Arroz con Pollo
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Arroz con Pollo (Chicken with Rice) is the best example of the Chinese influence on Panamanian cooking. Basically, this is chicken fried rice with a Panamanian sofrito, capers and olives and carrots. This is a very different dish than the arroz con pollo I grew up with, which was a baked dish, with whole pieces of chicken and yellow-colored rice. This dish is spiked with soy sauce, and the rice and chicken are pre-cooked, coming together at the end with the pre-cooked sofrito. Originally, this dish was a way to use left over chicken and rice, but today families will gather on the weekend to cook this up from scratch, as the Grub Bogger did here. You’ll want to be careful that you don’t get too salty with your finished product, so rinse the capers and olives, and don’t salt the sofrito. You won’t need any salt for the chicken, because it will marinate in soy. Read more…
Mondongo is another dish that I had always known about from Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican joints, but never ate growing up. Tripe was not a normal dinner on the Upper West Side. I never tried the stuff until I was living in France, and my Armenian-Turkish-French friend took me to a great little Turkish place that served İşkembe, a tripe soup enriched with egg yolk and spiked with lemon juice and paprika. I feel in love with the stuff, and ended up going to the spot even without my friend for a fix. Back in New York, I feel in love with what was to me is Korean İşkembe: Kom Tang. This is a soup made from ox tails with a healthy dose of tender tripe as a meaty ingredient. Now that I was sold on tripe, which is basically cow’s stomach, I figured I would try out my lady’s aunt’s recipe for Panamanian-style tripe stew. 
Patacones are known as tostones in New York - another treat I ate growing at the Cuban-Chinese joints on the Upper West Side. Either way, they are unripe plantains, twice-fried, and eaten as a side dish. The first fry is to soften them up and do most of the cooking. Then, you smash them and return to the oil to get them nice and golden brown. You can smash them with the bottom of the beer bottle or a saute pan, but I use a tostonera, a special device built for the job. I was always a fan of platanos maduros growing up, the really ripe plantains that are also fried. The Grub Blogger got turned on to patacones when he tried them at his lady’s family’s house, where they made up for the two reasons I hadn’t liked tostones. First, they weren’t super-dry. Second, they had some flavor. Not over frying the plantains took care of the first problem. a Healthy dose of garlic and salt, the second. These bad boys are good for a snack or side dish. They end up in sort of a cup-like shape, and are great to scoop up sauce from your main dish. Another key here to get a moist end-result is to use enough oil to comforably cover the plantains and let oil circulate around them, and to get that oil hot. All you need are plantains, garlic, salt and oil for frying. 
