Book: Latin American Street Food, by Sandra A. Gutierrez

By Sandra A. Gutierrez

As much as I love planning holidays around high-end destination restaurants - the kind that have to be booked months in advance - I like to leave plenty of time during each trip to eat real food, at the places where the locals eat on a day-to-day basis. Such food tends to be inexpensive, fast, fresh, varied and almost always delicious - and, best of all, it gives you a real sense of the place you're visiting, whether it's a kebab in Istanbul, a scrambled egg and pork floss banh mi in Hanoi, shaved ice in Taipei or a "dirty dog" hotdog in New York. It also gives you the opportunity to meet the kind of people who are keen to help out a foreigner who's curious about what to order.

In Latin American Street Food, author Sandra A. Gutierrez presents the food of countries such as Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Brazil and Argentina. She reminisces about the street foods she's tasted in Latin America: churros, hot dog with sauerkraut and avocado wrapped in a flour tortilla, corn on the cob topped with cheese and chillies.

Some of the recipes in this book will be difficult to make simply because, in Hong Kong, it's hard to find ingredients such as yucca or cassava flour, white arepa flour, fresh tomatillos and poblano peppers. Most of the recipes are doable, though, and include tostadas with spicy chicken; Bolivian chicken empanadas; Venezuelan tamales; corn pancakes with cheese; black-eyed pea fritters; hearts of palm pies; red beans and rice; Mexican hot chocolate; and hibiscus iced tea.