“rice with mango,” which is kind of a weird and improbable food combination. If you’ve made a mess of things, you’ve made arroz con mango.
If you like beef, you can try picadillo, which is ground beef cooked with sofrito, or the very popular vaca frita (literally, “fried cow”), which is shredded beef marinated with mojo, garlic, onions, and lime juice. It is then seared in a frying pan and served crispy and hot. Pretty tasty if done right.
You could accompany your picadillo or vaca frita not just with moros, but also with some yuca, ñame, or malanga, all of which are native Cuban roots of different textures and tastes, used extensively in Cuban cooking. Usually accompanied by mojo when boiled and served by themselves. Also good when fried into fritters, or thinly sliced and fried into chips. In the early days of the colonization of Cuba, yuca was very important because it was hearty and because bread could be made from its flour. Colloquially, ñame is used to describe a stupid, inept or clumsy person. Malanga is frequently given to children or served to someone when they are sick.
The most famous Cuban sandwich is probably the medianoche, made of ham, pork, cheese, pickles and mustard in a special, oval, yellow, slightly sweet roll. The literal meaning of the word is “midnight,” because it was
what people usually ate at that hour when they went to a café after the movies or the theater.
Other popular sandwiches are pan con lechón (bread and pork sandwich made with mojo), sándwich Cubano (sandwich made with ham, roast pork, Swiss cheese, pickles, and mustard), and a croqueta preparada (basically, a Cuban sandwich garnished with ham croquettes).
And then, of course, there is the frita, which is a Cuban sandwich very similar to a hamburger or cheeseburger. Unlike a hamburger, the meat is made with ground beef and ground pork or chorizo, and cooked with pimentón, a sort of paprika, which gives it a distinctive flavor.
Always served with chopped onions, mustard and very fine julienne potatoes. These are the sorts of sandwiches to eat when you are not on a diet. There is a restaurant in Little Havana called El Rey de las Fritas (The King of the Fritas). Pretty tasty!
Fruits and Vegetables
Fruits and desserts are an important part of Cuban meals.
Guanábana is a green, spiny Cuban fruit, inedible when raw but delicious when made into ice cream, or into a punch with sugar and milk or water which is called champola. To be in “la guanábana” means to be affluent, well off, and enjoying the best things in life.
