Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

So, after a most wonderful lunch at a place called Punto Azul here in Miraflores, I have decided that I should try and eat Ceviche every day between now and the day I leave Peru. I’d heard of it before coming here but never eaten it, when I was in Cusco last year I was too busy eating English Breakfasts. I won’t be making that mistake again. Ceviche is Peruvian dish of fish and seafood marinated in lime and lemon juice and served with a chili sauce (the wikipedia article gives more details – I particularly like the phrase “endless door” in the first paragrph.) . Now, I’m not the biggest hot food or fish fan in the world but after weeks of chicken and rice, I’m loving it.

On a side note we found out today that Ecuador no longer lets Colombians in. Laura rang the Ecuador Embassy and they confirmed this. She told them that she had Argentinian residency (which is a plus point) but was told that having been to Colombia recently would count against her and the official advice was that she would have to see how she got on with the Immigration Officer at the border. They couldn’t promise anymore than that. Brilliant.

Argentina is proud of its European heritage – it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that they, on the whole, consider themselves more European than anywhere else in South America, and to be fair they probably are. Except in the North there is very little indigeneous population, and looking at the faces on the streets and avenidas of Buenos Aires you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Milan or Barcelona.

This results in two things – one is a reputation in the rest of South America of a certain arrogance, that the Argentines (due to the Italian and Spanish bloodlines) consider themselves better than the rest of the “conquered” continent (leading to the joke about how does an Argentine commit suicide – he jumps off his ego) and the second result is the milanesa.

A Tasty Milanesa Sandwich

The Milanesa is everywhere. These things crop up in Europe under a variety of names depending on the country but what we are dealing with here is breaded steak (or veal or chicken), either served as a sandwich (as above) or on a plate with chips.

The thing you get to notice after a while here is that while the food isn’t bad, and is sufficiently “European” to count as familiar (no Guinea Pig here), by and large it is simply the same. Eat out in a standard cafe or restaurant and, once you’ve been here for a while, you will be able to recite the menu off-pat before picking it up.

There will be a section of coffee and medialunas, then the sandwich section – cheese, ham, cheese and ham (all options toasted or not), milanesa or beef (pay extra for lettuce or tomato). There may be a couple of empanada options, then there will be the Minuta section (the name presumably refers to length of time it takes to cook, one of the more serious cases of false advertising I’ve ever come across) which will contain more meat and carbs, this time on a plate. The milanesa will come plain with chips or Napolitana (with tomato and herb sauce) or a la Pizza (as Napolitana but with melted cheese). This little lot followed by the Pizza section itself which will feature a bewildering selection, none of them really resembling what we know as pizza, Argentine pizza being more of a slice of bread with melted cheese and cold ham and pickled red peppers.

Now, don’t get me wrong, with the possible exception of the pizza, none of the above is bad and I have eaten the length and breadth of this menu many a time, but that’s kind of the point – all places have the same choice of food. Given the heritage and the culinary possibilities that heritage could entail (I’m not sure I dare do a post on what passes as cheese in this country – I would get far too angry), it’s kind of a letdown.

A pile of Facturas

This is what breakfast looks like in Argentina. Every couple of blocks or so you stumble across a panaderia, the Argentine equivalent of a bakers or boulangerie. What’s unusual about this is that bread in this country is actually pretty poor, but what they do do well is sweet stuff. From Dulce de Leche to ice cream to alfajor biscuits to gallons of full-fat Coke it’s a miracle there are any teeth left. And in keeping with this cavity-inducing culinary lifestyle. breakfast is, for the most part, sweet too.

Facturas can be lots of different shapes and sizes, but the basics are the same. They’re cakes. That you have for breakfast. The most common is the medialuna (literally halfmoon) and all cafes do a coffee and medialuna combo in the morning, although my favourite way of eating them is warm, filled with ham and cheese.

Now, I like me a bit of food, and do seem to eat rather a lot and rather well here in Buenos Aires so I’ve decided to document some of the food that is considered typical here. In order to do this I will have to go out and buy the food, remember to take a picture of it, and eat the food. It’s a dirty job, but for you, O Faithful Reader, I am prepared to make the sacrifice.

