World Cup Special: Uruguay - Pascualina

I don't know whether this was a stupid idea or not but my culinery friend and I decided to cook a few themed meals for the World Cup; choosing dishes from one of the teams playing on certain matches....

So the first attempt was for the Uruguay/France game. We thought Uruguay yes.... never cooked anything from Uruguay before - lets give it a go.... It might have helped if we had looked at the map and saw how close it was to Argentina. We might then have known that it would be quite difficult to find a vegetarian option amongst all the lumps of steak and other carnivorous offerings. But we did manage to find this wonderful pie from Uruguay - the pascualina; a cheesy, eggy, greeny pie which was very filling and utterly delicious. Find the recipe on http://www.uruguayanfood.com/pascualina-recipe.htm. My only change to the recipe was to use spelt flour; the type of flour was unspecified so I thought I would experiment.

To accompany this wonderful pie I cooked up a black bean dish from Brazil (which does border Uruguay) with rice. I took the recipe from my 'Street Cafe Brazil' book by Micheal Bateman and left out the meat aspect.... to my mind it tastes good and my meat eating friend did not mind the exclusion of meat; in fact she thought it was rather tasty.

Serves 2
Can of black beans (should be able to get in most supermarkets or wholefood store).2 cloves of finely chopped garlic.3 bay leaves.

1. Pan fry the garlic on a gentle heat for about 3 to 4 minutes.
2. Add the black beans (including the liquid) and bay leaves and leave on a gentle heat for around 15 minutes. Stir occasionally to keep from sticking too much.
3. If need be add more water and cook for about 5 to 10 minutes more. Mash some of the beans with the back of a fork.
4. Remove the bay leaves and serve with rice.

To accompany this platter I rustled up a seasonal salad of rocket, pea shoots, nasturium leaves and radish.The Uruguayan food was indeed the best part of the football game. I should be doing some more World Cup specials in the coming weeks... a little Korean, maybe some Algerian - who knows.

Score:
Game: 0 Food: 4 (so disappointed with the game and frankly if it hadn't been for the food I would have switched off).