Angela Salamanca pulls up in front of her house just before a downpour. She hops out of the car and grabs a five-pound bag of Yukon gold potatoes and a reusable, filled-to-the-brim sack of groceries, carrots peeking out of the top.

She gets inside as the sky opens up. Salamanca, owner of Raleigh’s Centro restaurant, starts unpacking the groceriesanother five-pound bag of potatoes, red ones this time; an assortment of vegetables; a whole chicken. On the menu tonight: ajiaco.

While Centro is known for serving food that’s “Mexican del corazon,” Salamanca is from Bogota, Colombia. Ajiaco is a dish from her childhood, a soup traditionally served in bowls of black clay.

“In Colombia we eat a lot of soups,” she says. “It’s how you can feed lots of peopleand there’s a lot of that.”

When cooking at home, Salamanca typically tries to make something the familyshe and her two daughterscan enjoy for a few days. Ajiaco, made with chicken, corn, and potatoes, is fairly simple. It’s topped with avocado, cream, and capers and thickened by stewing the potatoes in stock for at least thirty minutes until the liquid is cloudy.

Salamanca starts the stock by cutting up the vegetables: carrots, green onions, and celery all go into a large pot full of water. She uses the flat of the blade to smash garlic cloves, peeling and tossing them in; the chicken follows into the steaming mix, along with anise, pepper, thyme, and marjoram.

Sara, Salamanca’s thirteen-year-old, sits down at the kitchen table with her homework. Sara was born here; her mother became a citizen in 2012. Later, over dinner, Sara will tell me that she thinks and dreams in English, though she and her mother converse in a mix of English and Spanish. Salamanca also thinks in English these days, for the most part, but she counts in Spanish.

Salamanca opens a bottom drawer and pulls out an unending supply of aprons. Many look handmade, and one bright orange one has a list running its entire length, of all the fruits that grow in ColombiaSalamanca has never eaten seven of them. She slips on a Frida Kahlo print. I catch sight of an apron embroidered with red, blue, and white flowers, and try it on. It fits like a little dress.

While the stock simmers, we peel and slice potatoesall ten pounds of them. She admits that the potatoes in America aren’t the same, but they work. The only thing that can’t be replicated, it seems, is the guascas. Considered a weed in much of the world, guascas is a member of the daisy family and the crucial ingredient in ajiaco. The herb adds an earthiness, a depth to the dish, and it can be found at most Mexican markets and International Foods. Salamanca pulls what looks like a large juice box labeled “aguardiente” from the fridge and places a couple of weighty, blue-rimmed shot glasses on the counter.

“In Colombia, our alcohol comes in boxes. This is what we drink all the time, for every occasion.”

She laughs as she swings open the door of a bottom cabinet to reveal stacks of the liquor. Essentially Colombian “fire water,” it is made from sugar cane and flavored with anise. It is light, at 29 percent, and bright. It resembles a less aggressive Ouzo, a more palatable Raki.

The stock is ready. Salamanca uses a pair of tongs to pull the chicken from the pot and places it aside to cool. The vegetables are strained, and the potatoes go in. She stirs the mixture with an enormous, hand-carved wooden spoon from Colombia, then traps the steam with a heavy lid. We’ll wait twenty minutes before adding the corn and guascas.

Sara has finished her homework. Salamanca refills our aguardiente glasses, and we gather around the table to pull the chicken. In the background, folk music from her grandfather’s region bounces around the kitchen, vibrant and lively. He’d been a cattle rancher, a cowboy, in Casanare. Her grandmother, the consummate hostess, had always welcomed friends and family to their home. Salamanca grew up in a single-parent household; since her mother worked a lot, she and her siblings spent many weekends with their grandparents.

Ajiaco is one of the many things she learned to cook by watching her grandma. But Salamanca would come into her own as a cook in the kitchen at Centro. She moved to North Carolina at seventeen, although it was supposed to be temporary. It was 1993, and she had been denied admission to the public university in Bogota. Her parents sent her to north Raleigh to work in her Uncle Carlos’s restaurant, Dos Taquitos.

“He had no idea,” she says. “It was a Saturday night, and he dropped me in the kitchen.”

She had never been in the back of a restaurant. “I just remember standing in the kitchen and seeing big trays of food just flying, left and right, and I thought, ‘We’re supposed to do that? How are we supposed to do that?’” But she did itand didn’t return to Colombia until ten years later.

After the unexpected death of her sister and the birth of her second daughter, she teamed up with Carlos to develop the concept for Centro. Just before opening, though, her uncle chased a sweetheart back to Colombia, leaving her to run the place on her own. A year after that, her chefshe calls her Marthica, “our little Martha”lost a battle with cancer.

“When Martha passed, we didn’t have a plan,” she says.The plan they eventually developed placed Angela in the kitchen, running the back of house. “I really admire kitchen workers because it’s the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. It’s taught me to start and finish something in a whole way.”

At first, though, it was about perfecting recipes and procedures, getting the kitchen to be an efficient place of work so they could eventually have fun around it. Today, she doesn’t let restrictions limit her creativity.

“I don’t feel like I have to cook Colombian, or cook Mexican,” she says. “I don’t let that dictate what I cook anymore. Once I started having fun with it, I started going back to what I loved when Grandma cooked for us.”

We finish shredding the chicken; it’s time to add the corn and guascas to the pot. Angela pulls off the husks and snaps the ears in half before tossing them in. She then dumps in the last half of the bag of guascas. We set the table, a spoon and corn pick at each place.

We build our bowls: broth rich with potatoes, a piece of corn, a bit of shredded chicken, avocado, cream, cilantro. For the next several moments, the only noise is the music dancing along in the background, the scraping of spoons, slurps. Angela says she’s learned, over the past ten years, how important it is to carve out time for yourself and your family, to make meals together.

“Cooking is a way you can take care of yourself,” she says. And by doing so, you are better able to take care of other people.

Sara begins to gather the plates and put them in the sink; she knows cleaning up is her mother’s least favorite part of cooking.

left Angela Salamanca, owner of Centro in Raleigh, at home with her daughter, Sara. top Onions and herbs in stock photos by alex boerner

photos by alex boerner