I love Patronato

There's this section of Santiago where you can buy really cheap clothing because it's fabricated there. And now today I stumbled across the main Santiago market (or so I think). It's called a vega. Ever since we arrived to Santiago, I've been shopping at a market in the metro station Puente Cal y Canto across from the Central Market (the Central Market mostly is full of seafood restaurants). The produce is generally fresher and cheaper there that in the supermarkets. It did kind of surprise me how small the market is being about the same size as Valparaíso's market. Valpo's population is about 260,000 while Santiago's is around 6.5 million. But I just figured there must be lots of ferias in Santiago, where venders set up in the street to sell produce on Wednesdays and Saturdays. But today, I took the wrong street to Patronato and found myself in front of this huge city-block-sized mass of produce stands with a sizeable parking lot. I saw a couple guys with dolleys stacked three meters high with cochayuyo. I LOVE food, especially fresh produce, so this was a felt like a huge personal jackpot to come across the vega. So I made my way in, figuring the exit on the other side would be pretty close to the clothing stores and when I came out on the other side, I was right by the Patronato metro station, across the street from the stores. Cheap clothing and cheap fresh food. What could be better?

I bought a couple pairs of pants and then headed back to the vega and bought a Chilean mango, which was tiny, but tasty, and a mankaqui, so good, and other fresh produce.

I've never bought so much expired food in my life.

I've even bought expired soy sauce at the Chinese Commercial Center. I used it for several months before I even noticed. Who checks the expiration date on soy sauce? I do now, when I remember. I've bought and eaten expired yogurt. First I noticed the funny taste, than the funny color and lastly the expiration date. Nasty. Although, I do generally check the expiration date on yogurt because it's a handy food to have on hand, sitting in the fridge for a week or two or three. Though it rarely lasts that long. I had crackers expire on me the other day. Crackers. In fact I wouldn't have even noticed. Vuko noticed. Though, they weren't already expired when I bought them like the other foods. They still had a month or so left, but we went on a 3-week vacation, so they were past expiration when we got back. I just bought expired chicken the other day, but cooked and ate it anyway. It was only one day past expiration. Normally I notice the expiration dates on chicken and meat products, but the other day I was looking for the smallest chicken breast (half a kilo) and forgot to crosscheck it for freshness. I've also bought expired milk. Nothing else occurs to me at the moment, but I will think of more things... and I'm sure I've cooked and eaten more expired food than I am aware. But I'm still living. I've eaten waaaay worse things in Chile and survived to perhaps blog about it someday.

low-carbon diet and related babblings

The locavore movement is now contending with the organic one, because although no chemicals are used to produce organic food (supposedly), considering the impact one's carbon footprint puts into question how ethical it is to buy Chilean grapes, unless of course you live here. Because if you live in the States, fuel will be needed to export those grapes. Eating locally appears to be where its at and previously obvious choices (for some) are put into doubt. So in order to combat the maybe-not-so-good-for-the-Earth organic fad, you can now partake in a low-carbon diet. I can barely contemplate the hordes of deer and wild rice someone living in Minnesota may have to eat to stay low-carbon. A lot of weight would be lost in the north country. Perhaps pumpkins and squash could be used for more than just Halloween decorations and Thanksgiving pie. Luckily strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and apples all grow there, as well as corn, peas lettuce, etc. ...I suppose that corner of the Earth is rather bountiful. In Chile I could almost live off the fruit and vegetables sold on the street. Speaking of bountiful...the pears are absolutely gorgeous and the cactus pears are sooo sweet right now, and quite cheap too. Capitalism's homogenizing/essentializing effect means consumers may not even know what fruits and veggies are in season. Here in Chile I've got more of a grasp on it. Though in Minnesota, there's not much in season 6 months of the year.

