micheleandtom.com

THINGS WE’RE GLAD WE PACKED

1. Tampons (I laid in an 8 month supply!)
2. Pans (We brought two All Clad pans with us, a stock pot and a frying pan.)
3. Chef’s Knife
4. Paring Knife

THINGS WE WISH WE HAD PACKED

1. Glide Floss
2. Leopard DVD (Tom could have then restored his MAC operating system in English after his hard drive died.)
3. Y Adapter (So the girls could both listen to a movie or music on one device.)
4. More US Bills (Moving and traveling require cash money.)

THINGS WE DIDN’T NEED TO PACK

1. Formal Clothes. (Everyone goes on and on about the formality of the populace in Baires, but the truth is, it’s like any other international city…unless you’re going to work or hanging out in a trendy bar, jeans and a regular shirt are SOP. I would have packed far less “nice” clothing and more t-shirts.)

THINGS WE ARE TRAVELING WITH NOW

1. Immersion Blender (pictured above). We bought this little jobby in Baires and I love it. I haven’t used an immersion blender forever, and they’ve come a long way baby. Truly, this is a power tool! We have taken it with us on our summer sojourn and we try to make smoothies most mornings, no matter where we are staying!!!

Uruguayans are serious about their mate drinking–they take it with them everywhere.

The mate-on-the-go form executed throughout the country is characterized by tucking the thermos under the arm, and then holding the cup and sipping straw in the same hand. (It’s an advanced maneuver, one that Ian is trying to perfect.)

This one-armed technique allows you to have all of your mate necessities at hand, while still leaving an arm free. For instance, at the bus station, with all of the bags that weren’t heavy (that means all suitcases except for ours), the bus driver clutched his mate accoutrement in one hand and loaded bags with the other. You’ve gotta be impressed by that.

Unfortunately, Ian doesn’t really have the right cup for this mobile mate consumption, so we often hear, “ahhh, I burned my hand,” as we walk around Punta del Diablo.

At first blush, juice may seem to be an odd topic for a blog post. However, when you have kids, juice and juice boxes are an important part of your life. And, here in Argentina, it is fraught with challenge.

We try to pump the kids full of water and milk in terms of general beverages. We also allow them a bit of juice, which we are finding most difficult as boxed juices are generally filled with high fructose corn syrup and/or soy.

Yes, you read correctly, soy. A lot of the juice boxes are fortified with soy, so the juice tastes…well, like soy, and it has a milky appearance.

Needless to say, the soy juice is not popular with the girls!

Luckily, there are alternatives. Fresh squeezed orange juice is very big here, and easily accessible in nearly every restaurant and cafe. The display of squeezing oranges is bigger than the display of peeling oranges at the grocery store. Licuados are also widely available at restaurants, which are milk, banana, and berry type smoothies. At home, we juice our own oranges and make our own licuados, but that doesn’t solve the box of juice at school dilemma.

And, on a “juice” non sequitur, the Castellano way to indicate that you would like your steak cooked rare (which will probably come back medium!) is “jugoso,” or “juicy!”

“Hey, how many bags of milk do we have left?” is a question you commonly hear in our apartment.

Milk in Buenos Aires comes in two types of containers: milk in a box, or milk in a bag. Tom and I used to buy the milk in a box. It is pasteurized regularly and tastes fine.

One day, Ian did the shopping, and bought the milk in a bag because it’s a peso cheaper. The milk in a bag is ultra pasteurized, which leaves any dairy product with a slightly off taste. (Do a side-by-side taste test at home if you don’t believe me.) Ian also bought the yellow plastic milk-in-a-bag holder/pourer that you need in order to successfully wield the bagged milk.

Now, for some reason, we keep buying the milk in a bag even though we prefer the taste of the milk in a box. To make our continued patronage even more confusing, I am very challenged by the milk in a bag. I often forget to put it in the plastic container before cutting the corner of the bag, which then makes it a challenge to stuff the bag in the container without spilling.

I also am known for accidentally cutting the pouring spout hole in the bag too large, which creates a sort of milk fire-hose effect when you try to pour! Everyone lives in fear of me changing out the bag of milk — hee hee.

You want proof that people in Buenos Aires are insanely fabulous? Well read on…

Amaranta, the restaurant where we broke bread for “El Dia de la Accion de Gracias,” or Thanksgiving, is a weekly brunch haunt for Tom, Ian and me.

While perusing the Thanksgiving menu during one such brunch visit, we mentioned that our kids had nut allergies (always a concern with stuffings) and wanted to clear the turkey dinner for the Zs, well technically, I guess just for Zelda. Anyway, the owner of the restaurant kindly assured us that there were no nuts in any of the main courses.

We noted to ourselves that there were nuts in the pies and we just figured that we would avoid those for Zelda.

Well, we began our Thanksgiving meal at the restaurant and learned that, completely of their own volition, they had prepared one of each pie in a nut free version just for the girls. (I nearly fell out of my chair.) And, if that doesn’t make your eyes mist, they had prepared a special holiday gift bread for everyone as we left the restaurant; and because the traditional version contained nuts, they made a special chocolate bread just for the girls.

I am often surprised and warmed by the true kindness to be found in this vast metropolis.

Last year, we were in Victoria, BC for Thanksgiving and had a traditional meal at the Empress hotel. Sad to say, it was a subpar meal, as this homage to turkey excess goes.

This year, we were joined by Ian in Buenos Aires for Thanksgiving, and we had a great meal at a nearby local restaurant. It is owned by a Bolivian chef who went to a Quaker boarding school in Iowa (to learn English), lived for a bit in New Hampshire, and then cooked on a boat serving the South American cruise industry before opening his restaurant, Amaranta.

