Cook Book Idea

I have been thinking about the idea of writing a cookbook for quite a while. The recent discussion of "food you can't find" got me thinking a bit more. The idea is to do (and I hate this name/description) a Gringo Cooking in Nicaragua book.

The idea is to help people from the U.S., Canada and, to a lesser extent, Europe come up with food that appeals to their roots but is reasonable in cost in Nicaragua. There is a French restaurant in San José, Costa Rica that offers French dishes made with local ingredients. The idea of this book would be very similar.

Let me offer one very simple thing my maid in Costa Rica started doing for me that totally made sense. She called them Chicharones de Yuca. For me, they were a local replacement for french fried potatoes. She would peel and boil the yuca until it was close to done. Then cut it into smaller french fry sized pieces and pan fry. Add some chili garlic sauce (which is what I liked to do with french fries) and you have something cheap, tasty and in my book, better than french fried potatoes.

With domestic help prices so low, making something (I just suggested Kim Chee) rather than trying to figure out how to import it can make a lot of sense. Thus, the book becomes a combination of how to cook things with local ingredients that are like what you ate back home and, for those that you used to buy but will be expensive, how to make them.

When life gets sane (that means I CoolTop is done, I live there in the house I haven't started building yet and such I will probably attack this idea. No specific idea whether to just do this as an on-line contributor site, an E-book (like Living Like a Nica) or a "real book". I do think it would be fun to do, interesting to get input from others and useful. It might also be worth doing in both English and Spanish. Clearly, being vegetarian, I would welcome a co-author that could cover the "dead animal" alternatives.