Comida

The food in Argentina deserves a post all of it's own. I should obviously start with the beef, and in it's honour, I have even changed the title picture to the holy image of the cow. Even though I dare not say it aloud here, the Argentines aren't infallible ... lazy restaurants can still mess up a steak, but when they get it right it's absolutely amazing. Every part of the animal is usually represented, and if you ask for the menu in the best parrillas, they just point you in the direction of the fire pit and you pick the cut of meat sizzling on the grill. Meat heaven.

Describing our Christmas Eve meal makes me feel like the tourist photographing his dinner in restaurants but it was so darned good, I'll do it anyway:

Argentines celebrate Christmas on the 24th rather than the 25th and we were facing a dull night in at our hostel until a couple of Argentine boys next door asked if we'd like to share an Asado (BBQ) with them. If I bought the wood (using charcoal is an insult apparently), they would do the cooking. As luck would have it, they turned out to be a couple of 21 year-olds from 'chef school' in Buenos Aires! We brought a couple of steaks and some sausage to the party (how English) and they brought a slab of beef short ribs about a meter long, chitterlings (2m of intestines), and more steak. We shared the food with a couple of Spanish girls also from the hostel and saw in Christmas morning drunk on about 2kg of meat each and some booze called Fernet (really no point describing it because I'm not recommending it to anyone).


A slight disappointment here is that nearly everywhere (outside the fancy restaurants) works to the 'WYSIWYG' system ('what you see is what you get') and they very rarely deliver beyond the description on the menu. ie: if you order a steak and a salad from the menu, you will often receive a piece of meat with some leaves; there will be no garnish, no sauce, and no other dimension to the salad. This applies to everything. A popular meal here is 'milanese'; flattened meat (we've never dared ask which) fried in breadcrumbs, a bit like an escalope. We ordered 2 milanese in a resto bar and received ... 2 pieces of flattened, crumbed and fried meat. The waiter obviously thought that this was a well-rounded meal. Or he hated us.

I don't like to abuse the hospitality of the hosts by complaining so in the interest of fairness, I should mention that nearly all of our 'saddest' meals (outside of Bolivia) have been our fault. Our diet on the road consists mainly of rice or pasta cooked with pieces of sun-sweaty salami fried in oxo cubes. If we're lucky there'll be an onion in there ... or an egg. No matter how bad the meal, or how bored we are of it, we are always so hungry we'll eat anything. The less said about these meals the better.

To finish on a high note ... a brief mention for the two best culinary discoveries since pop tarts arrived on the scene when I was 10: wine ice cream, and pomelo (grapefruit) flavoured everything. Argentina is missing a trick in only shouting it's mouth off about steak and wine, they should be exporting their Torrontes and Malbec flavoured sorbets to every corner of the world. Also, Argentines are famous for slathering everything in Dulche de leche (caramel flavoured condensed milk), yet they keep quiet about their pomelo flavoured drinks and ice creams. Selfish, I say.