Out & About

In our last post about the 10 most memorable Latin eateries in the Twin Cities, we promised to deliver a tour of tacos and tamales. With a spicy integrity, we are going to deliver just that. Here and now. A guide that hopefully will continue to grow if you, dear reader/eater, will share your favorites and then share this list of Mexican manna, El Salvadorian sanctity, of Peruvian piety with anyone and everyone you know who loves Latin food.

This is the fifth post in a series about attending culinary school. Also check out earlier posts on wine tasting class, poultry class, cooking in quantity, and the introduction to the series.

In my last culinary school update for this series, I wrote about making Peking ducks, the most memorable project our class has undertaken so far. The heart of our culinary program, though, lies not in our afternoon classes but our morning labs. From 7 a.m. until at least 11 a.m., we students sleepily shuffle in to prepare for the school’s breakfast and lunch service.

Elissa Altman started her food blog, Poor Man's Feast, in 2008 after years as a cookbook editor, food columnist, personal chef, and caterer.

I’d been using a slow cooker for several months before taking Jeff Woodworth's Slow Cooker & Pressure Cooker class at the Wedge Co-op this winter. Life for me as a part-time student is hectic and heavily scheduled and finding time to cook often takes a backseat to studying, work, social life, and a myriad of extracurricular activities. Encouraged by the prospect of producing lots of food with minimal effort, I decided to invest more time in learning these do-ahead techniques.

It's been just over a year and we've been to 30+ Latin eateries...amazing. There are still more than 20 eateries on our list and more opening every day...it seems unreal. This could go on forever and yet, it is time to hang up our hats (sombreros?) for now and present our palates with a new spectrum of flavors. But don't worry! We are determined to continue to keep our eyes open for the next terrific tamal and you, dear reader, will be the first to know. For now, though, we wish to present our favorites for you as a last hurrah -- a celebration of sorts of our favorite and most memorable moments of mole, molcajete, and menudo. And so, without further ado or bombast, it gives me great honor to present:

Latin Tongue 2012/2013: Our Top Ten Most Memorable Eats...

Or, in our humble opinions, The Best of Latin Food in the Twin Cities

Now that I’ve provided an overview of Minnesota State Community and Technical College’s Culinary Arts program and also what I learned in my first few wine classes, I’m moving on to our Poultry and Seafood class. Spring break is quickly approaching and will mark the end of our poultry unit and our transition into seafood.

Two years after moving to the Philippines, I am finally getting the hang of local lingo. I've learned, for instance, that taxi drivers are called mama (Tagalog for 'uncle') and that unli (short for 'unlimited') refers to any all-you-can-consume product, from rice to cellphone minutes. Some terms, however, took a bit longer to decipher.

Now that it’s a few weeks into my second semester of culinary school (you can read the introduction to the series here), I’ve got a few wine classes under my belt. Class is truly an introduction to wine, and a non-pretentionous one, at that. There are no wine snobs in our class. Only students like myself, who enjoy drinking wine but admit to knowing nothing about it. When I introduced myself to the class, I included the fact that the first adult beverage I bought and consumed upon turning 21 was a bottle of Boone’s Farm, in the Blue Hawaiian flavor to be exact.

After more than a year of writing the Latin Tongue series, we are still finding surprises and learning lessons valuable and true. Let me start off by saying that when this whole Latin eating adventure comes to an end, I will look back upon it with much fondness and I hope to say that it has made me a better, more understanding person. A window to another world is open to anyone willing to sit down and have a meal with someone from another culture. There is possibly no better place to put yourself if you want a glimpse of the Latin world in the Twin Cities then El Mercado Central. Located on Bloomington and Lake, this small indoor market is packed with food, merchandise and plenty of good folks.