There were two seatings, one at 6:00 pm and one at 9:15 p.m. We, of course, chose the 6:00 pm seating, and were delighted to be in a restaurant that wasn’t empty while eating our meal at a normal hour!

Tonight we had our entire meal delivered.

First, we called a local hole-in-the-wall takeout joint called La Rotiseria. They brought us a rotisserie chicken with lemon wedges, mashed potatoes, mashed squash, and a salad (shredded carrots, lettuce, rice, thinly sliced onion and tomatoes). We put some of our homemade salad dressing on the latter and called it a night. Dinner!

For dessert, we dialed Persicco, which has the best dark chocolate gelato I have ever eaten in my life. They are arguably the most popular, and therefore one of the most expensive, of the heladerías here in Buenos Aires. Their fleet of delivery scooters, and it is a fleet, is quite impressive.

The store was so busy when we called, they couldn’t deliver our gelato for an hour (the nerve).

Pictured above is the kilo that we ordered, still rock hard (coffee, dark chocolate, and dulce de leche), which we had open on the table waiting for it to soften. (Persicco delivers it with chips of dry ice — amazing really.)

“So what was so hard about lifting up the phone to order our dinner and dessert?”

Well, Tom went down with a 50 peso note to pay for the 46 peso gelato, expecting to get two, 2-peso notes back in return. Instead, he got four single peso coins, which are like gold doubloons around here. (You know this if you have been following my obsession with the coin shortage.) He didn’t want to tip, he wanted to hoard his coins and run back upstairs, chortling over his ill-gotten gains.

But, being the big man that he is, Tom took a deep breath and did the right thing, returning two of the peso coins to the delivery driver. “That was hard,” he said to us when he returned to the bamboo decompression chamber. We observed a moment of silence for his strength.

Tom’s Spanish teacher, Lorena, described the Argentinian diet as consisting of the following four meals a day.

FIRST MEAL: Coffee (the most important component of the first meal) and some sort of sweet pastry.

SECOND MEAL: This would be analogous to our lunch and is generally empanadas (meat stuffed pastry dough) and/or pizza (bread and lots and lots of cheese). Possibly a sandwich could be substituted here.

THIRD MEAL: Third meal is taken at around 5:00 pm and consists of coffee (the only thing that gets you through until dinner) and a small cookie/pastry. If you are hungry, you might eat a tostada (bread, thin slice of cheese, thin slice of meat, toasted).

FOURTH MEAL: This is the big meal of the day and is generally some combination of meat and potatoes with whatever else you may choose to eat (perhaps a salad). This meal is eaten at 9:30 or 10:00 pm. Lorena said that people go to bed directly after eating dinner during the week. (Mind you, on the weekend, it is common to eat much later.)

Lorena asked Tom what our eating schedule was in the States. He told her, with kids, that we generally tended to eat at 6:30 pm or 7:00 pm and then we would go to bed around 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm. She couldn’t believe that there was such a big gap between when we ate dinner and when we went to bed, during which she claimed she would starve.

This knowledge led us to conclude that the big steak at the end of the day in Argentina is really just a time-saver because it acts as your undigested breakfast for the next morning!!

Look out! Here’s another rare post from Tom…

While prices in general have risen quite a bit in the past several years in Buenos Aires, food prices are still dramatically less than what we’re used to in the States. Let’s take a recent example, in which I decided to cook up some steaks on the stovetop.

My selection was the Bife de Chorizo, which is the equivalent of a NY Strip steak. (Argentine cuts of beef can be quite a bit different than US cuts, but the bife de chorizo maps pretty exactly.)

Four thick steaks equals about four pounds of beef.

Total cost: $10 US dollars, or about $2.50 per 1 lb. steak.

Checking the New Seasons Market web site (where we shopped in Portland) shows that back home, the NY Strip steak would be about $15/lb. Can’t complain about that!

Please note that the above is a pre-cooking photo. While I like beef on the rare side, this would be a bit excessive…

When we first arrived and were not eating dinner on an Argentinian schedule (i.e., at midnight), we would often stop in to a cafe to eat our evening meal. Several times, we attempted the Caesar Salad.

This was folly though–thus far, it has not been the salad for which we hoped. Here, it often contains ham, or chicken, or chunks of cheddar cheese, or hunks of an unidentified white cheese, or hard boiled egg…all topped with masses of an artfully arranged heavy mayonnaise dressing.

Still craving a more traditional Caesar salad, we decided to make our own while entertaining guests for the first time last night.

Sounds easy, you don’t need a lot of ingredients, but getting romaine lettuce proved to be both expensive (in cab fare) and time consuming. First I checked at my verduleria (local produce seller)–the lettuce there was so limp, I couldn’t believe that they were trying to sell it. I ran to the Disco (local grocery). Same thing–the entire head would fall over in my hand if I tried to pick it up.

I hopped a cab and rode 20 minutes to an open air market in Belgrano. No luck, it was closed. So I started walking around Belgrano until I found a Carrefour, another supermarket, and bought what seemed like every head of lettuce in the place. (The check-out guy gave me the “crazy foreigner” look.) We stripped off a lot of slimy limp outer leaves and, hooray, discovered some yummy, actually crunchy, bright green romaine lettuce on the inside, just waiting to get out.

I’m happy to say that we were able to serve a decent Caesar salad to our first Argentinian dinner guests (not counting Ian, of course).

Our guests were Sara King, who is here in Argentina from Portland visiting the city for a few months, and Ian’s friends, Dani and Guada. (Guadalupe brought us home-baked alfajores–sort of a butter cookie with dulce de leche in the middle–yummy.)