spice free: adventures in cooking

i may have mentioned that they have a little problem here with the lack of spices.  it makes cooking rather difficult (not that i ever excelled in cooking) because everything winds up tasting rather similarly.  a few weeks ago i tried to make chili, which is something i can usually make well, and it wound up tasting like an italian style tomato sauce filled with lots of pinto beans.  not cool.

part of the problem is the lack of black beans.  they only have one kind of canned bean here.  in order to get black beans you have to buy them dry and then soak them for hours.  but i realized the larger problem was cumin.  you can add loads of chili powder to something (which i had to buy in a special "health food" store), but it does not necessitate chili.  so yesterday i went on a quest for cumin.  i'll be honest, i only looked in one place.

they have these stores called dieteticas which from the outside look like health food stores.  they have lots of rice cakes, teas,  spices, nuts and grains, but they also have lots of "specialty" items like chocolate chip cookies and gluten-free dulce de leche.  so it's not quite a health store.  it's more of a shit-you-can't-get-in-the-supermarket store.

so i went in and asked for cumin.  i tried to pronounce it real spanish sounding, because often they take non-spanish words and just pronounce them with a thick spanish accent.  like the time we tried to order shots of jameson and were told it was pronounced cham-ih-son.

moving on!

i received a small sachet of an unfamiliar spice, but i continued with the transaction in hopes that maybe it was cumin in some sort of raw form.  like maybe this is what cumin looks like before your grind it up.

not so.  what i actually received was a bag of rye seeds.  not helpful for chili making.  however, the bolshevik is either going to make rye bread with it or possibly try to distill his own icelandic rye-flavored death schnapps.

in the end, i had an okay chili with black beans, corn, tomatoes, crumbled veggie burger, carrots, celery, onion and garlic.  but it just needed some cumin.  so i got creative.  and let me tell you, when i get creative in the kitchen it usually is not good.  there is much eye-rolling from the bolshevik when i try to freestyle a recipe.

we have this little armenian store not too far from here that sells stuffed grape leaves and hummus and falafel mix.  and i thought to myself, "self .. there is cumin in falafel!"  i will admit it.  i added falafel mix into my chili.  i don't know if it gave the desired cumin effect, but it certainly didn't hurt.  but next time i go on a cumin quest, the first stop is the armenian store.  and hopefully i will figure out how to pronounce cumin by then.

chinatown and tango

this week on vamonos librarian we journeyed into chinatown or barrio chino ... this is a neighborhood consisting of about two blocks here in buenos aires, but it was interesting nonetheless.  we had some yummy chinese food for lunch, which was nice since it is not often that we get to eat a meal that has spices in it.  not that this food was spicy, but they did at least implement two or more spices in the preparation.

then we checked out some of the local groceries stores, which apparently are the only places you can buy things like red pepper flakes and chili powder and coriander.  crazy.  they also had sushi and dumplings and other more typical asian items, along with an extensive collection of fresh seafood.

then we found what i would consider to be "staples" but are not present in any local food stores.  things like soy sauce, coconut milk and of course ... the ever elusive peanut butter.

apparently, what expats miss most about their homes is the availability of peanut butter.  i personally could go years without peanut butter, but to each his own.  (although all this talk of peanut butter does kind of put me in the mood for some peanut noodles) ... anyway, at a recent expat gathering i suggested that someone could "make their own" peanut butter if they missed it so much.  this idea was met with much hemming and hawing.  certainly, with such a long list of ingredients (peanuts, oil, salt) no one could possibly make this in their own home.  you'd need to be a professional chef or something!

moving on.

barrio chino also has a large supply of buddha statues, paper lanterns, and other asian tchotchkes.  just in case you needed a dragon carved out of jade, that's where you get it.

anyway.  after chinatown, we went to one of the many free tango events that are going on this month as part of the tango festival.

you may not know this, but the bolshevik takes a firm stand against dancing.  he's like one of the old townsfolk from footloose who wants to keep dancing outlawed.  one time, i had to bribe him to take a tango lesson by promising to attend a world cup qualifying futbol match.  but luckily he doesn't mind spending an hour or so watching some dancing, so i guess he's not all bad.

anyway, straight from buenos aires for your viewing pleasure ...