What started in Falls Church as charity turned into mystery and ended in a savory lesson for everyone.
Social workers connected with a free-food program at Bailey's Elementary School couldn't understand why some donations gathered dust on the pantry shelf. They couldn't give them away -- beans, corn, soup, beets, greens, hearts of palm, coconut milk.
Patricia Moreno, a health promotion consultant, shook her head. What was going on? Then it hit her. Of course! The unwanted food came in cans.
Moreno, who emigrated from Colombia decades ago, knows her fellow Latinos. "We are not used to cooking with canned food," she says. "We do not know how to cook with it. . . . There was a pantry full of food not being taken because people don't know how to use it!"
In many Latin American countries, canned food is considered a luxury. Families are more accustomed to buying fresh food from the market or harvesting it fresh from their own fields.
In this country, canned food is cheap, albeit processed and loaded with salt. More to the point, cans of food are commonly given away to food drives.
'Tin Chefs'
Latino families at Bailey's are among the chief beneficiaries of such drives. Nearly half the students at the school are Latino, and more than half the students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches.
Which brings us to the Bailey's cafeteria Monday afternoon, for a cooking class. Two professional chefs in white coats are standing behind an array of canned goods, speaking in Spanish to an audience of about 20 parents and 30 children. Univision should pick this up for a new cooking show called "Tin Chefs."
"We Latinos like to eat well," chef Javier Quiroga jokes, patting his belly. "It's not necessary to lose the Latin flavor, which is very important. But we can use what is donated here. . . . We're going to learn how to use cans."
Quiroga, born in Bolivia and owner of To Your Taste Catering in Vienna, is more used to provisioning fancy parties with freshly prepared Latino-accented feasts. But several months ago Moreno asked him if he could work with cans.
Quiroga accepted the challenge. This is the second in a quarterly series of classes at Bailey's, co-sponsored by Anthem HealthKeepers, a Medicaid program in Northern Virginia, and by Inova Health System's community health division.
"Where is everybody from?" Quiroga asks the audience members. They're from you name it: Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Honduras. To round it off, Quiroga's executive chef, German Chavez, who is helping to cook today, is from Nicaragua.
'Los baked beans'
What's everybody's word for beans, for corn? Quiroga asks, and a variety of names are called out -- frijoles, habichuelas, ejotes for beans, elote, choclo, maíz, mazorca for corn.
He holds up a can of, um -- he searches for the word -- a can of "los baked beans." "Do you know these, do you like them?" he asks.
The audience is silent. It is the silence of polite revulsion.
"They're sweet, right? Don't you eat sweet beans in the Dominican Republic?" he asks Carolina Dotel, who is from that country.
Yes, they do eat a sweet bean dish called habichuelas con dulce in her country, Dotel allows. "But only at Easter." And it is nothing like baked beans.
Quiroga sees he will have difficulty making the case for baked beans, but he will try. Later.
The cans on today's menu were selected by Moreno from the ones languishing in greatest numbers on the pantry shelf, including green string beans, several types of round beans and coconut milk. Quiroga also has brought some boneless chicken breasts.
Time to get down to cooking on two portable gas burners. Quiroga holds up the can of coconut milk and asks if anyone knows what it's for.
"A piña colada?" Dotel suggests.
Quiroga and Chavez proceed to whip up a pot of coconut soup, using the milk, water, chopped onion and chicken stock.
"I never knew you could take a can of coconut milk and make soup," says Eduardo Rivas, from El Salvador.
The sauteed chicken turns out to have nothing to do with cans, but in spicing the dish Quiroga makes the opposite point about fresh vs. processed: Instead of the relatively expensive store-bought powdered chicken spice these families typically use, they can add fresh garlic, onion, cilantro, a little salt and pepper to create a much more savory chicken.
At the previous class, Quiroga used canned hearts of palm and canned cream of mushroom soup to show different styles of serving chicken. The memory of those recipes lingers fondly, and there are few if any cans of palms or mushroom soup on the pantry shelves.
"My 9-year-old son asked me to make it again for him!" Patricia Gomez, a parent and volunteer at the school, says of the mushroom version. "He loved it. . . . I never had cream of mushroom soup before."
While cooking, Quiroga dispenses advice on kitchen hygiene and calories. Latinos should get away from the same old meat, rice, beans and pupusas, he says. A more diverse diet can be healthier, while maintaining its Latin identity, and cans can help.
Now Quiroga and Chavez open several cans of corn, green beans, black beans, garbanzo beans and white beans. Chavez adds garlic, onion and cilantro and mixes it all together. "Usually I also add lime or lemon juice, but today I just have red wine vinegar," he says. "And I like to slice in some jalapeños."
A four-bean salad? At how many gringo dinner parties have we seen this?
The parents in the audience say they hardly ever mix beans this way. They prefer to soak dried beans for several hours because those beans taste better than canned. Getting three or four pots of different dried beans going to make a mixed bean salad would be a pain. Cans might be a solution.
"The bean salad, the mix, that is new for me," Gomez says.
Mission impossible
Quiroga and Chavez serve the chicken sliced over the bean salad. Now comes the best part of a cooking class. Everyone slurps down the soup, eats up the chicken and beans, and talks about why they came to the class.
"In our countries, we don't eat with cans," says Lilian Mejia, from Honduras. "We don't know how to cook with cans. . . . I have to learn more about cans."
"In Mexico, food in cans is more expensive, and here it's cheaper," says Marbella Lopez. "That's the difference."
As for the baked beans, Quiroga gives up.
"You can liven them up, put a little bit of our flavor on them," he says. "A little cilantro, onion, garlic. . . . Baked beans are very American. They eat them in los barbecues, and it's delicious."
No one appears convinced. Baked beans are a mission impossible for another class. Latinos don't do baked beans, maybe not even on Easter. That unopened can will go back on the shelf.
More on: Latinos | Canned food
