Complainy Bread and Other Culinary Adventures

Following up on my earlier post, Uma introdução à comida (an introduction to the food), the other night I decided to try my hand at two dishes. One dish is called pão de queijo. If you know Spanish, you might not be surprised to learn that pão, like pan, means bread. Queijo, however, bears no resemblance to the Spanish word quejo, or complaint; its cognate is queso, which you might also know if you are a fan of nachos con queso – cheese! So pão de queijo means cheesy bread rolls (not complainy bread, as I was mis-translating it in my head). These are also naturally gluten-free, calling for tapioca flour instead of wheat flour, but of course my grocery store, which is famous for not having everything on my shopping list, like, ever, did not have tapioca flour. My gluten-free colleague, seeing me googling recipes at the computer next to him, advised to sub in cornstarch if I couldn’t find tapioca flour. I think I also overbaked them a bit, so they did not come out great the first time. When I went to do it again, I went out of my way to find tapioca flour (Whole Foods and its giant esoteric grain selection to the rescue!). I bet tapioca flour is easy to find in Brazil, given how ubiquitous these seem to be! The second batch was much lighter and tastier than the first.

The other dish seemed like a good summery dish, salpicão (chicken salad), so I thought it would be good to make while the weather here in the northern hemisphere is still warm. I found lots of different versions of this; basically it seems like you can put in whatever you like, or whatever you have on hand. Ours had raisins, apple, peas, corn, and green olives, plus chicken and mayo (I generally distrust mayo-based salads, which goes against my Midwestern roots, but I digress – but this was good). I did poach – and shred – chicken for the first time, so that was new. All recipes also called for “shoestring potatoes” which I didn’t know by that name but are those super thin, very crunchy french fries. Unfortunately, my grocery store of course did not have shoestring potatoes, so I subbed in pistachios for a little crunch. (So sue me; it was fine.) Next time I have real salpicão, I won’t be too distrustful of its mayo-y nature!