Two weeks into our time in Argentina Kehala and I have finally gotten around to actually writing a blog post. Hopefully we’ll get better at this. Because we are living and working together for the first month of our time here, we’ll write about different things and post them on both of our blogs. So, for those of you reading both blogs, we’ll have the same stuff on each so until July 22…pick it and stick it.
Given my generally food-obsessed nature, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when I sat down to write, the thing I most wanted to write about was food.
Having been a vegetarian for all twenty years of my life, eating in Argentina is a strange experience. When planning a trip it’s always hard to know what parts of the stereotypes about a given place are actually true, but with regards to Argentinean food, I think that they are largely accurate. Argentineans love meat, most especially beef but all kinds of meat are acceptable! Ham and chicken especially. I very quickly abandoned any notion of attempting vegetarianism here (especially as the term only connotes that a person does not eat beef rather than meat in general). Instead, Kehala and I have become adept at eating whatever is put in from of us and exclaiming “Que rico!”(or “how delicious!”). The other major components of the Argentinean diet (at least according to my somewhat limited experience) are bread and sugar, both of which are consumed in large quantities. As the daughter of a health nut, I keep wondering how it is possible that the entirety of the Argentinean population is not overweight. When I asked however, a number of Argentineans assured me that they like vegetables too.
Kehala and I both crave vegetables with regularity, although our host mom has very kindly tried to accommodate our tastes. We went through my iPhoto yesterday and salivated while looking at all the pictures of food we cooked last year…I knew there would be some use for those photos! Nonetheless, our host mom is a good cook and the food is generally very tasty. She has made us chop suey (which she said was Chinese, but tasted more Italian than anything…again, the stereotype that Argentineans do not like spicy food appears to be very true), spinach pie, tortilla de papas (a savory potato cake-like thing), rice with beef, pizza with ham, chicken tart and pasta among other things. She also very kindly found us plain yogurt (which she finds very strange), so now we can enjoy our habitual breakfast of plain yogurt with fruit and granola. Before this, we would eat criollos (a biscuit-like bread that has a flaky texture and is the one food that, at this point, I will miss when I return home) and bananas for breakfast every morning. Even with the switch to yogurt, Kehala and I are becoming infamous for our liking for criollos, which our host mother buys in large quantities and we consume mostly while huddling next to the heater, leaving a large pile of crumbs in our wake.
We eat lunch daily at the guadaría, or daycare, where we volunteer. The food here is not as good as our host mother’s but again it is generally well seasoned. It is here that I have eaten beef stew in various forms, rice with beef and other 2-3 year old friendly meaty things!
On Thursday night, we experienced our first asada. Miguel, a friend of our host mother, cooked beef, a few types of sausage, and a variety of vegetables on the parilla (or grill). Kehala and I tried not to laugh as we dutifully took our first bites of carne asada, a totally new experience for me. I did not enjoy it very much, but the sausages were a bit better and everything was edible with enough bread! The vegetables were excellent, particularly the grilled peppers and overall it was not a bad experience.
I have also learned in my two weeks here that Argentineans love drinks—coke, incredibly sweet juice, and other fizzy (or not fizzy) sweet concoctions. On our first trip to the grocery store, we saw an entire section of an aisle, probably about 50 feet long and 10 feet high, filled entirely with coke. The rest of the drinks were elsewhere. The most astonishing drink-related moment for me was when, at a party at the guardaría, the women served 2 and 3 year olds coke in sippy cups! Even more astonishing was when later Kehala and I expressed our surprise to a friend who cast us a confused look and asked us what was strange about kids drinking coke.
Overall, we are adjusting slowly to Argentinean food. There have been some rough patches as our stomachs become accustomed to a new diet, but we hope this will improve with time. Both of us miss salads a lot, especially when we think about all the delicious summer produce in Oregon but we sneak raw carrots from the fridge, mandarin oranges from our host mother’s tree and consume more bananas and bread than I ever have in my life!
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