“WHAT’S IN YOUR POCKET?”
I love homemade pop tarts, but I really love these more than others. These berry pop tarts are simple, full of stuff you probably have in your fridge and pantry, and bring back childhood memories of sitting on the floor in my oversized-dad-t-shirt-turned-nightgown watching Saturday morning cartoons and munchin’ on a pop tart.
"Gujiya is a sweet Indian pocket traditionally served during Holi celebrations. Half moons stuffed with chopped nuts, coconut, sugar, and mawa -- gujiya is also a great afternoon snack to serve with chai, or a quick sweet breakfast bite to eat on the way to work.
Here’s the gist: kale and scallions are cooked to a crisp in olive oil or ghee while lemon juice and salt marinate the remaining raw kale in a separate bowl. The trick to charring kale is making sure it is dry when it goes into the pan and leaving it alone for longer than you think you should before stirring it. After the kale in the skillet is plenty crisp, I add a healthy pour of maple syrup into the pan and let the liquid cook down and caramelize onto the leaves. The charred kale reduces to about half its original mass, and when it is added to the bowl with the lemony kale, the uncooked half is ever-so-slightly steamed by the hot kale, offering what looks like a smaller yield overall— a.k.a. the most flavorful way to put two times the kale into my body in just one sitting. A beautiful component to an easy weeknight meal.
Turmeric, black pepper and coriander toasted in hot oil with a lot of garlic and ginger, then vegetable or chicken broth and coconut milk is added to to simmer with hearty greens. Add frozen dumplings to your golden-hued soup and simmer with coconut milk for a very balanced dinner!
The best pocket pal is a salad. I love salads. Mack loves salads. We even love boring salads because we love our veggies, but crunchy, juicy, tangy salads are where our salad-loving selves thrive.
The new year always brings a slew of new health trends (with an unhealthy dose of shame, tbh): intermittent fasting, keto diet, CBD everything, health wines. Some of these seem a lot more reasonable than others, but we decided to start 2019 with a focus on a classic wellness concept: balance.
We are still figuring out where to set our sights for all of 2019, but we know we’ll be spending some time learning more about the pocket foods from China and Mexico, and the people from there who are making them here in America.
Making stewed black-eyed peas and collard greens for New Year’s this year slipped my mind until midday on the first of January when I realized we had no “good luck food” on the docket for the day. Too hungry to wait for a pot of beans to cook, I grabbed a can of Black-eyed peas from HEB and made a black-eyed pea avocado salsa to stuff into fresh collard wraps with quinoa, chicken, herbs and pecans. So this year we skirted the traditional beans and greens, but still managed to fit black-eyed peas and collards into a fast, good luck meal.
2018 marked our second year here on the internet. Whew! We took an exciting new direction last year, with a deeper commitment to looking at food history and culture through the lens of a pocket. Our mission at The World in a Pocket is to better understand the world through the lens of a dumpling (err, any pocket food!). Last April we met in Durham, N.C. to revisit our mission and keep us on track. It’s always a good idea--even (especially!) with passion projects--to check on your goals.
Our love for pupusas led us on a search to understand why so many people from El Salvador are coming to America. The timeline below takes us from artifacts found in Joya de Ceren, “El Salvador’s Pompeii”, a native village buried by ashes from a volcano eruption, where food and utensils were found as they were being cooked almost 2000 years ago, to present day.
In 2015, Cecilia Polanco wanted to start a scholarship fund for undocumented students, but needed a sustainable way to monetize the fund. She founded So Good Pupusas to raise money and use the revenue to support her non-profit, Pupusas for Education, which provides the scholarships.
Homemade chocolate pop tarts started to resonate more with every minute that I thought about it. Because I was tight on time with my holiday baking schedule, I decided to make a quick and easy puff pastry recipe that packed a fiery surprise.
Pumpkin empanadas are a South Texas delicacy and finding them in the local panaderias in North Carolina is near impossible. This fall, I had an insatiable craving for empanadas de calabaza and my now not-so-secret dulce de leche pockets. With brisk autumn weather blowing in and holiday baking ideas swirling around in my head, pumpkin hand pies that you could serve for thanksgiving and empanadas de calabaza y cajeta that you can serve for merienda was my new recipe challenge.
When I was in 6th grade, my grandmother, lured by the tropical climate and a gaggle of widowed friends, moved to Florida. For a number of summers, I joined Mama Min in her high-rise Hollywood apartment, traveling via Eastern Airlines to the land of palm trees and coconut patties. Her kitchen was compact, with just enough room for a slim café table and two chairs. We spent many afternoons sitting out on the shaded balcony, avoiding the blazing sun. The sound of the ocean in the distance was punctuated by the click-click of my grandmother’s knitting needles. It was during these warm weather holidays that I learned the joy of casual dinners and the beauty of the blintz.
Ellen Gray’s recipe for blintzes stuffed with cheese and topped with cherries brings is inspired by summers spent in Florida with her grandma, “Mama Min”. The idea of cheesecake for dinner over a game of Mah Jong, after a day spent swimming on the beach, makes us yearn for simpler times.
The weekend before I had bought a dozen Autumn Queen peaches from Costco. I tried my hardest to use them all up before they went bad, knowing peach hand pies photographed with a late summer color palette was the perfect distraction from the news. I wanted to add a nuanced layer of sweetness, so I dug into my homemade cardamom and vanilla simple syrup, a mainstay in my fridge for fancy coffee, tea, cocktails, and compotes.
