![]() ![]() “The best memories I have of when I was a child in Costa Rica are the times I spent with my grandma in the kitchen, feeling her love with every dish she made for us,” she says. ![]() She often uses the recipes featured here during her classes to honor her grandmother and Costa Rica, but also as a way to connect with people through her food, just like she did when she first arrived 28 years ago. She spends free time at home cooking with Marco or for friends and family, and she teaches cooking classes at Kitchen Collage. When asked if she participates in the festival’s cooking demonstrations, Blanco says that she is too busy and that that’s her sister Tiana Blanco’s job, who comes from South Dakota to help.īlanco still gets her chance to shine in the kitchen. “I am a big advocate for the local Latino community, both at school and at the festival,” she says. Blanco has helped with the planning, organizing of food trucks, and fundraising for scholarships since the first festival in 2002. Her tamer schedule not only allowed her to spend more time with Josh and son Marco, who’s now 19, but also to volunteer as a board member with the Latino Festival. She had the Spanish skills, so she got the job and still finds it rewarding. A friend told her about an opening in the Des Moines Public Schools for a bilingual liaison, working with students. She came through Ellis Island from England and Josh’s dad was German European.”Īfter years of cooking professionally, she tired of the long hours in restaurant kitchens. ![]() “It was totally different from what his mom made. “He loved everything I cooked,” Blanco says with a laugh. She met and married Josh Daines, who was as smitten with her uninhibited cooking. Eventually she enrolled in the Iowa Culinary Institute at Des Moines Area Community College, where she found her voice and put her talent in the kitchen to good use.Īfter graduating with a culinary degree, Blanco took a four-month pastry course at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and worked as a sous chef at the Wine Experience. ![]() Blanco powered through English language classes and tapped into the growing local Latino community. They toasted homemade tortillas, shared a love of tres leche cake, and assembled tacos together, all which helped them reconnect and lessen the homesickness. The transition was made smoother as Blanco’s mother shared her passion for cooking. She hadn’t seen her mother during those three years, due to immigration proceedings, and was about to trade living with a grandmother and father she adored for a place with cold winters and a language she didn’t speak. Since immigrating to Des Moines in May of 1994, food has been her connector to the place she left behind and to bridge her language gap as she made a new life in Iowa.Īt age 19, Blanco left Costa Rica to live in Iowa with her mother, Mayela Fonseca, who had moved here three years earlier with Pioneer Hi-Bred International. “And if you plan on making it ahead, don’t add the onions until just before reheating, because they make the dish bitter,” she adds.Ĭonversations with Blanco often weave in cooking, especially heartfelt descriptions of her homeland dishes, including little nuggets of cooking wisdom. ![]()
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