Note: THE WORLD IS NOT ENDING! (or "Delicious, Delicious Cochinita Pibil")

On this lovely 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 3 K'ank'in, it seems appropriate to celebrate the start of the new b'ak'tun with some Maya cuisine.  I had hoped to make yet another helping of the below recipe but work and life just kept me busy (funny that).  So instead I am reposting this famously delicious Yucatec Maya dish that I have enjoyed for years and slow cooked a few years ago (note, by the way, that it is now quite easy to find banana leaves at H Mart: they usually have them frozen and, sometimes, fresh).  This week instead I will just be lazy and buy store bought.  The R&R Taquería in Elkridge sounds like a good bet according to HowChow.

Now eat some and remember: the world is not ending.

- - - - -

Cochinita Pibil (originally published Sunday, August 3, 2008, or 12.19.15.9.19 2 Kawak 2 Yaxk'in)


I had friends over on Saturday night for dinner. Originally I had planned this around my friend Jim visiting from California (so difficult to get him on a plane). But plans changed, mostly due to skyrocketing fuel prices and airplane fees, so he went on vacation locally with his family instead. But I still had my local friends over anyway.

For them I made cochinita pibil, one of my most favorite Mexican dishes. It's not the Americanized "Mexican" food we have here, and it's definitely not what you imagine when you think of Mexican. I've eaten it a few times in California (The best place to find it in the Inland Empire? The Casa Maya in Mentone) , and one buddy made it for me one time I was visiting. I've even eaten it at a diner in the historic section of Mexico City - have no idea if it's there anymore - and I'm pretty sure I had it at least once in Mérida, Yucatán - it is, after all, not a national but a Yucatecan dish.

There are many recipes for cochinita pibil on the internet and in cookbooks, and a few ways to prepare it, be it the oven, the Dutch oven or the slow cooker. The important thing is to marinade it overnight, wrap it in banana leaves and then cook it for a few hours. I wanted to break out the slow cooker, so I wouldn't have to stand there and monitor it all day. After searching for a good slow cooker version I found this version translated from the standard oven-based recipe by Rick Bayless himself (here's the most authentic version of his recipe, which requires building a pit to cook it in the ground).

This recipe is relatively simple, if you have everything you need, but it does take a little preparation.  You need at least 2 to 3 lbs of pork butt/shoulder - I got a 5 lb picnic shoulder from Giant for just $7 on sale, and ended up cooking the whole thing. With that you also need a chopped up white onion, banana leaves to wrap it in, and some achiote paste. Achiote paste is quite easy to find in Southern California, but almost impossible to find here. So came the more time consuming task of making my own achiote paste from scratch. Again, there are many online, ranging from the simple to the elaborate. I chose something on the more elaborate side, and set my spice grinder to work.

Ingredients for the achiote marinade

The most difficult ingredient to find is the annatto seed, which you can find in any supermarket with a very well-stocked Latin American or Mexican section. And you should be able to find it in any Latino or Mexican market. The second most difficult thing to find is the bitter (or Seville) orange. In fact, it is much more difficult to find than annatto seed, but unlike annatto you can make a reasonable substitute for bitter orange by mixing orange juice with either lime or lemon juice. If you can find the real stuff, however, use it. After running all over Baltimore I found a bottle of Goya bitter orange / naranja agria marinade at Wegman's (which I later saw at the Giant just a 20 minute walk from my place).

I finally settled on this recipe from Chow.com, since it had some interesting flavors and since I had almost all the ingredients. I won't quote the recipe, but it calls for pan-seared garlic, cloves,whole cumin, whole coriander seed, kosher salt, allspice berries and black peppercorns, in addition to the annatto seeds and bitter orange juice. I had no allspice berries, but since most recipes don't call for them, I didn't sweat it.

After grinding the annatto and other seeds, blending the bitter orange juice and the garlic, and mixing it all together, you get something that looks like this:

It should be smoother, but it still worked.

It's difficult to describe the unique taste of this stuff, but it is definitely not what you think of when you think "Mexican" cuisine.

