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!