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This was a very fussy recipe that we embarked upon somewhat grudgingly yesterday.

The first step entailed the pleasant task of trying to locate a chuck roast equivalent in BA. The chuck comes from the shoulder of the bife. Specifically, we were looking for something from the first 5 ribs.

Tom said that discussing our meat requirements would surpass his butcher Spanish capabilities, so he enlisted my aid. Armed with a picture of meat cuts superimposed over a cow, I marched in and started quizzing the hapless young man behind the counter at the Avicar. (You could tell that he was wondering why he had the misfortune of drawing us as clients!)

After much debate, we decided that the aguja roast was the closest approximation, and we examined the hunk of meat he pulled out of the case and dickered over which 2 kg section we were going to cut off based on rib indentations.

Meat secured, we returned to the house to begin a day of cooking. Reducing a whole bottle of wine…crisping some pancetta to render grease…browning the hunk o’roast…slapping it all in a pot with some herbs…adding carrots…cooking pearl onions and mushrooms separately in butter and sugar, eventually browning and glazing them (wow)…removing the meat…reducing the cooking sauce…slightly thickening the jus with some gelatin. (I was skeptical, but it was perfect.)

Verdict? TO FREAKING DIE FOR. It was really amazing, probably the best pot roast we have ever made. (And, Tom’s new favorite recipe.)

Yesterday, when we went to pick up the girls from school, our favorite and most wonderfully helpful parent, Silvia, had a little gifty for our family — empanadas caseras. (Oh yes, that means homemade!)

These gems of beef wrapped in pastry dough were prepared by Silvia’s sister, and she was very insistent that we understand that these were crafted in the manner common in Tucumán, Argentina, from whence her family hails. (The implication being that their way of assembling an empanada was far superior to all others!)

In further questioning Silvia, it seems that the main distinction of a Tucumán-style empanada had to do with the beef, which she stressed was hand cut into cubes, not just ground, as you often find in Buenos Aires. You can see the delicious finished product straight out of the oven here, and may I add, they were probably the best Argentine Hot Pockets (our name in jest for empanadas) we have yet tasted.

First, it helps to break your back and maybe some ribs, thereby rendering you rather useless for 4 weeks. Even when you cut back on the food, the fat settles in, especially when your body had grown used to a lot of walking and regular workouts previous to your injury.

Then, fly to Portland and attend a 3-day, intense, closed-door conference where they feed you delicious victuals. All.Day.Long.

And lastly, gorge yourself on the bountiful and beautiful restaurant/farmer’s market scene in Portland, Oregon for a month, spare no expense. And while you’re at it, don’t really pick back up with the whole workout thing as your vertebrae fractures heal.

If you can’t manage to break your own columna vertebral, then you should know that being the spouse of the spinally challenged helps with weight gain as well, because your workouts and nutritional outlook go to hell as you assume the mantle of all parental and familial responsibilities.

Your stress level gets ramped up too (with worry for your mate, of course), and food being your drug of choice, you eat like a pig until someone makes it stop.

What does all of this mean? We are purging demon sugar from our diets once again, eating responsibly, and getting on the Crossfit/back rehab bandwagon. It’s going to be a long few months whipping these bods back into shape again.

While Mark’s Deli in Palermo Viejo is an institution, I implore you, if you’re in the neighborhood, skip those misbegotten sandwiches and head over to the dulce de leche/mozzarella bar instead!

(I know a lot of people love Mark’s Deli, so I waited until our little vacation out of the country to post this!)

La Salamandra is a company that produces high quality dairy products (hence the caramel/cheese theme for the restaurant) that can be found throughout stores in Argentina. Happily, they also own a little cafe and coffee shop.

This is my go-to place for a healthy delicious lunch that also features an exquisite dessert at the end! On the lunch side, they offer a variety of hot savory quiches and tarts as well as sandwiches. But, where I go crazy, is the salads. My favorite is the greens served with grilled vegetables; I order it time after time, I can’t stay from it, no matter how hard I try…I think it’s just general vegetable withdrawal that does it.

The salads feature very fresh, crispy lettuce that is actually tossed with a simple dressing (I know, don’t faint).

Mark’s Deli, by comparison, is the restaurant you want to love when you have a hankering for that good old American sandwich, but it really doesn’t deliver in terms of execution. The bread is poor, the deli meat pretty flavorless, and the usual lack of spice, condiments and sauces dooms these bread and meat creations to mundanity.

In the war of the mint lemonade bebidas — I’m afraid the winner is also La Salamandra.

Both places are overpriced and they sport a bit of a scene, but if you are looking for “over the top,” then Mark’s Deli is the place to people watch, no doubt. La Salamandra will turn your table if it’s busy, depositing your check before you ask for it, which is a bit of a shock in Argentina.

And lastly, if you need to pick up gifts for home, La Salamandra carries their dulce de leche with a convenient little cookbook in English to accompany the wickedly tasty sweet sauce.

Since arriving a week ago, I have had a mixed-berry crisp, a piece of marionberry and peach pie at my conference, I have picked blueberries at Mom and Dad’s place (the early bush is really productive this year and the berries are sweet sweet sweet), harvested raspberries from the bushes at the parental unit’s house as well, consumed blackberries obtained from a local farm (garnished with a little vanilla ice cream), and positively inhaled so many Bing and Rainier cherries that I get a little woozy just thinking about it.

Fresh, amazing berries and cherries are one of the reasons that there is no place I would rather be when it comes to eating than the Pacific Northwest in the summer.

If you find yourself, on a beautiful crisp winter Saturday with your children away at an overnight, and you want to stretch your legs and see how your broken vertebrae can handle a longer walk — I suggest a getaway in the park!