After that, score the pork butt and rub the achiote all over it, put it in a large ziploc bag or a sealed-up bowl to marinate overnight, and then cook the damn thing. To paraphase Rick Bayless' recipe: he suggests lining a slow cooker with the banana leaves (So far I have only been able to find them at Wegman's; not even H-Mart has them!), put in the pork, dump in the marinade and about 1/2 cup of water (since I had more pork, I just added more water), then wrap the pork in the rest of the banana leaves over it and slow cook it for at least 6 hours. Since he never says to do it on low or high, I had to search for that elsewhere. What few authorities I found suggested either low for 10 to 12 hours, or high for 6 hours. So I went for 6 hours on high.

The marinade the night beforeAnd in the slow cooker. Make sure you have enough banana leaves to completely cover it. Okay, you technically don't need them in the slow cooker, but they make for a better presentation and do, in fact, keep the meat a little moister.

There is one final, indispensable component to cochinita pibil, and it's not tortillas, although those are helpful. You always eat it with red onions that have been pickled in bitter orange juice and a little sprinkle of salt for several hours. So simple, Bayless just spends two sentences mentioning how: just slice a red onion thin and marinate in the juice (I used a cup of bitter orange juice for one large red onion) and sprinkle some kosher salt on it.

This is all you need to make it. And a little salt. A few hours later, this becomes......this!

Throw it in a plastic baggie and voila! It should be marinated much longer, but I didn't have much longer.

And you eat those onions with this, the finished cochinita pibil.

It's startling how the meat just falls off the bone after cooking it for this long, too. Eat it with some rice, black beans and tortillas, and fresh salsa (Bayless recommends homemade roasted habanero salsa, which they would eat in Yucatán, but I don't like my mouth to hurt). Wonderful stuff!

Snacking State-by-State: Oklahoma I - Oh, I'm just WILD about onions! (or "Two Cherokee eggs and pin a rose on 'em!")

Our next stop on the state food tour is the Sooner State, part South, part West, part Southwest, and a smidgen of Midwest.  But alas, no weird dream sequences or no surries with fringes on top here.  This is all edible.  OK?

Official Name: State of Oklahoma
State Nicknames: The Sooner State
Admission to the US: November 16, 1907 (#46)
Capital: Oklahoma City (largest)
Other Important Cities: Tulsa (2nd largest), Norman (3rd largest), Broken Arrow (4th largest)
Region: Southwest, South, West; West South Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Corn Bread & BBQ; Bison
Bordered by: Kansas (north), Missouri (northeast), Arkansas (east), Texas & the Red River (south), New Mexico (west), Colorado (northwest)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: buffalo (animal), milk (beverage), white bass (fish), raccoon (furbearer animal), strawberry (fruit), white-tail deer (game animal), wild turkey (game bird), honeybee (insect - for the honey), watermelon (vegetable); "Fried okra, squash, cornbread, barbecue pork, biscuits, sausage and gravy, grits, corn, strawberries, chicken fried steak, pecan pie, and black-eyed peas" (meal - quoted from Netstate.com)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: Southern foods (qv, Official State Meal), sometimes with a Western or Southwestern flavor; Native American (specifically Cherokee) foods

Like many Western states, Oklahoma's cuisine has a frontier history.  But this is just part of the story.  As Hilde Gabriel-Lee (quoted on the Food Timeline website) notes in Taste of the States: A Food History of America (note to self: smack yourself for not tracking this down before you started this project), before the 1900's Oklahoma cuisine was more or less Great Plains cuisine: the foods of the five largest tribes in Indian Territory, "the Creek, Choctaw, Chicksaw, Cherokee, and Seminole" [Lee 1992, in FoodTimeline.org].  These cultures (particularly the Cherokee) were refugees from Back East, having been forced to march to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears along which thousands of persons lost their lives.  Their homelands were cleared for white settlement, and the Native peoples were sent to less familiar, less hospitable areas along the border with Mexico, what would later become Texas (note: check out the Cherokee Nation website for more history of the Trail of Tears).  After relocation, the Cherokee and other forcibly relocated peoples made Oklahoma their home long past the early 20th century, when Oklahoma too was opened to white settlement.

