Foto Friday # 40

I do, I do, I really bloody do.
I'm having an Argentina moment here, so just ignore me.

Foto Friday # 39

Grilled offal from Estilo Campo in Buenos Aires. Heaven, pure heaven.

La Cupertina – Empanadas Ye Olde Way

If you take two old ladies, a few traditional ways, some old recipes, a shop and decorate it as if it’s your grandma’s kitchen, a lot of care and attention to detail. Mix all these ingredients together and you get Cupertina. A great place that sells empanadas, tamales, stews and other foods from the North of Argentina.

I’ve eaten their literally every time I have visited Buenos Aires. No idea how we originally found it, as it’s on a street in Palermo with nothing really around or close to it.

I’m pretty sure the two old ladies who run it, really do not need to. But they do it for the love of it. The love of doing simple things perfectly and sharing their love of Northern Argentinean food to the local Porteños.

They are quite a funny couple. As they don’t actually seem to talk to each other. It looks to me as if they keep out of each other’s way. Maybe years of working with each other has driven them mad. They each have their own jobs to do and that’s it. It doesn’t create a weird atmosphere, but it is kinda funny to watch.

The star of the show here are the empanadas. They only do a few. Knife cut beef empanadas, cheese and onion and humita. Which is a sweetened maize empanada. It’s an acquired taste. Not my favourite, but hey I just stick to the meat ones.

The knife cut empanadas have knife cut chunks of juicy meat in slightly spicy gravy. They are the bees knees. I can honestly say they are the best empanadas I have ever tasted. But more on that on a later blog.

They also do a stew of beans and chorizo sausage called Locro. The Humitas (tamales) are also really good. Maize based. But still pretty darn good.

Northern Argentina used to belong to Bolivia, but then again so much of Northern Chile, Southern Peru used to belong to Bolivia also. It once had a coastline, till Chile stole it. But that’s enough of politics for one day.

So most of the peoples of Tucuman are of Bolivian decent. Their customs, their foods are all heavily influenced by the high Andean plateau they came from. The foods especially the stews are heavy on the stomach for a Buenos Aires Summers day, but it fits perfectly on a Winters afternoon anywhere.

Cupertina is well worth searching out, and I’m sure when we return to B.A. in a few weeks we will pay another visit for some more of their fabulous empanadas.

Cheese Laden Pizzas

Argentineans are very proud of their pizzas. As so much as to say, that if you even mentioned that the pizzas in Italy are better than theirs, then you are facing a heavy duty argument. Which in simple terms means that they will scream and shout at you for hours on end. Hands waving around, aggressive overtones, faces getting all red. It’s the Italian blood in them. You kinda get the picture.

The pizzas here are pretty good I have to say. But wether they are as good as in the “Home Country” is another matter.

Since we have been here, we have had quite a few of them to sample. I can only eat so much meat in one day. The one thing that Argentineans love is mozzarella, or muzzarella as they call it here. As it’s not the freshly made balls of buffalo cheese that melts like heaven and looks like puddles of snow after it comes out of the oven. As in Colombia they use a processed version, which comes in large blocks. The Argentine version is better than the soulless, tasteless one from Colombia, but it’s still not fresh as in Italy.

No matter what pizza we have ordered they all come with a heavy covering of this processed cheese. Actually every pizza on every menu has muzzarella as one of the main ingredients. They love it.

On a cool San Martin de Los Andes night, it works a treat. Kinda fills you up in a comforting way. On a hot sultry Buenos Aires night in a hot restaurant with a broken air conditioner. It’s hell. The heavy cheese sits on your stomach like a brick. It’s not a good thing. It’s the only time a pizza has made me feel a little ill. Not a good thing.

My favourite tipple with pizza is beer. I can see that some wine would go well with pizza, but beer or Belgium to be precise is my preferred type. But a couple of litres of Quilmes goes down a treat.

I am a finger eating pizza person. I am a big anti knife and fork pizza eating person. I think it is wrong. For me eating pizza with a knife and fork is a crime against food. It’s not right.

There is a chain of pizza restaurants in England that tries and sells itself as a gourmet pizza place. Pizza for the posh folk. Every time I walk past I cringe as I see people cutting up their pizzas and eating small bits. Sometimes I want to scream.

Thankfully in Argentina everyone is in on my side and eats their cheese laden pizzas with their hands. Phew.

Buenos Aires Or Bust....

For a meat eater like myself, going to Argentina is like coming home. The sheer staggering variety and amount of meat on offer in every restaurant is incredible. It really is paradise., in other words it’s a veggies hell.

After 7 months of eating not too good and over cooked thin pieces of beef, our friend and kind sharer of his apartment to us. Gonzi. He took us to La Gran Parrilla del Plata. A small kinda cool parilla joint in the up and coming and less rough than it was San Telmo. You always know you are in for a good night as there is always a queue to the good places.

Gonzi being Gonzi is a less than patient person, but after countless little chats to the guys inside he managed to at least get us a glass of wine as a consolation for the wait. He did this before with us at another parilla in Palermo, but there we all got wine and small pieces of chorizo to munch on. Well Palermo is slightly more posh than San Telmo.

Finally we were shown to our seats, after 30 minutes of watching a guy trying to eat a steak the size of a small cow on his plate. He did a good job of getting our stomachs to rumbling point. As Gonzi is a regular here, and it had been an age since we last had a parilla or anything resembling well cooked meat. We decided to let him order for the three of us. But mainly because we were all quite drunk. The bottle back at his house went down too quickly on empty stomachs.

He was like a little kid in a sweet shop. Unchecked it would have been a stomach busting evening. Well it was anyhows, but much worse. It turned out he hadn’t been out for a while, work, work, work was the excuse. So we were a good excuse.

He ordered a whole grilled provolone cheese as a starter. The most famous of Argentina’s Italian cheeses. Crusty on the outside and soft and yummy inside, with that woody smell to it. Nothing beats cheese cooked over wood.

For the main course, we had ojo de bife, vacio and costillar. Or in English, a huge rib eye steak, done to medium rare perfection, a fatty yummy flank steak and a juicy rib of beef, so rare it was about to walk off before we all attacked it. With this came the mixed salad, onion, tomato and lettuce with a bottle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar to lavish over it. The final thing he ordered was a bowl of rosemary potatoes. Heaven.

He did at one point ask the waiter to cancel the costillar but it was too late. We were in for a long session. The bottle of heavy Malbec, something I do not like to drink on it’s own but with half a cow to contend with. It went down like a dream.

Several hours later, all plates wiped clean, wine emptied, coffees sipped and bill paid, we staggered out of the restaurant into the warm Argentinian night. Not sure if it was the wine that made us stagger or the fact that we had just put on at least several kilo’s. Anyhows we were in heaven. Meat heaven. This was going to be a very good six weeks.

Buenos Aires ...

We have finally arrived in Buenos Aires, and it's hot .....

I still have a few blogs to write about Medellin, and one or two on Bogota.

Not sure when they will be posted, maybe as and when they are written or when we are back in Colombia ...

Anyhows from a hot Buenos Aires ..... Adieu ....