Today was a cooking day: arroz on pollo, Puerto Rican style, and fried plantains. I really miss the Puerto Rican food I grew up with in New York City. I had a friend when I was 17, Diana, who made the best arroz con pollo on the face of the earth. She tried to teach me how to replicate it but I never even came close. I decided to try again when I discovered that a couple of the Mexican food centers in Berkeley carry Goya products. Goya is ubiquitous in New York City. Anyone who has taken the subway there would have seen all their ads, at least, if they never cooked with the stuff. I won’t bother giving you the recipe for the chicken until I improve it. The plantains are easy. Peel and cut green plantains at an angle into slices about 1/2 inch thick. Shallow fry them in hot canola oil until barely brown. Drain on paper towels. When cooled down, kind of smash them with a flat mallet or the side of a bench scraper or metal spatula with a weight on the other side. You get the idea, right? Explaining this in text is like telling someone how to tie a shoe. You want to flatten them a bit and break them but not pulverize them. Then fry the slices again in hot oil, transferring to paper towels when nice and brown. Salt liberally with coarse salt and serve as-is with a wedge of lime or as a side dish. They remind me of trips to Orchard Beach with Diana and her large family. We would haul enough arroz con pollo there to feed an army, and pick up tropical sodas and other family members in the Bronx on the way. Diana’s reddish rice was moist but still crumbly and never gummy, the liquid having simply stained and flavored it. We would eat it warm, and the chicken pieces – still on the bone – would loosen and pop out of the rice when you dug a spoon into the mass. There would be green pigeon peas in there, as well. This food memory is commingled in my head with Puerto Rican culture and New York City and all the clashing music and noise and mayhem of Orchard Beach on a hot summer day, and driving in that loaded station wagon down the Grand Concourse full tilt feeling as happy as WKTU’s disco beat.
