“Oh dear.”
I’ve been working all weekend and Paulo commandeered the kitchen. I heard some banging around, but I’ve been absorbed in work and not in what he was doing. I took a break to check on dinner, walked into the kitchen, and stopped in my tracks. Paulo was wearing a t-shirt covered in oil splatters. He was also wearing sunglasses — at 9pm.
“What’s with the sunglasses?”
“I decided not to take any chances.” It was then that I noticed oil spatters all over the floor.
“My bolinhos de arroz aren’t working out.” (Little rice cakes, in case the picture tells you otherwise.)
I peered into the bowl. “They’re too wet.”
“Yeah, I should’ve added more flour.”
I felt sorry for him — frying is not fun, especially when the frying material is wet and sending hot oil everywhere.
“I should’ve intervened. My people are professional rice eaters. We eat it three times a day, even for breakfast. Filipinos love fried rice, but it’s gotta be dry. When you eat that much rice, you learn a hundred ways to prepare it.”
“The Portuguese are big rice eaters, too.”
“I know, I wrote about it, but Portuguese like a wetter rice and that doesn’t work for bolinhos de arroz. Well, it’s probably good thing I didn’t photograph it for the Traditional Portuguese Kitchen series, then. We’ll try it again, but drier/starchier next time, so they roll into balls. These look like… sorry rice mice.”
(For the record, I ate all my rice, like a good Filipino. What the bolinhos de arroz lacked in texture didn’t affect their flavor.)
December 18, 2016
Album: Portugal [Autumn 2016]
For more posts/photos of Portuguese food and drink:
http://gailatlarge.com/blog/tag/portuguese-kitchen
https://www.pinterest.com/gailatlarge/portuguese-food-drink/
https://www.instagram.com/gailatlarge/
