Week 2 - Central and South American

This week, our senior project group decided to explore local central and south American cuisine. We wanted to look into how the diversity of the food available in the city of Portland affects the culture.

We started by trying food at a local Mexican food cart called cemitas poblanos that specialized in serving traditional cemitas, which are sandwiches made with cemita rolls. We also tried fajitas and burritos from the same location. Next, we attempted to recreate the Mexican food and created our own chicken fajitas with corn tortillas which turned out really great.

The next type of food we tried was traditional Columbian food from a food cart called El Pilon. We had chicken empanadas and arepas. We wanted to step outside of our comfort zone and we tried to make chicken arepas, which are corn pancakes made with special precooked corn flour, and then filled with meat. We were less successful in making this dish, as it was difficult to make the dough by hand and we also had to improvise by creating our own version of the dough as the specific arepa flour was difficult to procure, but we learned many valuable lessons from this experience. 

Throughout this week's experiences, we learned a lot about the diversity of Hispanic cuisine and we also learned how many foods we thought to be Hispanic such as burritos and quesadillas were actually American creations. 

As we continue our journey, I wonder what other kinds of common international foods are actually American versions.