Category: Food

Serving up traditional Puerto Rican with ‘heart and soul’

Parkside Convenience is located in a small plaza in Manchester with two or three small restaurants. It appears to be, and is, a convenience store. Immediately inside the front door there are the usual coolers for sodas and drinks, and a counter with a lottery machine and a case of scratch tickets, but continue to the back of the store and there is a surprise.

Mi Familia is a Puerto Rican takeout restaurant specializing in traditional island dishes that you would never suspect was there. It’s like a Puerto Rican soul-food speakeasy.

Tyra Torres is half of the wife-and-husband team that owns and runs Mi Familia.

“We bought the store about three years ago,” she said. “We had all this space in the back, and I visualized myself cooking again because we had owned the restaurant in Mass., years ago. It was me and my grandmother; we were the cooks. So we got permission from the city, and got permission from the landlord to open the kitchen. And now I put my heart and soul into cooking.”

Torres said that in addition to studying culinary arts for four years, she learned her cooking from her Puerto Rican grandmother.

“So everything we cook is from scratch,” she said. ”Our food is very flavorful. It’s not hot, not too spicy, but vibrant.” She explained that Puerto Rican cooking has a lot in common with other Caribbean cuisines but focuses on that vibrancy. “Every other Caribbean [culture], like Dominicans and even Mexicans has their specialty and they put in their different types of flavors and ingredients into their food. I would say the difference with us and them is, I would say we would put more garlic, cilantro, peppers, onions, a lot of herbs. You could call it herbaceous.”

Most of the Torres’ dishes involve some sort of tender-cooked protein, served on either Caribbean rice or plantains. Plantains are a fruit in the banana family that is generally starchy instead of sweet. Torres said that one of the things she loves about plantains (platanos in Spanish) is their versatility.

“You can make plantains any way you want,” she said. “We can boil it. We can fry it. I put it into most of my dishes. Like I do a Sancocho Saturday, where I also put plantains in that.” Sancocho, she said, is a specially prepared pork chop that is served with rice, or, of course, plantains. “I make a mofongo, which is made out of plantains. You fry it up, you make it into a mofongo ball. I put my seasonings in it. I put my garlic paste, oils, butter and salt to give it the perfect taste. I even make a platano sandwich, which is called a jibarito.”

Torres said that even traditional village foods, like goat, tripe or pigs’ feet, which she prepares mostly around holidays, have gotten a good reception from customers, even ones who aren’t used to that sort of food.

“Our customers are very open to trying it,” she said, “especially around this area. You wouldn’t think so, but they’ll call and ask me what is the Special for the day. They’ll ask me when I’m going to cook something like pigs’ feet, because they’ve had it in Puerto Rico, when they went to visit, or because they’ve had it here and found out they love it.”

Mi Familia’s most popular dish, however, is chicharron. Unlike Mexican chicharrones, which are made from pork skin fried into crispy chips, Puerto Rican chicharron is made from pork belly — the same cut of meat that bacon comes from. “We season it, and I deep fry it,” Torres said. “So it’s crispy on the outside and then it’s moist on the inside. It’s delicious. And once I take it out, it’s the outside of the pork belly, which is the fat is, is a little hard and crunchy. But then, once you bite into it there’s a crunch, and then you go into the meat, which is tender, with a lot of juice and flavor.”

Torres said a long-term goal is to eventually convert Mi Familia into a sit-down restaurant. “Because,” she said, “We could use more Caribbean stuff here.”

Mi Familia
Where: 675 Hooksett Road, Manchester
When: open for takeout six days a week: Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m, Friday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday from noon to 8 p.m.
More: 626-6730, mifamiliaatparkside.com
Call or visit the restaurant’s Facebook page for daily specials.

Featured photo:Chef Tyra Torres is the co-owner of Mi Familia, a semi-secret Puerto Rican restaurant. Photo by John Fladd.

St. Nicholas Church has added an extra day to its Food Festival

Traditions can carry a lot of cultural inertia; food traditions especially so. So it is a big deal when a church changes the structure of a long-running event.

Nobody knows this more than Amy Valkanos, one of the organizers of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church’s Annual Lamb Barbecue, which is in its 77th year.

“We have homemade recipes,” she said, “that have been passed down from the generation that started [it] originally. That’s what we use to make our meals. The big draw is the lamb barbecue, of course, which, man, when that starts cooking, throughout the whole neighborhood the smell of it will just penetrate your nostrils and you’ve just got to go follow that smell and find out where it is coming from. It’s just so good.”

But this year, the festival has been expanded by a day. In addition to the 400 pounds of lamb that will be cooked on Saturday, Greek food enthusiasts will have an extra day devoted to gyros. A gyro is a mixture of grilled meats and tzatziki sauce served on fluffy pita bread.

“Adding a Gyro Day,” Valkanos said, “was a decision made because we know that our community and parishioners love gyros. But, given the fact that we are a small church and with a small volunteer staff, or smaller let’s say in comparison to other churches in the area, we knew that to actually include gyros on that same day would really be a huge undertaking for us. But to meet the demand and to also stick to a different palate, we decided, ‘Well, yeah, you know what? Let’s just do a Gyro Day.’ So on Sunday, that’s what we’re having. We’re cooking the gyro meat, and we’ll serve gyro sandwiches, with a bag of chips and a drink. It’s a different interest for people who want to try a different type of food and another opportunity for our community neighbors to come see us.”

The gyro meat — a combination of lamb and beef, Valkanos said — will not be cooked on traditional upright spits, but in the St. Nicholas parish hall, then sliced thin for the sandwiches served outside.

The goal, according to Valkanos, is to serve dedicated gyro fans gyros as close as possible to a perfect gyro. And that starts with the individual ingredients. The bread, for instance, is not like the flat pocket bread that you usually find in a supermarket.

“It is not the kind you would buy that opens up and you fill it up,” she said. “Rather, this is a soft and fluffy pita that acts as a plate and you wrap around the meat.”

For Valkanos, one of the things that make a gyro so special is the combination of complementary textures that goes into it.

“It’s just a combination of all the ingredients,” she said. “You’ve got great seasoned meat and then you add the tzatziki sauce to it, which is very cool on your palate. And then you add the tomatoes and a little bit of lettuce and a little onion in it, and then the soft bread to wrap it up and eat it. It’s a really good all-around, whole food sandwich.”

Regardless of whether people attend the Lamb Barbecue, Gyro Day, or both, Valkonos said, St. Nicholas’ weekend of food is an expression of an important Greek value: hospitality.

“Our festival is unique,” she said, “in that it really is reminiscent of Old World Greece, where there is this little church in the landscape in the countryside somewhere in Greece and people just come together and have a very homegrown organic experience. It feels very much like that.”

Annual Lamb Barbecue
When: Traditional Greek food and pastries Saturday, June 21, from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, June 22, will be Gyro Day — fresh gyro, a bag of chips and a drink will cost $13; gyros will be served from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Where: St. Nicholas Orthodox Church’s, 1160 Bridge St., Manchester, 625-6115, stnicholasgreekchurch.com

Featured photo: A St. Nicholas Gyro. Courtesy photo.