According to the Indian Pioneer Papers, a volume of thousands of interviews published in 1936, Cherokee grew what they could, but did hunt for everything from squirrel to deer to the very occasional buffalo, as one Jennie Hines noted in an interview [Cherokee Nation, 2011]:

Bean bread could be found at almost every table. Hominy, dried corn, dried fruits, and wild meats were their chief food. They did not can much food. There were no fruit jars in this country yet. They usually dried their fruits and meats. [Hines, in Cherokee Nation, date unknown]

The Cherokee, and for that matter many Native peoples in eastern Oklahoma, gathered wild onions as a social activity [Cherokee Nation, 2011].  One popular but easy recipe on the Cherokee Nation website involves a few wild onions, a few eggs, some bacon grease and some water.

The Recipe: Cherokee Wild Onions and Scrambled Eggs

To make this dish, you will need:

* wild onions (yes, I know there are wild onions in this area, as Chef Jerry Pellegrino reminded up on a recent installment of WYPR's Radio Kitchen.  But I haven't had any chance to go rooting around for them.  I did, however, have some green onions that I grew in my garden.  Not wild onions, but at least I actually yanked them out of the ground instead of buying them)
* eggs - for every half cup of wild onions you need about six or seven eggs.  I had a quarter cup of onions, so I grabbed three eggs)
* bacon grease (had just enough)

First, chop or cut up your wild or green onions.

Melt the bacon grease in a pan.  I used my cast iron skillet.

Add the onions to the pan.

Also add a small amount of water (I just eyeballed it), and fry up the onions in the pan until the water is gone and the onions are soft.

Add the eggs...

... and scramble until cooked through.

This is quite a simple and lovely dish.  I can't say I have ever really scrambled eggs with green onions in them but it is a technique I will try again in the future.  Not much more to say about this.


Cherokee Nation.  "More About Cherokee Cooking".  The Official Site of the Cherokee Nation, 2011.  Copyright 2011 the Cherokee Nation, All Rights Reserved.

Cherokee Nation.  "Wild Onions and Scrambled Eggs".   The Official Site of the Cherokee Nation, 2011.  Copyright 2011 the Cherokee Nation, All Rights Reserved.

Drummond, Ree.  The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl.  Willliam Morrow: New York, 2009.

Lee, Hilde Gabriel.  Taste of the States: A Food History of America.  Howell Press: Charlottesville, VA, 1992.  Quoted on the Food Timeline State Foods website.

Netstate.com.  "Oklahoma State Symbols, Songs and Emblems".  Copyright 2012 Netstate.com, All Rights Reserved.


Yearwood, Trisha, with Gwen Yearwood and Beth Yearwood Bernard. Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen: Recipes from My Family to Yours. Clarkson Potter: New York, 2008.


Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Oklahoma" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Oklahoma".

Snacking State-by-State: North Dakota I - It's A Sioux Stew Revue

Prior to this post, my only exposure to North Dakota was Fargo (which, I might add, mostly takes place in Minnesota).  Watching Fargo give me no insight into the foods of the Roughrider State, and well it shouldn't.  Otherwise, I'd just be exploring Arby's and "Pancakes House".

Official Name: State of North Dakota
State Nicknames: The Roughrider State, The Peace Garden State, the Flickertail State
Admission to the US: November 2, 1889 (#39)
Capital: Bismarck (2nd largest)
Other Important Cities: Fargo (largest), Grand Forks (3rd largest), Minot (4th largest)
Region: Midwest, Great Plains; West North Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Bison; Wild Rice
Bordered by: Manitoba, Saskatchewan (Canada) (north); Montana (west); South Dakota (south); Minnesota (east)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: milk (beverage), northern pike (fish), chokecherry (fruit), Western wheatgrass (grass)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: wheat & milk (a leading producer of each), Native American (such as Lakota Sioux) foods (including fry bread, pemmican, foods using buffalo, etc.); buffalo, wild rice, chokecherries and other native foods; German,  Scandinavian and Russo-German foods (including borscht and knoepfla soup, etc)


North Dakota's cuisine features a few strong culinary traditions: northern Great Plains (such as Lakota Sioux), Northern European (such as German & Scandinavian) and Eastern European (such as Russian and Russo-German).  While there are surely other traditions, these are the big ones.  A very complete list of what to find food-wise in North Dakota comes from Thoughts from a North Dakota Ambassador blog author Sandy McMerty, the North Dakota Commerce Dept's Ambassador Program Director and self-proclaimed "chief cheerleader for the state of North Dakota".  She (with intern Stacey Loula) provides an extensive list of food festivals, finds and recipes from all over the state [McMurty 2011]

