Everyone who knows me knows I love to eat. Which is why I had to dedicate a post just to all of the amazing food we had while we traveled around South America. Unfortunately, this blog website will only let me post five pictures at a time for some reason, so I had to limit this to just a few of the meals we had during our travels.
It was pretty chilly down in Buenos Aires, which made it perfect weather for "submarinos." Basically you get a glass of really hot milk and a chocolate bar (sometimes in the shape of a tiny chocolate submarine), and mix them together until the chocolate gets nice and melty. It's best enjoyed along with an "alfajor" which is a soft shortbread cookie filled with dulce de leche and dipped in chocolate. Pretty tasty stuff.
The king in Argentinean cuisine is most definitely beef. Between the two of us Sarah and I ate roughly the equivalent of an entire cow. My favorite was the "ojo de bife," which is their version of a ribeye, pictured here. All the cows are grass-fed in Argentina, as opposed to grain-fed like in the States, which leads to a slightly tougher, but much tastier piece of beef. It goes well with a slice of "provoleta," which is just a thick slab of provolone cheese, seasoned well and slapped on the grill until it grows tough and chewy on the outside, and warm and gooey on the inside.
Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of our dinner at La Bourgogne, which was a really fancy French restaurant in the ritzy part of northern Buenos Aires. It is consistently ranked by several travel magazines as the best restaurant in South America, and I figure it would be tough to pass up a chance to eat at the best restaurant on an entire continent. They gave us everything from foie gras and goat cheese gazpacho as starters to flambeed beef tenderloin and rack of lamb as an entree.
Chile isn't exactly known for its cuisine, but they did have some great national dishes. One of the most famous dishes is "pastel de choclo," which is somewhat like a pot pie. They put big pieces of bone-in chicken into a cast iron bowl and fill it with gravy and vegetables. Then they top it with a generous helping of cornbread mix with honey and bake the whole thing for half an hour. The whole meal was pretty hearty. We also had plenty of seafood since we were so close to the coast, which Sarah enjoyed (me not so much).
We always tried to taste some of the national favorites everywhere we went, which in Rio de Janeiro means "feijoada," a thick bean soup/stew filled with whatever meat they happened to have on hand that day. Our feijoada had steak, chicken, dried beef, tongue, and a couple other things. It was amazing, except for maybe the tongue. You usually pour it out over a bed of rice and eat with tons of toppings, including vegetables, fried bananas, and peppers.
Finally, one of our last meals in South America was one of the restaurants I was most excited about, "Porcau," which translates to "piggy." It's a Brazilian rodizio-style steakhouse, which means the waiters continue to bring you food until you ask them to stop. Although this wasn't entirely true, since they will give you more steak even when you tell them you don't want it. This restaurant has raised gluttony to an art form, and they serve you every conceivable variation of beef, chicken, and pork. One of the strangest may have been a strip steak they somehow stuffed with cheese, but it was all amazing.
So there you have it. Our culinary tour de force of three nations in South America. Sarah and I had such an awesome time there, and I'm sorry my blog posts have to go back to normal old boring life from here on out. Oh well, I hope you all keep reading anyway.
