Food in Argentina

Lou: In contrast to the personal sized pizzas of Chile (with strange toppings—such as green beans & avocado!), pizza here seems to be more like a full sized pizza (with sauce and cheese and “normal” toppings). Though it escapes me how anyone would think to sprinkle hard-boiled eggs for a topping! In fact there doesn’t seem to be much thought to cholesterol in the restaurants. Cheese, grease & eggs abound! But in the health food stores (dieticas) there are special mixes to add to soup or milk to help you get your omega 3’s. I’m looking forward to frequenting these stores for all of the grains and legumes they have in bulk.

Back to the restaurants, Dan can fill you in on all the variations of beef there are. We find that just about all of the menus look the same to us. I’ve been enjoying the freshly made spinach ravioli. For some change, it was fun to go to a “taco bar”. Not exactly what we remember of Mexican food, but fun to see yet another country’s take on regional fare. And we thought Minnesota style salsa had no heat! To our disappointment there don’t seem to be any Chinese restaurants in town.

Ice cream places abound. Each with at least 20 flavors! There are many fruit flavors, and probably at least 5 different chocolate flavors (like Swiss or almonds or Rocher)—Not mixes or swirls, just plain flavors! They scoop it up tall like a gnome hat & then ask if you would like chocolate or strawberry sauce on top. Last night it was still warm out & we stopped for a cone on our way home. It was fun to see a line going out the door at an ice cream shop at one in the morning! We got a cone of lemon mousse and raspberry cream. I guess it is a bit barbaric to eat out of the cone because they give you a little plastic sampler spoon to use.

I haven’t had as many fruits here as in Chile, but I think they will be just as delicious here. The peaches that we did buy were so good! It really does make a difference to get fruit that wasn’t picked green! Nothing strange, pretty much the same tree fruits that you could get in the states. I haven’t seen any cactus tunas here, but in Chile they were very common (& very seedy!).