I'm Not Lion.....

Clues:

1. JuliaAnne's brave little footprints as she ran 12 miles in the dark on Saturday morning.

2. Eye-shine as her headlamp veered into the scrub trees beside the perimeter road.


3. THIS sound immediately after the eye-shine:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS1-4NlhUlc


4. THESE footprints photographed the day after.


5. THESE good places for cover.

Of course, she got to her destination, turned around and ran back the same way she came. I'm just glad I said an extra prayer for her as I heard her leave the house so early in the morning.

Corny

It's corn season in Chile, which means that corn is everywhere. At the completo stand at the flea market a corn relish was one of the options to top a hot dog. On the side of the ceviche I ordered in the food court, crunchy salty maize garnished the plate. Trucks with carefully stacked ears rumble down the roads and freeways and markets bulge with the harvest.

This month I learned how to make two staples of Chilean cuisine: pastel de choclo and humitas. Both use ground up corn (choclo) with fresh albahaca (basil) to make a delicious mash. Pastel has a ground beef and chopped onion filling with chicken pieces inside or on top, and humitas are tamale-like, wrapped in the corn husks, tied up and boiled in a pot of water. Like empanadas, pastel has quarters of boiled egg and an unpitted olive tucked inside. All are a production!

Yoyo taught the wives group to make humitas. Her husband laughed because it was the first time she'd made them by herself. I told her it was like Saundra described medical school procedures: see one, do one, teach one. We were all thrilled with the result. The corn is ground up in a machine they call a "Uno Dos Tres"--a food processor. We also used a blender to speed up the process. The basil is ground up with the corn and some salt and oil. "If it doesn't taste right, add more oil."  Chilean corn is enormous and sturdy--halfway between sweet corn and field corn. Twenty choclo--twenty ears of corn--made 50 humitas.

Teresa invited us to her home to make pastel de choclo--insisting I participate in everything so I could do it by myself later. (She's a true teacher. She also worked a full day at her job of caring for two ninety-year olds before starting the pastel de choclo project with me.) For roughly three pounds of ground beef we (really she) chopped up 10 onions. Everyone in the house was bawling their eyes out. The onions were boiled in water with sugar, the ground beef was fried (by aliens--yes, I"m aware this is passive voice!) and the corn was cut off the cobs and  ground in the "One Two Three," and then cooked on the stove. While this was going on, she boiled chicken and prepared the hard-boiled eggs. It was beyond a three-ring circus, but beginning to smell divine.

When everything was ready, we layered it in her sturdy clay handmade pans: beef and onion mixture, eggs, olives, chicken pieces and finally the corn mixture with a little sugar sprinkled on top. Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous.

My next post will about the challenges of losing weight in Chile, and the ease of gaining it!

Chillan

 We took a weekend trip to see another part of Chile and to visit with Jory and Kathy (Jay's nephew and his wife) who were visiting her family. It took about two seconds and we were also family and included in the huge traveling two day party. Chile is filled with the warmest, most welcoming, generous people on the planet, I'm convinced, and being 'tio' and 'tia' just made it all the sweeter.

Wish you could see the fresh flowers and other aisles of goodness in either of the two markets we visited. This is the peak of fruit season, but it seems there is fresh produce all year, and everything seems to be on steroids. Lucy, Kathy's mom, made pastel de choclo--a sort of corn pie with onions and some ground beef as the bottom layer, with a ground fresh corn topping, olives and hard-boiled eggs in the filling and pieces of chicken on top. I've had several versions, but Lucy's was so "super rico," that I've vowed to figure out a way to make it when I get home. Jory and Kathy were not optimistic about my being successful. The corn is so different--enormous ears that aren't as fragile and tender as our corn but not exactly field corn, either. I'm going to try using polenta with creamed corn. You can't imagine how good it is. We enjoyed asado--barbecue--and brought back a bunch of Chillan's famous sausage, longaniza, to share.

Happily, we finally got up into the mountains and did a little walking around. We've enjoyed seeing the Andes in the distance, but this was the first time we got close enough to feel we were in the mountains. Chile is a country 2600 miles long with an average width of only 112 miles, but it's easier to get to the ocean than the peaks.

In the far south of Chile we saw the national tree, the araucaria, or monkey puzzle tree. It's sometimes called the chilean pine. The indigenous people--the Mapuche--depended on it for food, fuel, shelter, and medicine. After many years it produces the gigantic (up to two inches long) pine nuts --pinones--we discovered last year. You can see from the close-up that it's not a pine, though; and those spiny branches are as sharp as they look. These trees were surprisingly regular looking, but some of them take on weird shapes.

I'd been looking for an araucaria to take a picture of and found this row of them on our trip into the mountains across from a little stand where we bought some Chilean avellanas. (Avellanas are hazelnuts, but like the Chilean pinon isn't a pine nut, neither are Chilean avellanas hazelnuts.)

So many things to discover! So little time!