Of these, the foods of North Dakota's native peoples are certainly the oldest: Ojibwe/Chippewa, Assiniboine, the Affiliated Tribes (Hidatsa, Mandan and Arikara), and specifically the Sioux: Lakota, Dakota and Nakota. Many of the foods that the Sioux and other Great Plains peoples have eaten and still eat today (and will continue to eat in the future) have already been featured in this series: specifically wojapi and more than a few types of fry bread (the versatile staple of modern Native American cuisine), while others such as wahuwapa wasna (corn balls) will likely pop up at some point in the future .  One search for modern Sioux recipes also turns up a lot of recipes with buffalo, a very important animal in the Great Plains.  It was hunted and eaten there for generations, and of course is now raised as livestock.  So once again it's easy to find.

One search of the internet turned up many Lakota recipes that use buffalo.  Wendell and Nancy Deer With Horns offer a traditional Lakota stew that consists of just chunks of buffalo, wild onions and turnips - simple and delicious.  I went with a more modernized stew from NativeTech.org contributor "HLakota51", Hunkpapa Lakota (Standing Rock Sioux), who gives a filling "Grandma Connie's Buffalo Feast" using ground buffalo, corn, tomato and brown rice.  I thought of using wild rice, but sometimes my innovations don't work out too well, so no substitutions this time.

The Recipe: Grandma Connie's Buffalo Feast

For this buffalo feast you will need the following:

* ground buffalo (quite the feast indeed.  I picked up a pound of ground buffalo at the Waverly Farmer's Market - Gunpowder Bison had plenty of buffalo.  I picked up a pound of it for - gack- $9)
* corn (one can, about 80¢ at Harris Teeter)
* tomatoes (again, about the same at Harris Teeter)
* onions (had a few in the kitchen)
* brown rice (a few cups of it.  I bought it in bulk at Whole Foods for surprisingly little, only about $1.50)
* water (you will need this for the rice.  I had to add a little more than the recipe called for)
* all-purpose seasoning (I didn't have any of this around, so I threw a few spices together: rosemary, cayenne, oregano, thyme and sage.  In the end, I also added a few fancier, feastier things to the finished product: alder-smoked sea salt and Trader Joe's Flower Pepper, a combination of peppercorns and dried edible flowers, all ground together)

First, chop the onions.

I started to sauté the onion with some butter (not listed in the recipe)...

...and then added the buffalo.  Cook until brown.

Add everything else and simmer for half an hour.  I found the rice to still be hard after twenty minutes, so I covered it for the last ten.  The rice was still hard, so I added more water and cooked, covered, for fifteen more minutes.  Tender this time!

Once done, add the spices and stir.

One thing I can say about this buffalo feast: it is quite hearty.  With the selection of seasonings I used it turned out somewhat bland.  Had I used different seasonings that probably would have made a difference.  Again, adding the Flower Pepper and the sea salt made for a fascinating flavor.  It could go well with a little fry bread, or in my case some leftover naan.


Sources:

Deer With Horns, Wendell and Nancy. "Buffalo Recipes".  Deer With Horns Web Site, date unknown.  Copyright 1998-2012 Deer With Horns Web Site.

Diary of a Recipe Addict (Megan, blogger).  "Knoephla Soup".  Posted March 10, 2011.  Copyright 2011-2012 Diary of a Recipe Addict.

Germans from Russia Heritage Collection.  "History and Culture".  Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011.  Copyright 2012 North Dakota State University Libraries.

"HLakota51" (username). "Grandma Connie's Buffalo Feast". NativeTech.org: Indigenous Food and Traditional Recipes. Date posted unknown. Copyright 2012 NativeTech.

McMurty, Sandy.  "Foods of North Dakota".  Thoughts from a North Dakota Ambassador.  Posted March 3, 2011.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "North Dakota" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "North Dakota".

