Supermercado y Pollo Guisado: cooking Dominican style

I've been wanting to make pollo guisado for quite some time now. Sure sancocho and mofongo are everybody's traditional favorites, but those are your special occasion dishes, your once-every-couple-of-weeks dishes. Pollo guisado, on the other hand, is the every day go-to meal. The people's food. The daily bread of the Dominican diet. Serve it alongside some moro, a fancy way of saying rice and beans, and there is nothing more standard. So of course, I had to learn to make it. 
The adventure began, like all good culinary adventures, at the supermarket. 
Many Dominicans buy their goods from nearby colmados or sometimes passing "marchenas," local women who travel through the streets (usually on donkeys, but sometimes with wheel barrows) shouting out their wares. 

But if you are looking for a one-stop shop, La Sirena, the closest thing the D.R. has to a Wal-Mart, is the favorite choice of your average middle-class Dominican.  No, you can't bargain for your goods here (darn!), but you get the convenience of finding everything in one place and not having to chase la marchena down the street.  
Plus, air conditioning. 
Those are two very magical words in the D.R. 

In any case, I snapped some pics to give you an idea of what grocery shopping is like with a tropical flare. You can also get an idea of the prices if you take a look at the signs posted above each item. Just remember that 1 U.S. dollar is about 40 Dominican pesos. So that means 10 pesos= $.25, 20 pesos= $.50, 40 pesos= $1.00, 100 pesos= $2.50, 200 pesos= $5.00, and so on. 
Above, we've got mangos (finally in season, yes!!!!), and zapotes...an odd pumpkin-y fruit. 

Lechoza, or papaya, is sold year round. It turns nice and yellow when it is ripe. 

Here we've got chinola, or passion fruit, on the left (It gets all wrinkly when it is ripe), and Dominican oranges, which for some reason, are not orange at all! but rather a mish-mash of orange and green. 

And of course, this is berenjena, or egg plant, which strangely enough is a very common veggie here and is featured in many traditional Dominican dishes. I never would have guessed that. 

Now onto the ajies verdes (green peppers) and tomates bugalu (roma tomatoes). I really just took this picture so that I could say bugalu. Best word ever. Bugalu. bugalu. bugalu. bugalu. bugalu. hahaha.

Next up, the "viveres," which actually translates to "supplies" or "provisions" in English. However, here in the D.R. the word generally refers to root vegetables and plantains. The variety of tubers here far exceeds anything we have in the U.S., and many of their names don´t have English translations (ñame, yautia). What I love about the word viveres is that the word actually stems from the verb "vivir," to live. These are the veggies that Dominicans live on. Cheap and filling, they are usually featured in at least one (but possibly two or three) daily meals for the average Dominican. 

And of course we have plaintains. Don´t be fooled, they don´t taste a thing like bananas. Both are tough and starchy and nearly impossible to eat raw. They are usually boiled or fried. The green version of course, is less ripe and has a bland potato-y flavor, while the yellow version is mildly sweet. 

The next isle over we´ll find conflé and leche. The funny thing is, all cereals, from Lucky Charms to Coco Puffs, are referred to as cornflé (cornflakes). And the milk here is often sold in powdered form, as in the Nido brand packages you see above. 

And we can´t skip the dessert isle! 

The most common desserts (The ones sold by vendors at the beach or on buses) are dulce de mani (a very sweet peanut brittle), dulce de coco (same concept as the peanut brittle but with coconut flakes), and dulce de leche  (a condensed milk treat). All of these are overpoweringly sugary (but still delicious)-- in true Dominican fashion. The island was initially colonized to grow sugar cane after all!

Certainly no Dominican grocery store would be complete without salami. The typical Dominican salami is called longaniza, but there are tons of varieties. Most look, and taste, more like giant seasoned hot dogs than anything else though. Not my style, but if you are a hot dog lover, well the D.R. is the place for you. 

The eggs are never refrigerated. And look! You can even buy cute little speckled ones!

And I couldn´t not mention guandules. They are officially called pigeon peas in the U.S. but I´d never heard of them before. Really, they are a bean, not a pea, and they are often served in moro. 
Which brings me back to the pollo guisado with moro! 
Well anyways, I found myself a real Dominican (a friend of mine) and he dragged my all through La Sirena looking for our ingredients.

Red peppers, green peppers, garlic, onion, celery, cilantro, oregano, tomato paste, soy sauce (salsa china), rice, black beans,  and a whole chicken. 

First step, hack the chicken into pieces. There does not seem to be a method to this. Just take a sharp knife and go at it! Cut off the excess skin and rinse the pieces in water to clean. 

Second step, I have no idea. 
I tried to get Diego to explain to me the process paso a paso of making pollo guisado with moro, but that plan did not work out at all.  Turns out Diego is more of a tosser...you know...one of those people that continuously tosses things into a pot until it tastes right. No measurements, no recipe...not even a real method as far as I could see. Part of the veggies went into the pot at the beginning, some of them went in a little later, and some of them went in later still. "Why don´t you put all the veggies in at one time? What are you going to do with these extra veggies?" I kept pestering. But he just laughed and said, "Tranquila!"  Every time I turned around he was tossing something new into one of the pots or asking for another random ingredient. "Do you have olives?" "I need some rum." "Hmmm, more celery I think!" 

Finally I just gave up, popped open a cool bottle of wine in the now very steamy kitchen, and took his "tranquila" advice while he did his thing 

The finished black bean moro, served with red peppers which is not super traditional, just a little bit of Diego flare :)

I´m not sure how he did it, but he sure did it well! 

Pollo guisado con moro de habichuelas negras y tostones: Braised chicken with black bean moro and fried plantain chips. Yum!

Since I couldn´t get the whole recipe out of Diego (which makes perfect sense actually, since the D.R. has a primarily oral culture, meaning stories and recipes and traditions are passed down by word or mouth and learning processes rather than written down) I did a little research and found what seems like a really good pollo guisado recipe online. Try it out and let me know what you think!