So, today I will start with what could be considered as the bedrock of Argentinian fast food.

Choripan

Meet the Choripan. So called from the name of the sausage (Chorizo) and the fact it’s served in bread (pan). A slight digression here on the word Chorizo. In Spain, it refers to a thinly sliced, spicy cured sausage. Here it refers to the pork sausage you see above, unless you’re talking about a Bife de Chorizo which is a sirloin steak.

So anyway, the choripan is the Argentine version of the burger, or the kebab. the national portable meat served in bread snack. In true Argentinian fashion, it is not messed with in any way when it arrives on your plate. Enter into any Parrilla (a restaurant containing a huge charcoal grill, which serves bascially meat and little else and pronounced, here at least, paree-sha) and above the grill will be a stack of already cooked Chorizos. When a Choripan is ordered, the sausage is taken from the top rack, sliced in half, butterfly style, and placed innard-down on the grill. Once nicely browned, it’s removed and put in between 2 bits of bread. No gherkins, no ketchup, no lettuce, no tomato. That’s it.

However, you are of course free to add your own condiments, most usually this will be a liberal dollop of the wonderfully named chimichurri, a mix of oil, vinegar, garlic and chili. Occasionally there will be a little bowl of chopped onion and tomato salsa, which goes nicely with the bread, but it’s the chimichurri that really does the business.

So, there you have it – the perfect lunchtime snack, pre-drinking preparation or post-bar munchies. It really does do it all, why do you need anything else? And as a bonus, my local Parrilla is all decked out in traditional gaucho style, which makes me think of English Narrowboat decorations. Here are two of the tables:

Tables

If you want to be shot in Alaska, other than doing it yourself (which, given the low levels of sunlight in winter it seems a lot of people do. The state has the highest per capita suicide rate in the US), there are 2 ways. Say the wrong thing about Sarah Palin to the wrong person or announce loudly and proudly that you eat farmed fish. Man, they hate that. On the surface (or under it at least, ha ha!) farming seems a sensible solution. In areas where the salmon population has been overfished, give the wild ones a chance to recover by placing huge net cages near the shore and grow the little blighters like chickens. That way, the supermarkets remain stocked with nutritious tasty fishies, jobs are provided for areas hit by a collapsed fishing industry (by necessity, fish farms are set up in areas where the salmon occur naturally, often at the mouth of a spawning stream) and nature is untouched to carry on doing what it does. Right?

Well, no as it happens. The fish farms are messing up the environment just as much, if not more as fishing. Fish, like chickens, are not designed to confined to a cage in huge numbers. When one fish gets an infection, a lot of the other salmon, being in close proximity, also become infected. The infection affects the skin and the fish shed flakes of infected scales. As they are in a net, these flakes float out into the sea, where the wild salmon either leaving or returning to their natal stream swim through a huge cloud of horribleness. Wild fish in turn become infected, making it very hard for the natural population to recover and/or stay healthy.

Strike one for the fish farms. Strike two is the fact that in order to combat the infections, fish farms pump a lot of antibiotics into the water, which not only cause mutations in the farmed salmon (which we then eat, even the mututated ones), also of course cause untold damage to the wild population beyond the nets. And thirdly, farmed fish tastes awful, really fucking bad. As I said earlier, I used to think I didn’t like fish, I know realise I love fish, just none of the fish I’ve eaten before. I’ve been lucky enough to eat a lot of fresh seafood in the last 3 weeks. Halibut, rockfish, lingcod, shrimps, crab and, of course, salmon. It truly and honestly tastes fantastic – fresh, delicate and healthy. I’ve eaten it every day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I’ve not eaten meat for 3 weeks (aside from a hot dog, gimme a break, I was drunk) and have felt no desire to. From a raw chunk sliced from a beautiful, whole, deep red coho (sockeye), rockfish tacos, home-smoked king salmon to crab cakes, I’ve stuffed my face.

