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" \n Growing up in the United States might make people think dishes like mac and cheese or meatloaf might be comfort foods for me, but they&amp;#039;re not. Having grown-up with my Salvadorian Abuelita&amp;#039;s home cooking, to me a comfort dish is a bowl of rice, frijoles, hard-boiled egg, slice of queso fresco, and homemade tortillas. I think I might have disliked this dish when it was prepared for me as a kid, but now this combination always hits the spot. One of my regrets, which I&amp;#039;m trying to rectify, is never learning how to cook Salvadorian food like pupusas or tamales. After my Abuelita passed away I spent some time tasting the pupuserias of Los Angeles, and luckily I have been able to get weekly fixes at farmers&amp;#039; markets. And while not truly considering myself an expert on Salvadoran dishes, I still enjoy explaining to my non-Hispanic friends what a pupusa is, and the &amp;quot;right way&amp;quot; to eat one (for the record, it&amp;#039;s with your hands). I learned this little rule when my uncles teased me for picking up eating utensils at a party once. I was told to eat pupusas like a real Salvadorian. Like almost anything in life, something as simple as pupusas can become another way to highlight the lack of knowledge I have about my culture. Once, I was trying to explain the different kinds of pupusas sold at the farmers&amp;#039; market I went to, including one that had jalape\u00F1o as one of the stuffing ingredients. My mother snorted that those were not authentic pupusas\u2014in El Salvador they wouldn&amp;#039;t even know what a jalape\u00F1o was. I do however take some glee in knowing I&amp;#039;m not the only one that didn&amp;#039;t take the time to learn my Abuelita&amp;#039;s recipes or miss her cooking. My mother also doesn&amp;#039;t have the really know how to correctly whip up tamales or pupusas, but she has assured me she could figure it out if she just knew the exact products used.  This past holiday season it was quite amusing to watch my mother sneak around my uncle&amp;#039;s wife&amp;#039;s kitchen, studying the ingredients while I tried some rookie attempts at pupusa making. Something I didn&amp;#039;t really think about at the time was my youngest uncle was also standing with me trying to learn how to mold pupusas as well. It was my mother who pointed it out. My youngest uncle&amp;#039;s wife doesn&amp;#039;t know how to cook, and he misses his mother&amp;#039;s Salvadorian cooking too. He also wants to learn so desperately how to prepare these dishes. It is equally heartbreaking and comforting to know that I am not alone in this, and that we&amp;#039;re all secretly trying to uncover my Abuelita&amp;#039;s pupusas recipe. Click here for Angelica&amp;#039;s previous post. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a4224/latina-like-me-abuelitas-cooking/?click=rel>