Anyway I suppose my idea is to have a garden. Some of my ex-co-workers in Minnesota have a HUUGE pumpkin patch and surplus zucchinis every year, so I could probably partake in those if I ever go home. Meanwhile, I imagine that studying pre-Colombian diets could go far to give an idea as to what to eat in América.

excellent enchilada recipe

I recommend this recipe!!! It's one of my favorite. The best part is the enchilada sauce; that's what gives the recipe it's super addictive tastiness. What goes in the tortillas is relative. I've prepared the recipe below and it's quite good, but it's also quite tasty stuffed with chicken, green peppers and cheese, or even quinoa, veggies and cheese. When I put chicken or pork in the enchiladas, I always have cooked the meat first. Often I use meat left over from the day before.

Poroto, Corn, and Zucchini Enchiladas

Prepare the Enchilada Sauce a day or two ahead of time, and refrigerate. I generally prepare enough to make enchiladas twice in a week.

2 teaspoon canola oil
1 cup diced red onion
2 teaspoon minced garlic
1 cup organic vegetable broth (such as Swanson Certified Organic)
2 tablespoon chili powder
2 tablespoon honey
2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon salt
4-6 juicy tomatoes

Preparation
Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and garlic; sauté 5 minutes or until onion is tender. Stir in broth and remaining ingredients. Reduce heat, and simmer 30 minutes.

3 cups (serving size: about 1/3 cup)

Ingredients (what goes in the tortillas)
2 teaspoon canola oil
2 cups diced zucchini
1 (10-ounce) package frozen whole-kernel corn
1 cup porotos of your choice, cooked
3 cups Enchilada Sauce, divided
8 (8-inch) whole wheat tortillas
2 cups shredded cheese, divided

Preparation
Preheat oven to 350°F (180°C).

Heat oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add 2 cups zucchini and corn; sauté for 5 minutes or until vegetables are tender. Remove from heat, and stir in beans.

Spread 1 cup Enchilada Sauce in the bottom of a 13 x 9-inch baking dish coated with oil. Spoon about 1/2 cup zucchini mixture down center of 1 tortilla; sprinkle with 2 tablespoons cheese, and roll up. Place seam-side down in baking dish. Repeat procedure with remaining tortillas, zucchini mixture, and 14 tablespoons cheese. Spread remaining 2 cups sauce evenly over enchiladas.

Cover with foil; bake at 350°F (180°C) for 15-30 minutes. Uncover; top with remaining 1 cup cheese. Bake, uncovered, for 10 minutes or until cheese melts.

Chili Powder

INGREDIENTS:
* 1 part paprika (ají de color)
* 2 parts ground cumin
* 1 part cayenne pepper (merken) - I always use merken instead of cayenne because it's such a good spice and easy to get in Chile.
* 1 part oregano
* 2 parts garlic powder – or add garlic sauce or garlic when cooking and leave out garlic powder

Matar aloo

Today I prepared matar aloo. It turned out quite well besides the under-cooked potatoes. The technique for next time may be to boil them beforehand. I omitted the green peas because the ones I bought here don't cook. Even in the pressure cooker they take forever to soften at all. Is that normal? I just plan on substituting other things rather than using green peas (dal). I also think that adding chicken or veggie broth instead of water would be a tasty addition to the recipe. Although I tried to prepare a ton of this to have leftovers for tomorrow, there's barely any leftover. Cuak. Next time.

Matar aloo

1 T butter
½ t cumin seeds
1 C dried Green peas (dal) soaked overnight and cooked just until soft but mushy
1 potato cubed
1 t ginger paste
1 t garlic paste
1 small onion, minced
1 big tomato or ½ cup tomato sauce
1 T cumin seeds pd,
½ t red chilli pd
salt
cilantro
1 t sugar

To Grind:
2 T coconut
2 T toasted almonds
½ t garam masala

Melt butter,add cumin seeds.Add cubed Potatoes,saute until reddish.Put in minced onion until it gets color,then add Giner-Garlic paste and saute for a minute.Add in all the dry spices,stir fry until you see little butter on top.Add in Tomato.

