Recipe: Cheese Soup / Buñuelos

Our friendships with so many San Nicolaseños are based heavily on cooking expeditions. Cooking Nicaraguan food together is such a tangible way for our Nicaraguan friends to teach us about their culture, just as cooking American food is a way for us to share our culture. And partaking of those foods, letting them nourish our bodies, and saying "Que rico!" when we've done so - this is a way of physically accepting and valuing each other's traditions.

We undertook one such cooking adventure recently with our friend Rosalind and her mom. Rosalind is a toothpick-legged fifth-grade girl who bops around town in froofy dresses, saying sassy things. Davie had asked her to teach him how to make these woven rubber band bracelets (which are all the rage among elementary school kids right now), so we stopped at a little shop to pick up a bag of rubber bands before heading to her house.

Although Rosalind's family is fairly well off (her dad is the vice mayor of San Nicolas), they still make most of their meals in traditional Nicaraguan fashion over the wood stove out behind their house. When we got there, Rosalind's mom already had a fire going and was dropping the little cheese dumplings for sopa de cuajada into a pan of sizzling oil.

Sopa de cuajada (or cheese soup), Rosalind's mom told us, is a meal that people make for special occasions or when they have a lot of cheese on hand. Cuajada is a white, crumbly farm cheese that lots of people make in their homes with fresh milk from their cows. It's actually quite simple to make; apparently you just combine rennet, milk, and salt and after a few hours of kneading the mixture and squeezing out the whey, you're left with a delicious, cow-tasting cheese.

Anyhow, we skipped that part and went straight to making the soup. First we shaped and fried the delicious little cheese and corn dumplings, and then we threw a bunch of vegetables into the soup pot to boil. While it was simmering, Rosalind and Davie made rubber band bracelets and Rosalind's mom braided my hair.

We ended up having too many dumplings for the soup, so Rosalind's mom quickly adapted them into a sweet, donut-like dessert called buñuelos. Buñuelos, a popular Nicaraguan street food, are apparently just deep-fried corn and cheese balls drizzled with a sweet syrup. When they were done, we hauled everything up to their family dining room and partook in the feast together. "Que rico!" we said.

Sopa de Cuajada / Cheese Soup

For the dumplings:
1 lb. of maseca, or corn flour
1 lb. of cuajada, or white farm cheese
salt to taste

Mix these ingredients together and shape them into little balls, 1 or 2 inches in diameter. Carefully drop them into a pan of hot oil and deep fry them for a few minutes, until brown.

For the soup:
2 potatoes, diced
1 onion, diced
1 green pepper, diced
1/4 cup of mint leaves
1 liter of water

Boil vegetables and water until the potatoes are soft. Then add:

3 cups of milk
1 teaspoon of achiote (a red spice that I don't think there is an English word for)
2 chicken bouillon cubes

Mix together until bouillon cubes dissolve. Throw in the dumplings right before serving. If you have leftover dumplings, you can easily make . . .

Buñuelos / Donuts

Heat up a chunk of dulce (or you can use 2 cups of brown sugar) with a tablespoon or two of water, until it becomes liquid. Pour this hot syrup over the corn and cheese dumplings and let them soak in it until you're ready to eat them.