Monti Carlo’s debut cookbook dishes stories, recipes in ‘Spanglish’

I hadn’t intended to spend the morning before Mother’s Day at Your DeKalb International Farmers Market. I knew it would be a madhouse.

But there I was, wading through a throng of last-minute shoppers in search of tamarind paste. I needed it for the Tamarind Roast Chicken I had been drooling over in AJC senior food and dining editor Monti Carlo’s gorgeous debut cookbook, “Spanglish: Recipes and Stories” (Simon Element, $32.50), available May 19.

Fortunately, I found a block of the tart, sticky pulp, and that beautifully bronzed bird became the centerpiece of a dreamy, tropical-scented Mother’s Day feast that began with a Mango and Avocado Panzanella Salad and ended with Toasted Coconut Panna Cotta — a meal I would happily repeat.

A taste of Carlo’s native Puerto Rico shines through every recipe in these pages. But each tells a more personal story of finding identity at the crossroads of the world she was born into and the one that’s now home.

In poignant essays, she transports us back to her abuela’s kitchen on the dairy farm where Carlo spent her earliest years and where her love of food began. We learn of the tumultuous years that followed, bouncing around from one mainland city to the next through childhood and beyond, working in restaurants, starting careers in radio and stand-up comedy, surviving a near-fatal car crash, and hitting rock-bottom as a divorced, broke, unemployed single mom. That’s when she got the opportunity to audition for Gordon Ramsay on “MasterChef” that changed her life.

She writes how she struggled when the producers asked her to define her cuisine. While Puerto Rican flavors of sofrito, plantain and picadillo felt like home, so did the sloppy Joes and biscuits and gravy she’d grown to love in the continental U.S.

“If my kitchen could talk, it would speak Spanglish,” she wrote.