Specifically, the Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívari. This is a small, very cozy modern art museum that shows a rotating collection of 19th and 20th century Argentinian artists. It is utterly approachable and features a variety of exhibits, a quaint store, a sculpture garden, and they offer courses as well. (When we were there yesterday, there was a class of sculptors tapping away at pieces of wood.)

One of my favorite aspects of this museum is the little cafe that opens onto the sculpture garden and features both indoor and outdoor seating. The service has always been gracious, they have an amazing plato de frutas and they are supposed to have fabulous desserts. (I always seem to get the fruit when there, so I can’t vouch for the postres personally!)

This weekend, we decided to see if we could reproduce the American classic using ingredients obtained within walking distance of the house.

Eggs, flour, vanilla, white sugar, butter, and baking soda (I finally figured out where to find it in the store) were all pretty easy to find. The tricky parts were locating brown sugar and the chocolate chips (they can’t contain trace amounts of nuts due to Zelda’s allergies). It also turns out that the baking sheets we secured did not perform as expected.

First, the chocolate: as you can see in the picture below, Tom chopped up a chocolate bar to create his own little homemade chips. Très cute. Next, the brown sugar: I had two choices. The first was the lighter brown sugar, which was still dark compared to US sugars and also had a very strong gingerbread flavor. The second was very dark, really nearly black. It smelled and tasted more like the brown sugar we have back home. I ended up using a combination of both.

Lastly, the pans. Our “biscuit” baking sheet served reasonably well, but the cookies stuck a bit. (It didn’t help that we forgot to get a cooling rack, so we had to let them set on the pan longer than usual.) As an alternative option for baking, we thought we would try our pizza pan…which, unfortunately, turned out to be a disaster. As you can see in the picture below, the cookies congealed and the pan actually began to burn after about five minutes, emitting a foul smelling smoke in the oven. *sigh*

Anyhow, the verdict — not bad. A little gingersnappy tasting, but we could get used to that.

Our current strategy to implement Operation Chocochip is to play around a bit more with the brown sugar ratios, get a better metal spatula, and maybe find a less sticky pan. Is it a worthwhile goal to perfect chocolate chip cookies while living in Argentina using local ingredients? To be honest, I have no idea, but we’re going to keep trying anyway! (Eating the failures is half the fun!!)

After we all attended a birthday party for one of Zoe’s friends yesterday, it was, of course, difficult to get the children into bed. (Hardly a surprise after massive amounts of cake, cola, and carbs).

While trying to work on the computer, I hurled multiple entreaties via raised parental voice back toward their bedroom requesting that they begin brushing their teeth. Unfortunately, they successfully ignored me for quite some time, forcing me to get off my ass to investigate further. When I barged into their room, I found candy displayed on their beds, as shown above. (Zelda’s is on the top.)

Truly, I was at a loss as to why they would painstakingly arrange their candy in such a fashion. It turns out, they were going to engage in some sisterly candy trading, and felt it necessary to display their ill-gotten piñata goods in an organized and attractive manner. Hilarious. I had to reward their industriousness and predilection for proper merchandising — yes, I let them stay up a bit later to complete their dickering.

If you love salad, this is not the country for you.

When we gather together with Porteños for the express purpose of eating, we often make a very simple mock Caesar salad with romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese, and a dressing that consists of a garlic/salt paste, lemon zest and juice, Dijon mustard, and some olive oil. (In the US, we add croutons, but they’re hard to find here and I can’t be bothered to make them.)

The addition of salad to the meal is generally received with a low level of enthusiasm, at least initially, by the local set. Then, once my Argentine friends taste the green stuff, they invariably start raving…ooohs and aaahs abound. What is the recipe? What is in this salad? This salad is great!?!

Why does this simple concoction garner such attention? Because it actually has dressing on it, something that is nearly impossible to find here. Last night at an asado with friends, a wonderful older Argentinian-Italian man kept muttering to himself, mouth full of romaine, “cheese and lettuce, cheese and lettuce…I would never think to put those together and that they would taste so good! I can’t believe it…cheese and lettuce!”

What does pass for dressing in Argentina? I’m afraid it’s often a bottle of corn oil and a bottle of white or cider vinegar. If that’s not bad enough, the other dressing option is essentially a packet of mayonnaise. Good Lord, it can’t be a surprise that so few like to eat vegetables here!

Photo by Flickr user WordRidden used under a Creative Commons license.

I must be hungry, I’ve been posting about food a lot lately!

Last week, when Tom and I were looking for an easy meal to make out of a rotisserie chicken, we decided to attempt a chicken and dumplings type of dish using buttermilk biscuit dough.

What ensued was chaos.

We didn’t have buttermilk, so we had to obtain some lemons to sour our own milk. We had a hard time finding edible frozen peas. We had to substitute massive amounts of baking powder for baking soda, which affects the flavor. We only have a tiny food processor, so I had to cut the butter into the dough in batches. I made half of a batch in the food processor and combined it with the buttermilk only to find we were severely short on baking powder, so Tom and the girls had to dash out and buy more while the first half of the dough was soaking up the moist ingredients.

After scouring the store’s three different sections that contained baking ingredients, the Offermann shopping team finally found the polvo de hornear and raced home. We didn’t have cake flour. We didn’t have a rolling pin, so I used the rectangular olive oil bottle to roll out the biscuit dough (pictured above). As mentioned previously, we had no measuring implements — we just eyeballed everything! We made a huge mess.

Unfortunately, our “easy” meal proved to be anything but; however, we did end up with a lovely looking chicken and dumplings that actually tasted good to boot!

(And, we felt righteous after cooking because we made our own chicken stock out of the rotisserie carcass.)