Global Cuisine

I don’t want to lose weight, stand in line at the gym, or make short-lived resolutions for 2014 - I resolve to live in the moment.

Days before the holiday I decided that Menudo was my good luck dish for this New Year’s Day. It could have been black-eyed peas or slow cooked green with pot liquor, or lentils with something but I’ve been craving Menudo for months! Menudo is tripe soup with Guajillo chiles, onions, garlic, white hominy and a few other slippery slope ingredients. I planned on freezing 11 little bags of this potion, just in case my luck needs to be topped off…

I thought about creating my Menudo for days. I dragged every cookbook out on the subject and read all about it. I visited with Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy and that was long overdue. This good luck dish was turning into an adventure. Sure, I could have bought a can of Menudo and left it at that, or flown to Tucson, but instead I drove an hour south in light snow flurries to collect the ‘unusual’ ingredients. I had my grocery list and I was ready for some interaction with the human race after being isolated by bad weather.

Since I love pretty much all Mexican food, it would be hard for me to pick a favorite, but I particularly love any dish poured over with salsa verde, made of tomatillos. This fresh, slightly tart, and bright green sauce is so aromatic and flavorful, that you can't help but think of Mexico. Sometimes, though it's hard to differentiate between authentic Mexican and Tex-Mex recipes. Many foods that are popular in American culture are interpretations of Mexican foods. Just think of nachos, burritos, and chili. But no matter the actual origin of these foods, they all taste great due to the familiar Mexican flavors.

My favorite dish, enchiladas Suizas, isn't entirely Mexican either. But it's served at Mexican restaurants and is for all its worth considered authentic. As the story goes, Swiss immigrants brought their love of dairy products along with them to Mexico, where they opened dairies and began producing cheeses like the ones they knew back home. Somewhere along the line, the traditional dish of enchiladas, made with either red or green salsa, was reinterpreted using the Swiss cheese (Suizas means Swiss). The dish consists of corn tortillas wrapped around filling, then layered in a casserole, poured over with salsa verde, and covered with cheese. It's Mexican home-cooked comfort food at its best.

Ever wonder what it would be like to marry a man who grew up in a palace? I did exactly that when I wed Ajay Singh, a fellow journalist who had grown up in Old Delhi and the Himalayas. Throughout the 1990's, I even lived for weeks at a time behind the rusted wrought-iron gates of the Singh family's one-hundred-room Indian palace.

Ajay and I met when we were both worked at Time Inc.'s newsweekly Asiaweek in Hong Kong. Although I knew very little about my fiancé or his family background, we still got engaged within three months of meeting at a company offsite event. A few months after this engagement, I discovered that not only did Ajay grow up in a rambling old 19th-century grand manor on the outskirts of Delhi, but also that we were now set to inherit the grandest wing of the house.

It may sound like a fairytale but, of course, there's always the fine print. Mokimpur - as the house is called - turned out to be not much of a fantasy palace. Believe me, it was no luxurious showcase of velvet daybeds, gilt-framed portraits of maharajas and other lofty ancestors, and sweeping palm-dotted landscapes. Instead, it was more of a sprawling moldy tear down, with hot-and-cold running mosquitoes, belligerent peacocks, and the odd royal ghost or two.

I call this the 1-2-3 dinner because just like that, snap, and it's ready.

On the way home yesterday, after spending the afternoon at a museum with my boys, my eight-year old begged me to make this for dinner. It's one of his favorite meals and he knows he doesn't have to wait long for me to whip this up.

"Mom, please make the 1-2-3 chicken tonight, it's soooo good. I really, really want it and it's so yummy.

So here it is, dinner in a flash, ready so fast there's even time to take pictures!

I know I saw this recipe in a magazine, however I can't remember which one. I've made it so many times, I have it memorized. I also don't remember if this dish had a name, so let's call it Tangy-Sweet Plum-Spiced Chicken, a shout out to the plum jam and Chinese five-spice powder used in this recipe.