Currying Flavor

So the Chilean diet has some quirks. Or maybe it has absolutely no quirks at all. The food here is definitely not bad. But it's certainly different and not in a particularly exciting way. I like the two national street foods: giant, calzone-like empanadas and completos, which are hot dogs covered in avocado, tomato and mayonnaise. But generally the intensity of flavor around here is pretty low. Culinarily, the most exciting thing is being able to buy a kilogram of strawberries and two perfect avocados for about two dollars. Many can attest to my abiding love for strawberry-avocado salads, but like anything, one gets sick of them after a while. Especially when one is consuming strawberries by the kilo to avoid spoilage.

So today I decided to branch out a bit and make a curry. I wouldn't say that curry is a staple of my repertoire, but I feel comfortable making it. The nice thing about curry is you can make it with anything as long as you can find curry powder (or paste, but they don't even have milk in the refrigerated section of the grocery store here). When I began my adventure I wasn't sure I'd be able to find the powder. But sure enough, it was on the shelf in the international section of the grocery store, tucked behind some soy sauce. I also bought the brownest looking rice (it was not actually brown rice), some chicken legs (easy) and a can of what I thought was coconut milk. It was actually coconut cream, unfortunately. Which turned out to be really delicious and I ate some spread on a piece of bread as dessert.

Veggies were of course no problem. Cauliflower, strangely awesome potatoes, carrots, peppers... my roommate even had a ginger root stashed in the freezer she let me use (thanks, Nike!). So the curry was coming along nicely. My other roommate demonstrated the completely foreign can opener (thanks, Rodrigo!- It actually seems to just be a blade you use to cut open cans). I sort of just added gobs of coconut cream and lots of water where I would normally use coconut milk. And honestly it wasn't bad. The curry powder had a nice kick. It was definitely better than the curry powder I bought from the bodega on fourth avenue in Park Slope. All in all, I think I'll be able to figure out how to approximate all the varieties of foods I have been missing. Maybe next I'll try chili. Because puns make things more delicious.