Home/Tag: Boricua

#IslandFlavor: Cheater’s Chicharron

In Puerto Rico we have a town nicknamed Pork Rind City and lechoneras that line a whole highway. Pork crackling is our drug. In any given plaza you will find cart after cart overflowing with chicharron. So many that it’s hard to imagine any pigs on the island have their skin intact. My mother loves crackling so much that Thanksgiving 1985 was almost ruined when one of my aunts nabbed the coveted piece of crunchy skin on the pernil before it had been served. When my mother made the discovery (as she went to sneak a piece for herself) she spit out “How could you!” in a tone of disgust [...]

#IslandFlavor: My Abuela’s Café Colao

One of my very first memories is of sitting in my Abuela Alicia’s tiny apartment in San Juan. I was five years old and the roar of the highway just outside her window was a sort of soundtrack to her morning routine. The cars honked angrily as she prepared her café colao the same way she had ten thousand times before. I would watch, mesmerized, as she held the well-worn mesh strainer over her coffee cup and let the coffee slowly drip out. Abuela would take these moments to talk to me about some of the challenges that I would face in life. The biggest of which would be surviving [...]

2017-12-19T00:37:26+00:00By |Drinks, Recipes|17 Comments
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