I’ve eaten corn-fed beef from happy cows and it does taste “nicer” than feedlot cattle, but the difference between farmed salmon and wild salmon is staggering. It’s a million miles from what we in Europe (or me at least) know as fish. I loved it. Obviously, I was lucky enough to be in a place where some of the world’s finest is plucked directly from the ocean, if you catch it yourself, sea to plate in 3 hours. Very few of the 175 million make their way to Europe and when they do the price is often prohibitive for mere mortals, but if you ever get the chance to try it, leap (see what I did there?) at it. And do us all a favour, when you eat fish, eat sustainably caught fish and secondly, you’d always buy free-range chickens so please don’t eat farmed fish, it’s really not worth it.

Let’s play a game. How about Word Association? I’ll say a word and you come up with a word or phrase it makes you think of. First thing that pops into your head. OK? Ready? Here goes…

…Salmon.

You probably (bear with me here) came up with “fish” or maybe “leap” or more likely “flaccid piece of pale pink something in a polysterene tray from Tesco, but it’s full of omega 3 therefore healthy and I feel virtuous”. Amirite?

Of course I am, that’s what salmon means in the UK. Well, not in Alaska it doesn’t, and particularly not in Ketchikan, the Salmon Capital of the World. Salmon in Alaska is a way of life. Getting the ferry up, in the middle of day 2 I started seeing ripples in the water and got all excited (it was 38 hours on a boat, didn’t take much), wondering what mighty sea creature could be causing this. Before I long I caught sight of the culprit, none other than a large salmon leaping a good two feet out of the water, a quick shimmy and splashing back in to the water. I watched for a while and time and again I saw fish doing this. Sometimes just the once, other times clearly the same fish jumping out of the water 3 or 4 times in quick succession. I thought it was fantastic and very novel.

I’ve since realised that salmon do this all the time, particularly in the summer just prior to their spawning run, and I’ve grown very blasé about it. Whenever there is a bit of sea here, salmon are jumping out of it. It’s very cool. I’ve heard three theories as to why they do it, first they’re catching insects. Second it’s in their blood, it’s how they get upstream and they’re just practicing. Thirdly, it’s only females and they do it to force their eggs nearer to the business end so it’s easier for laying. One & three came from non-Alaskans I met on the ferry and the second one was my cousin, so I’m going with the local knowledge.

I don’t eat a lot of fish, I know I should eat more, but the fact is I don’t really like it that much. Plus I remember reading an article once where it pointed out that some vegetarians like to take the moral ground about not eating meat, saying it is immoral, all the while eating fish, which is taken from the wild rather than farmed. The author made the point that if all the cows in the world disappeared, no natural ecosystem would suffer, finish off one species of fish and it’s a different matter entirely. Countless other species would suffer.

If salmon were the species wiped out, then not only would a few summer barbeques suffer. Salmon not only feed us, but at the various stages of their life they also feed bears, eagles, otters and many larger fish to name but a few. They are born and grow in a stream, spend 1-5 years in the ocean and then return to the same stream (nobody knows how they find it) to spawn and die. Once spawned, their decaying bodies in the thousands of streams and lakes provide nutrients to the soil which improves the berries growing nearby, which feed birds, deer and bears (again). It’s an amazing, finely balanced, well established cycle of life and death.

Until the human race comes along of course. Alaska prides itself on having a sustainable salmon population. Fishing and bycatch is well-monitored and blackouts can be (and are) declared if returning salmon numbers are low. The state runs hatcheries to increase the numbers of young salmon entering the streams, fish ladders are installed to allow returning fish to bypass hydroelectric installations. Which is just as well, seeing as even given all that Alaska takes 175,000,000 salmon out of the sea each year. That’s 175 million legal fish, not counting the untold numbers caught by illegal Chinese, Russian and Japanese boats. Overall is does seem to be a healthy system and the the Alaskans seem to have understood that we can’t just take as many fish out of the sea as want, without disaster, not least the collapse of the fishing industry.

• Vodka purchased in Paraguay – ingredients: Ethyl Alcohol, Water
• Whisky purchased in Bolivia – ingredients: Whisky (20%), water, caramel flavouring
• 100% Cranberry purchased in USA – ingredients: Grape, Cranberry and Apple Juice