Friday, May 19, 2006

Fodder: Salmon, seafood and those Alfajores!

Talking food. Our diet for the past 2-3 weeks or so has been made up of a fair bit of fish. It started of in south southern Chile, where we went through maybe 4 great Salmon dishes and also a quality HUGE smoked salmon which gave us a couple of great dinners and a few tasty lunches.

Since working our way further north (including an epic period - the tale can wait - of about 4 days hitching through some purely stunning scenery of rivers, valleys, lakes, mountains and temperate rain forest) we started to try more seafood including a great sea bass.

Most of this has been very recently on the island of Chiloe where they have local dishes similar to soups, stews and paella full of mussels, clams, different fish, octopus, oysters and plenty of things we didn't recognise and also couldn't work out after asking. Pretty much all of it has been really quality. The only worry was the other day when my swordfish, which was amazingly thick, had an uncooked patch in the middle. There's only one thing worse than over cooked fish...uncooked fish. Although how does Sushi work?? Anyway, after I'd eaten a lot of it, it was re-cooked although I still left a tiny patch from the middle and so, technically, didn't polish off the plate which is very very unlike me.

Finally, a word on Alfajores. These are sweet things made in Argentina and consist of two layers sandwiched together with a filling of Dulce de Leche and usually finished off with coconut shavings. The 2 layers are usually like shortbread but vary from soft donut type stuff, to more cakey to simply hard bread layers.

The chileans sell them too but try as they may, they rarely make them as well. You also get some dodgy packaged ones but the only great ones are fresh from the bakery. This has been the basis of our snacking diet for ages now and they deserve a mention. Bananas (often not great quality) and chocolate milk have played a lesser role than expected.

By the way, Dulce de Leche is a thick, very sweet caramel type thing of marmite texture but somewhere between chocolate paste and treacle in flavour (that's round here anyway; the rest of South America have their own versions).

P.S. Had my first attempt at fishing with my newly purchased cool spinner thing in a river the other day and, although nothing caught, had a dramatic 'bite' when a fish followed the bate towards the surface but missed it when lunging and jumped out of the water!

Note: for only the 2nd time so far, I borrowed these pics on this entry.