Keep stirring until Tomato sauce thickens and you see the shine of butter in the pan.Add 1 cou of water,salt and cooked Green Peas with it's cooking water if any,(Do not add too much water,sauce should thickish), 1 tsp sugar and simmer gently.

Meanwhile,grind coconut,almonds,garam masala until very smooth and add to simmering Matar Aloo and mix well.Simmer (must be on low heat to prevent coconut fro curdling)gently for 10-15mins until thick and butter shows up on top.Adjust the salt and chilli pd to your taste.

This dish tastes great the next day,please have some patience!!
Serve Matar Aloo with either Poori or layered Parathas, lemon slices and sweet onion slices on the side!!

a ton of sour quinoa

I made "sour quinoa", which is quinoa with Indian seasonings, I altered Madhur Jafrey's Sour chickpeas recipe. Lunch got a 4 from Vuko, he doesn't think quinoa can be a main dish. He said it was good but the pork chops were missing. jeje. poor guy. But now a have a weeks worth of sour quinoa so maybe tomorrow I can fry up the pork chops he wanted. We had apple pie/crisp for dessert. That turned out quite good. I give lunch a 5.5.

I find the sour quinoa and sour chickpeas recipes to be quite addictive. I think it's the cumin that gives it the pull to eat more. I really do. My enchilada recipe uses cumin as well and boy are the enchiladas addictive. That might be a good idea...to make quinoa-stuffed enchiladas this week. I have a ton of quinoa now, both regular and sour. So I could fuse mexican and indian and get an interesting dish. Both traditions seem to use a fair amount of cumin. Both enchiladas and sour chickpeas start by frying onions and tomatoes.

Last weeks food (mostly lunches) in review...

Monday - cazuela -- tasty
Tuesday - estofado de cazuela -- okay
Wednesday - chicken veggie stir-fry, yummy. I didn't think Vuko liked it so I asked him to give it a grade (between 1-7) and he gave it a 5. I give it a 5.8. I liked it because it had a ton of vegetables which is why I thought Vuko wouldn't like it, but I was wrong. (Granted it's diplomatic of him to compliment the hand that feeds him.)
Thursday - salad kind of like at Naturista restaurant (boiled potatoe, porotos granados, half an avocado, goat cheese with merkén, black olives) and quinoa. mote con huesillos for dessert
Friday - vegetable consomé and quinoa salad. and mote con huesillos for dessert.
Saturday - leftover quinoa salad... and tapas goat cheese with merken, crackers, olives, nuts
Sunday - pasta with olive oil and parmesan cheese accompanied with gatorade. Absolutely spectacular.

And I made the apple pie-like thing last night. It's kind of a apple crisp/apple pie hybrid. But all the butter and sugar made it tasty.

apple pie

Vuko's b-day is coming up, so I asked him what kind of cake he wants. And he said he doesn't really like cake, but that's because he hasn't tasted the cake I make. hehe. Really the store-bought cakes here are terrible, except for the mil hojas which has manjar. Or if you buy a cake in a German bakery, those are incredible..and expensive. So we decided on apple pie instead of cake...I really think it should be accompanied with cinnamon ice cream from El Emporio La Rosa...yummy. I´ll have to get a pint of that to go with it. So in true scholarly fashion, I looked up apple pie recipes on the internet...I have my preferences as far as recipes go, and I found a cookie crumb sort of crust...flour, chopped nuts, brown sugar and butter, it sounds simple enough. Not only are pie crusts supposedly hard to make, I honestly don't find them that tasty, except for the cookie crumb variety. Otherwise it's like eating bread or something, sort of blah, really. I've never been a big fan. So this pie crust sounds tasty. The filling is basically apples, sugar, a bit of flour, spices, and maybe I'll add some pecans or cherries or something, I don't know. And then, you know, the lattice top crust is like essential to have, except I've decided on a "crunch top" that is composed of butter, sugar, a pinch of salt, and flour that you distribute in clumps on top of the pie filling. These are just parts of recipes I harvested off the internet. We'll see how it turns out. Thinking of trying it out this weekend.

