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!