Snacking State-by-State: New Mexico II - More Than A Taco

Throughout Indian Country you don't find one monolithic culture, but so much cultural diversity.  Still, one common thread running through much of Native American cuisines is the humble, versatile frybread.  Grown from hardships during many Long Walks in the 19th century, Native peoples made what they could with the few rations the US government gave them that didn't go rancid as they were marched into often unknown territory.  The frybread was born out of this, and has long since become a staple of Native American dishes.  [Detterick-Piñeda 2011]

Official Name: State of New Mexico
State Nicknames: The Land of Enchantment
Admission to the US: January 6, 1912 (#47)
Capital: Santa Fe (4th largest)
Other Important Cities: Albuquerque (largest), Las Cruces (2nd largest), Rio Rancho (3rd largest) 
Region: Southwest, West; Mountain (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Chile Pepper; Pinyon Nut; Bison
Bordered by: Colorado (north), Oklahoma & Texas (east), Sonora & Chihuahua (Mexico) (south), Arizona (west), Utah (northwest)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: biscochito (cookie), New Mexico cutthroat trout (fish), yucca flower (flower), chile pepper (vegetable, though technically it's a fruit), frijol (vegetable - yes, two state vegetables), pine nut tree (tree - for the pine nuts, not the tree), New Mexico black bear (animal, though these are not ever eaten these days)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: Southwestern (specifically New Mexican) cuisine; the fabled New Mexico chile, Native American (such as Navajo) foods such as frybread, Navajo taco, etc.

One popular dish that has reached many corners of Native America is the Navajo taco (often called the Indian taco outside of the Southwest).  In fact, as Cynthia Detterick-Piñeda [2011] writes, the Indian taco is quintessential powwow food.

Indian tacos are the universal modern powwow food... They are also popular attractions at many fairs, festivals, and outdoor summer shows held in the southwest. People will line up to wait their turn to buy some freshly made tacos. Indian tacos are a combination of beans or ground beef, chopped lettuce, sliced tomato, shredded Cheddar cheese, and optional green chile atop plate-sized rounds of crispy Navajo or Indian fry bread. No plates or silverware are need, as you just fill the fry bread with your desired filling, roll it up, and eat.  [Detterick-Piñeda 2011] 

Even at powwows held in the Baltimore area, you will find at least a few food stands selling these: large pieces of puffy frybread piled high with the traditional fixins' for the Americanized "Mexican" taco: ground beef, onions, tomatoes, sometimes salsa, guacamole, sour cream, jalapeños - even black olive slices on occasion.

While most of Navajo Nation overlaps with Arizona (heck, in 1995 Arizonans voted the Navajo taco the state dish), a good chunk of Navajo Nation lies in New Mexico, and certainly the Navajo taco is eaten there.

For some odd reason I just can't seem to get very large frybreads out of my kitchen (not a lot of practice here).  So what you are about to see is really a mini-taco/"slider" version of the Navajo taco.

The Recipe: Navajo (or Indian) Taco

I used Detterick-Piñeda's recipe that she lists on her "Navajo Fry Bread, Indian Fry Bread" recipe page, which also includes a recipe for Indian tacos.

First, you need to make the frybread.  Fortunately, I had all the ingredients lying around - common with frybread, which grew out of hardship and a lack of fresh ingredients.

* powdered (dry) milk (just a little)
* unbleached flour
* baking powder
* salt and water
* And of course, vegetable oil, for frying.

First, mix the dry ingredients together.

Next add the water and stir with a fork until it becomes dough-like.

Like so.  Flour up your hands, and divide the dough. Stretch it out into fryable breads (my mother used canned biscuit dough to make something similar when I was little. She called them "pull-out cakes" because you pulled out the biscuit dough and fried it.  To minimize healthiness, you smooshed two biscuits together before frying, and ate it with margarine).

Heat up that oil when you are ready to start frying.

You should heat it to about 350°F for best results.

Fry the frybread for about 3 to 4 minutes on a side, less if it is smaller and browning nicely.

Hold it down in the pan if you need to, in order to guarantee that the whole thing gets browned.

Browning...

These are pretty small frybreads, but at least they turned out.  I've had mixed results with frybreads.  The ones I made with wild rice back when I was examining Minnesota turned out very nicely.

Next come the tacos.  To make these, I mostly followed Detterick-Piñeda's recipe with a few minor adjustments.

