Tostones Part II: Mojo de Ajo (aka garlic dipping sauce from heaven)

Remember my recipe for Tostones! posted a few weeks back? The green plantains that fry into smashed delicious, life-altering goodness?

Well, no toston is complete without a salty garlic-limon sauce to dip it into and make you feel really alive.

Without further ado, my recipe (and I fully admit there are endless varieties and ways to make this kind of dipping sauce) for...

Mojo de Ajo

- 2 cloves of garlic for every platano you're using (in this case, I fried up two platanos, so I used 4 cloves)

- some really good quality extra virgin olive oil

- lime juice (ideally fresh-squeezed, and lemon will do in a pinch)

- plenty of salt (I use kosher salt)

Mince your garlic as finely as is humanly possible. The day I made these tostones, I was lazy. So my garlic was pretty chunky. But it so doesn't really matter -- this sauce will still turn out like crack.

In a bowl, mix your garlic with some salt and mash it all up with the back of a spoon, to make kind of a garlic-salt paste.

Cover this concoction with several tablespoons of olive oil, and then add a couple of teaspoons of lime juice -- or more to your taste, however you like it. Too salty? Add more olive oil and lime juice. Too sour and limey? Add more olive oil. Not enough punch? Add a bit more lime juice. This sauce is really made by taste; can you tell?

Mix it all up, let it sit and meld and marinate and then when your tostones are all fried up, serve them along with this sauce and die and go to heaven.

Goes great over yucca, too, as well as over black beans & rice and grilled chicken.