Arepas Americano

A friend came over and brought a gift.  She somehow knew about my ashram days and decided I needed a yogi-esque fabric to drape across a room.  We laughed our asanas off because it's quite cliché.

As beautiful as they are - and I get it - yogis want to create partitions in rooms with no doors, walls, to create temporary boundaries with a decorative touch.  But sometimes, you pass through these fabric-ated areas and you just want to swipe the material off and use it as a sarong for the beach.   Sarong and yet it feels so right.

It took me back to a trip I made in Colombia.  I could not have asked for a better accommodation.  For $25 U.S. dollars a night, I stayed with a yoga instructor (this was not planned at all on my part). She was generous and trusting.  If every innkeeper was like her and every guest was like me, it really wouldn't be such a lonely planet.

My first day, she fed me what seemed to be the national breakfast of warm cocoa and arepa de choclo. "De choclo" sounds like more chocolate, but it really means corn.  She turned on the range and poured some oil on the cast-iron pan.  Then she placed a thin corn pancake on the pan and melted some cheese.  I folded one side over like an omelette and ate with my hands.  Like this:

It sort of looks like a calorie nightmare for many women in the States.  But the women in Colombia were not overweight.  I wondered.  Perhaps Colombia's corn is not so engineered like ours?  There is no denying that Jeffrey Smith made his way into our consciousness. 

Perhaps the cows are not as stressed out as ours?  Perhaps the people of Colombia are not as stressed out as us.  Maybe it's because the country's closer to the equator?

These are many variables I really can't get into right now to enjoy an arepa de choclo or arepa con queso.  What I can manage are the type of products I use to make one.  That, and knowing it's not something to eat all the time.  It's also a fun meal for children, granted they don't have allergies to the ingredients below.

So here is how I make my version of arepas con queso...

Arepas Americano  (servings: 2)

 

You will need: 

2 soft yellow corn tortillas from La Tortilla Factory.  These are organic, nonGMO, glutenfree.

You can substitute with thin corn english muffins but I really haven't experimented with any that had fit my criteria: a) made with corn; b) organic, nonGMO, glutenfree; c) doesn't have overly processed stuff to compensate for glutenfree quality; d) tastes great.

Raw Goat Milk cheese (Mild Cheddar) from Mt. Sterling co-op creamery.  It's so mild, it tastes nothing like cheddar.  It tastes like Colombia.  I'm not a daily dairy consumer, but this is ideal on occasion for people who like to eat mostly raw foods and digest their food better.

Instructions:

1) Turn toaster oven or oven on to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

2) Using a large cookie ring or the rim of a small bowl, press into the middle of each soft tortilla to make a smaller tortilla.  La Tortilla Factory does sell mini's but I'm not sure if they're organic + nonGMO corn + glutenfree.

3) Place them in toaster oven or oven.

4) In the meantime, cut the square block of raw cheese into 2 thin slices.  Cut each slice further in half to yield 4 rectangles in total.

5) Place 2 rectangles on each mini tortilla.  If the rectangles are much smaller than the diameter of your cut-up tortilla, then place them on one side of the hemisphere so that when you fold them later, there's some cheese to be seen at the edges.  Okay, very wordy here, and I'm sure this is what Youtube is for.

6) As every oven is different and everyone's idea of a thin slice varies, watch your arepas.  When you start to see the cheese has warmed and softened, somewhere between the spectrum of malleable and gooey, the arepas are ready.  We really don't want blistered and gooey.  Yes, burning the roofs of our mouths with pizza was fun way back then, but how many times do we need to go back there?


7) Pull the arepas out.  Fold them in half.  If it's an afterschool date with you and your little one, make some warm cacao or cocoa.

¡Buen apetito!