Mofongo

I like to watch this show called Diners, Drive-ins and Dives (DDD) with Guy Fieri. So of course Mr X has ended up getting sort of familiar with that show. While he was working in Florida he wanted to find some interesting and delicious places to eat so he decided to get online and see if there were any places to eat in Miami that had been featured on that show. Naturally there were. He picked out one place in particular. I don't remember the name of the place but I saw the episode of DDD relating to it. Mr X decided that we would dine at this place in particular when I first arrived. So off we went for dinner. The menu item in question was called "Mofongo". It is a Puerto Rican specialty. I forgot to bring my camera to take photos of my meal so I found pictures online for you. This is pretty much what it looks like:


The mofongo picture below has some other sort of meat on top but ours had shrimp and lobster placed on top. The cup of soup next to it is a chicken consomme into which you dip your mofongo.

This photo below is a close up of what is under the meat/seafood topping - essentially the mofongo part.

The stuff in the picture above is made by basically taking plantains, oil, garlic and chicharrones (fried pork skin) and mashing them all together, see the photo below:

The mashed mixture is put into a large wooden cup, topped with meat or seafood or nothing and served with the consomme. It was a very interesting dish and I'm very delighted to have tried it. But I probably wouldn't order it again. I thought it was good, just not spectacular. It's quite heavy so the more I ate of it the less I liked it. Mr X just didn't like it plain and simple and now he has decided that my show, DDD, cannot be trusted. I'm trying to convince him that we ought to give the show's recommendations another chance. We'll see though...

On a side note, we had a side of tostones (fried plantains) and those were tasty and highly addictive. I knew they probably weren't particularly good for me, being fried and all, but I didn't know how bad they probably were for me until I got home and googled them. Turns out they are fried not once, but twice. The plantains are cut and then fried and then smashed and then fried again. Eeesh. But hey, I'm happy to have tried something new from another culture. It's always interesting and fun.