* the frybreads you just made (it doesn't have to be those particular frybreads, but you will need some version thereof)

* ground beef (Detterick-Piñeda calls for ground lamb, an easy thing to find in the Navajo Nation since the Navajo are traditionally herders of sheep.  But ground lamb is pricey here, so I went with ground beef for half the price ($5 per lb)

* tomato and onion

* chiles (I didn't use the New Mexico ones this time, but my own home grown jalapeños)

* cheese (usually Cheddar, but I used some of that Pecorino Romano left over in the fridge)

* lettuce (recipe calls for iceburg lettuce.  Never was a fan.  I used Boston lettuce instead)

* sour cream is optional.  I didn't have any on me, unfortunately.

Fry up the ground beef with the onion and the chiles until brown.

Almost there.

And now you are ready to assemble the Navajo tacos.

Start with your frybread, indented side up.  Mine didn't really have a nice indented side.  This is the closest I came to an "indented side".

Pile the ground beef mixture onto the frybread.

The rest of it is pretty much stacked the way you like it.  I placed a slice of Roma tomato on next.

Next I put on the lettuce (shredded lazily and inefficiently) and the grated cheese.

And finally I put a little more ground beef on top.

I made quite the mess while eating this.  It probably would have been more efficient had I made a bigger piece of frybread.  I ate some of the filling later with the green chile sauce from last time (I made that second, actually).  It's a new way for me to eat a taco, certainly more filling than the standard one in a tortilla. Just imagine this one with sour cream...


Sources:


Albuquerque Convention & Visitor's Bureau.  "New Mexican Cuisine".  Published 2008.  Copyright Albuquerque Convention & Visitor's Bureau 2012.


Albuquerque Journal.  "Mexican Food Lover's Guide".  Date unknown.  Copyright Albuquerque Journal 2012.


Bueno Foods.  "Traditional New Mexican Green Chile Sauce".  Date unknown.


Detterick-Piñeda, Cynthia.  "Navajo Fry Bread, Indian Fry Bread".  WhatsCookingAmerica.Net, date unknown.  Copyright WhatsCookingAmerica.Net 2012.


Niederman, Sharon.  "Bizcochitos? Biscochitos?".  Posted December 16, 2008.  Copyright The Santa Fe New Mexican 2012.


Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "New Mexico" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "New Mexico".

Snacking State-by-State: Nevada I - Viva Los Piñones

When Americans think of Nevada... well first we usually think "ne-vah-duh", like the "o" in cot (or like the Spanish word nevada, meaning "snowy").  Nevadans will correct you by saying "It's 'ne-vă-duh'" (IPA - /æ/ ), like the "a" in cat. The state's travel website even says this (though note: even though the state is  "ne-vă-duh" the Sierra Nevada mountain range is "ne-vah-duh".  Nevada, Nevada, potato, potato... ah, hell).  Anyway, it's next on my food tour.  And my first attempted recipe comes is yet another variation on frybread using, of all things, the incredible, edible pine nut.

Official Name: State of Nevada
State Nicknames: The Silver State; The Sagebrush State
Admission to the US:  October 31, 1864 (#36)
Capital: Carson City (2nd largest)
Other Important Cities: Las Vegas (largest), Henderson (2nd largest), Reno (4th largst), Sparks (5th lagest)
Region: West, Rocky Mountains, Great Basin, Southwest; Mountain (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Pinyon Nut; Chile Pepper
Bordered by: Oregon & Idaho (north), Utah (east), Arizona (southeast), California (south and west)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: desert bighorn sheep (mammal - though generally not hunted); single-leaf pinyon (tree - for the pine nuts); Lahontan cutthroat trout (fish - whose low numbers are currently being replenished)
Some Famous and Typical Foods: Native American and frontier foods, specificalyl Native foods typical of Great Basin peoples (including pine nuts); Basque cuisine; buffets and Vegas-style excess (in Las Vegas)


Historically, Nevada's food is a reflection of its Native American and frontier immigrant cultures.  The Native peoples of of Nevada are in the Great Basin (which extends into much of Utah, and parts of Idaho, Wyoming, California and Oregon).  The Great Basin peoples were by and large hunter gatherers.  Just as buffalo was the key thing for the Plains peoples and acorns were for many of the California Indians, so pine nuts were the staple food for Native peoples in the Great Basin.  And this was far from an easy nut to crack (pardon the pun).  The processing of pine nuts - or pinyon nuts, pignolias, piñones, etc - was largely a communal effort, extending from summer into fall.  And the first falling of pine cones was considered a sacred time for many Great Basin peoples. Then the processing began - as PineNut.com notes, this was the hard part.

