Cooking in Chile!

A few people have asked what I buy at the grocery store and how we eat at home. Well! That has been interesting! Just about everything is different here. The ingredients, the packaging, the names, and what is available.

It has been an adventure finding what my kids will and won't eat. Some of the successes have been...

Hot dogs!

(Also known as salchichas here in Chile. In Mexico, salchichas are sausages but these have nothing to do with sausages except the shape!)

The biggest success has been the milk. When I went to the store and saw that they sell their milk in those boxes that have a shelf life of years, I thought, oh no! But I was wrong! It is a good thing this milk comes by the case because they can't get enough! I get white milk and chocolate milk by the liter! I buy it semi-descremada just because I love to say the word descremada - try it! It sounds way better than reduced fat!

Me encanta this little guy. It is a water boiler and it boils water fast! People here use them for hot tea and their cafe con leche which I describe below. It is pretty chilly here and coming home to hot tea is wonderful! The tea that I bought is called Ceylon tea. It is a little red and que delicioso!

I use matches all of the time because to turn on my oven I have to light it! Three weeks in and I still get such a kick out of it! I know I didn't drag in my own firewood or anything but it feels kind of Laura Ingallsish.

Once we found these I knew Elaine would eat something Chilean that wasn't chorrillana!!

Almost everything here comes in plastic bags. Here is my parmesan cheese! In a bag!

Here is my pasta sauce! In a bag! One more thing about pasta sauce is that it is only tomato sauce - nothing else is in it. So to make it more like the Prego my kids are used to I have started making my own pasta sauce using these bags of sauce and my kids love it! Goodbye Prego!!

Can you see that little white spout?

Here are my raspberry preserves, in a bag!

The only sad note for me here is coffee. Apparently, Nescafé has convinced most of Chile that Nescafé is coffee. They mix it with hot milk and they call it café con leche. Real coffee is rare and you have to ask for it by saying, café café. The few die hard coffee drinkers here have a cute joke about the name. "Nescafé no es café" which translates to "Nescafé is not coffee"!