Sunday night will be the social event of the season: we're having a dinner party for some of the young lovelies we've met here, along with our friend, Jay, visiting from San Francisco.
Porteños, for all their sophistication and while sharing the continent with some of the spiciest, most flavorful food traditions, have the palates of newborn babes. Emilio, an Argentine who will be dining with us on Sunday, has been known to cry if there's too much black pepper on his food.
So, of course, I'm cooking Mexican!! But good luck trying to find authentic ingredients here. Sheesh!
I looked everywhere to piece together the ingredients. Here and there, you can get Ortega's canned stuff-- if you can stand the fact that they use too much salt and not enough spice. (>.<)
But I cook Mexi-fresh, and after scouring every little tienda in the downtown in a fruitless search to find chipotle powder and fresh jalapeños, I realized trying to find anything with even a mini-kick was hopeless.
My only hope was to head to BsAs's tee-neh, tah-neh Chinatown. All two blocks of it-- whoo-hoo!
If you were going to solve for fresh Jalapeños as a logic problem, the solution would look like this:
Buenos Aires--> Chinatown --> Japanese Supermarket= Best Mexican Produce
So go figure.
~*~
Fun to walk through the aisles working at a double disadvantage-- not know what stuff was in Spanish and Chinese.
And then when you could read the English, it was often terrifying:
How about a gallon of "Champion Vegetable Barbecue Sauce"-- packaged in a paint can!
(I recognize it's sophomoric to snark at weird Chinenglish, but I just can't help myself...)
No comments:
Post a Comment