teflon is the pits

Freeking annoying. I can't stand teflon and wish it were never invented. What's wrong with stainless steel? I bought this teflon fry-pan a couple years back and you aren't supposed to wash it with soap or abrasive things... And the food gets stuck anyway..then what do you do? Stupid teflon. Another invention WAY OVER-RATED. I was at Target the other day looking for a new fry pan and of course they were ALL coated with teflon. So I bought one anyway, because I really did need a new fry pan...

I've been flirting with trying to find a copper fry pan. They sell a lot of copper pans here, I see lots on the way to Con-Con. They don't seem to be lined like the copper cookware in the States..but perhaps unlined copper is worth a try... this is random, but, according what I've read about ayurveda philosophy, copper balances kapha..

mote, cazuela, estofado, Young Combatant's Day

So I'm cooking like a pound of mote and considering instead of making rice to go with the stirfry to use some of the mote as the acompañamiento. I wonder what Vuko will think of this. He's not as experimental with the food he ingests as I am. After putting all this mote on to cook, I remembered Vuko doesn't like that much mote with his huesillos...though I love mote. I s'pose I´d eat it but probably getting more to the truth of the matter I don't feel like making rice today. After all the mote's already cooking.

Oh. Last week I tried a new thing and it worked out well. I made cazuela de ave (this wasn't the new part), a typical chilean soup. This was Friday. Turns out Young Combatent's Day fell on a Saturday this year, but who protests on Saturday? Stopping traffic in Alameda (the main drag in downtown Santiago) on a Saturday doesn't affect anyone. Plus, generally I think people have better things to do on Saturdays. So the protesters made a morning of it on Friday. Though I thought I saw some protester signs that were complaining about the Public Education or something. Anyway, Vuko called to say he was getting out of work at 3:30pm due to the protests, and wouldn't be coming home for lunch. So I had this huuuge pot of cazuela just for me and we were going to Viña for the weekend. So after lunch, I transferred it to a smaller pot and put it in the freezer. When we got back, I took it out and it defrosted for like 12 hours and I heated it up for lunch Monday. It was still quite tasty. I was suprised. And then we had it again on Tuesday. hahaha. By yesterday it was more like estofado (stew) de ave than cazuela, but it was still good.

menus, food ponderings and possible heresy

I imagine this will be a sort of journal of my cooking so I can look back and see what worked and what didn't with different culinary endeavors, and also to record and remember recipes that I've used and foods that I've prepared and I could talk incessantly about foods and diet...and I think I will.

I put some huesillos (dehydrated peaches) in a bowl and mote (a grain commonly eaten in Chile) in another bowl to soak for the evening, planning on making mote con huesillos (a Chilean food) tomorrow to have for breakfasts and desserts and snacks. The chancaca's been sitting in my cupboard for awhile now.. I´m planning on making stirfry for lunch tomorrow -- red pepper, carrots, celery, dientes de dragón (soybean sprouts), chicken and cashews. With rice to accompany.

For Wednesday am thinking of preparing a vegetable broth to cook the quinoa in and make a little soup. We eat a lot of quinoa. According to Wikipedia it was the most important food for the Incans. And maybe chop up some vegetables to stirfry to eat with the quinoa...The main dish is often a bit complicated for me. I have vegan tendencies though I don't know that I will ever become vegan, I'm sort of a vegan/vegetarian eater for most of my quotidian foods, especially breakfast. haha.