This began by roasting the pine cones around hot coals, turning them often, to cause them to open up. Then, the cones could be beaten lightly to cause the nuts to fall out. When a supply of nuts was available, these required further processing since the nuts were covered by a soft brown shell. Cracking this shell would be difficult and would injure the fruit inside. The nuts were processed by placing them on a basketry tray with hot coals from the fire. Once introduced together, the whole mass was kept in constant motion, throwing them up and swirling the tray, until the shells were roasted to a hard, crisp dark brown. The coals were removed at this point and the nuts were poured onto a grinding stone where they were lightly pounded with a mano until all of the shells had cracked and falled free of the inner fruit. [PineNut.com, date unknown]

The pine nuts would then be dried for future use, often being ground into a flour, not unlike the California Indians did with acorns (which had their own special processing needs).

The Great Basin peoples adapted their dishes with the influx of whites to their area.  During the Long Walk (the relocation of Native Americans in the West to reservations), many recipes were adapted to the new staples brought in from the whites.  One old recipe incorporates flour and powdered milk; perhaps an ancient version may have included pine nut flour.  This pine nut cake, a modern cousin to the many varieties of frybread, is often eaten today while stories of the relocation are told [Detterick-Piñeda, date unknown].

The following recipe comes from Cynthia Detterick-Piñeda of Andrews, Texas, and reposted on the WhatsCookingAmerica.net website.  Check here for a list of Detterick-Piñeda's (and others'?) Southwestern recipes.

The Recipe: Pine Nut Cakes

For pine nut cakes, you will need the following:

* pine nuts (seriously, you need these.  As we now know, these things aren't easy to process, and that's why they're so pricey.  I found that I didn't need a whole lot of them, maybe 1/2 cup at most.  This will make half of the above recipe.  I bought extra but found I didn't need to.  Great - more pine nuts to use all around!).
* powdered milk (had it)
* whole wheat flour (had it too)
* oil (for frying - had it)
* salt and water (well, yeah, I have those too)

First, throw the pine nuts into a food processor with all the remaining ingredients, except of course for the oil.

Pulse at a high speed until you get something mealy...

...eventually adding water little by little until you get a nice ball of pine nut dough.  I had to add just a little bit more water than the recipe called for.  The dough ball pretty much just formed all of a sudden.

Break off pieces of the dough.

Form each piece into a ball, about the size of a walnut.

Or a Brussels sprout.

And flatten that ball.

Fry in hot oil for a few minutes on a side until golden brown.  The author recommends cutting the first one open to make sure it is not doughy in the center.  Mine weren't.

Drain and serve hot.

 

With whatever condiments you so choose.  I have Icelandic butter and some of that Great Plains wojapi on top of mine.

Again, this is a smaller cousin to frybread.  I find that these pine nut cakes are best fresh out of the fat.  I had some day old pine nut cakes, cold.  They should at least be rewarmed, maybe even refried for a minute in the pan.  It is definitely a different way to eat pine nuts than I am used to.  I ate mine with butter but you could use honey, jelly (or wojapi).

Sources:


Detterick-Piñeda, Cynthia.  "Piñon Cakes - Pine Nut Cakes How To Make Pine Nut Cakes".  WhatsCookingAmerica.Net, date unknown.  Copyright WhatsCookingAmerica.Net 2011.


Elllingsworth, Christy.  "Basque potatoes".  The Daily Dish, posted January 4, 2011.


I4Vegas.Com.  "Popular Las Vegas Drinks". Date unknown.  Copyright I4Vegas.Com 1999-2011. 


The Modern Mixologist (TheModernMixologist.com).  "Cable Car: Tony's Signature Cocktail".  Date unknown.  Copyright The Modern Mixologist, 2007.


PineNut.Com.  "History of Pine Nuts & The People of the Great Basin". PineNut.Com, date unknown. Copyright PineNut.Com 1998-2011.

Schneider, Deborah.  "Mexican Mojito".  Leite's Culinaria (LeitesCulinaria.Com), posted May 5, 2010. 

Zubir, Nancy.  A travel guide to Basque America: families, feasts, and festivals.  University of Nevada Press: Reno, NV, 2006.  Also partially available on Google Books.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Nevada" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Nevada".