And I like the idea of being a locavore. There's supposed to be an organic restaurant near the U de Chile, the humanities building, that I would like to check out some day. Too bad I haven't had to go to the U de Chile humanities in months : (

Anyway, it's sort of a problem having vegan/vegetarian tendencies when my boyfriend loves meat, fish, poultry, etc. One way I've negotiated our dietary preferences so far is I buy canned tuna and some days I make him a tuna salad as the first plate and then it doesn't matter as much if the main entree contains no animal. I like meat too sometimes. Lately I´ve really enjoyed pork chops and pork ribs -- prepared with olive oil and lemon. yummy. In Chile the most typical get together that a person is invited to (be it a family or friend affair) is the barbecue -- asado. And I love the choripanes...It's one of my favorite foods. They are little fat sausages put in a little fat bunlike piece of bread. Bread is made fresh here daily. I suppose that's the other gliche in a possible plan of becoming a vegan.. I like barbecues. Especially in Chile. In the States I didn't have quite the passion for them that I do here.

So why would I want to be a vegan? My 1st reason is because I can't stand what I've heard about the food industry. I mostly avoid thinking about it when eating chicken (that are supposedly injected with sodium so they'll absorb more water and thus be larger and heavier and sell for more money), meat, salmon (antibiotic-injected), any of it really, even Chilean vegetables are likely to have of pesticides and other chemicals. Today on the cover of La Tercera, The headline was "USA: third chain of supermarkets suspends buying Chilean Salmon". (Safeway) Though I'd already read about this deal in c.hileno's website. Anyway, this is after a report is published in the New York Times about the elevated amount of antibiotics used in the Chilean Salmon Industry based on a report written by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development back in 2005. Capitalism can be so insidious. (I don't have anything against capitalism per se; its actually the business people and consumers that screw it all up.)

The soy industry is totally consciousless, conscienceless, rather. I've read they are clearcutting in Brazil and Argentina to plant more soy. Needless to say I mostly avoid soy. So anyway, I´m looking forward to having a garden again someday and being a member of a Community Supported Agriculture farm to perhaps transport me out of this downward spiral. In downtown Santiago I can't even grow spices on my balcony because the smog fallout coats my plants like chocolate coats strawberries.

... Oh, and as a side note, I read an article in El Mercurio a few months back saying how Coca-Cola Zero doesn't meet FDA standards to be sold in the US. It's sold here in Chile. I used to prefer it to diet coke even, until I read this article. I think it has more sodium which makes it a bit tastier. Regular coke is probably the way to go anyway...

Back to menu-planning... I haven't cooked in like a month and am excited to be back at it. Thursday and Friday I'm thinking of salads, mostly quinoa salad -- my typical one with chopped scallions, peppers, soy sauce, fresh grated ginger, fresh grated garlic, olive oil and possible other ingredients that may be laying around. And a perhaps a lettuce salad with olives, goat cheese with merken, and a little bowl of mixed nuts. That sounds quite good really. I should make a greek salad some day. Those are tasty. I got some good feta cheese at the market last year.

This has given me an idea for a character in a book or a short story... When I did the cruce de lagos from Bariloche, Argentina to Puerto Varas, Chile, there was a tour guide in the bus of the last leg of the trip and she explained the that Salmon industry had salmon growing in All Saints Lake, (Lago Todos los Santos) while the salmon is young, and then it is transported to the ocean to continue growing there. But say the tour guide gets sick of her job one day, maybe she experiences an existential crises, well this time as she talks to all the tourists on the bus about the salmon industry she could go into how very blessed these All Saint's salmon are..unfortunately they ruin the lake's ecosystem and are later injected with antibiotics because they get a contagious harmful fungus from having their cages too close together and she could go on and on.... Imagine being on that bus. I´m sure there are many things I'd rather not know about the industry since I eat salmon once or twice a month in the form of sushi. But since its the antibiotics I´m worried about, maybe it makes no difference whether the fish is cooked or raw.

The other thing I read was that now some scientists are saying that overuse of antibiotics may be a factor in developing asthma and peanut allergy.

I'm just going to stop eating.