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Jan 1

Brett’s salsa (¡Feliz Año Nuevo!)

Happy new year from Peru! We still have another few days before I’ll start working on my Peru food post, but in the meantime here’s a recipe post from way back in October, before we left. It’s one of our absolute stand-bys, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that looking at these photos right now is eliciting some pretty severe cravings – mainly for Mexican food, but also for home.

This is actually the first post I’ve had that I didn’t write myself. Perhaps some day I’ll be getting offers for guest posts from Mark Bittman and Molly Stevens and Chad Robertson and all my other favorites, but I’ll be happy to say that my first ever guest post was written by one of the best chefs I know – who also happens to be my husband. We’ve actually been meaning to post this for a long time, since it’s one of the things we almost always have around the house, especially in the summer. I know it’s not the most seasonally appropriate recipe (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least), but you can keep this one in your back pocket for when tomatoes and cilantro and carrots are at their best. We dedicate this post to Hayden, in her infinite hunger for salsa. 

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Dec 19

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Chile: The Food

After Argentina, we spent five days in Chile before flying up to Peru. To get there we took an 8-hour bus over the Andes, slowly climbing up the range and plummeting back down the western side. The ride was full of breath-taking scenery and included a more literally breath-taking trip down La Caracol, perhaps the most frightening-looking strip of highway I’ve ever seen:

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That’s no guard rails, no shoulders, sheer-sided highway, as seen from the second story of a bus. Whew.

In Chile, we spent three nights in Valparaíso, a beautiful but somewhat rough-edged seaside town and UNESCO World Heritage Site. The town itself is famous for its cultural atmosphere – music, art, and poetry – as well as for its major port and its beautiful beaches. After Valpo we spent two nights in Santiago, Chile’s capital and main metropolitan center. Santiago was far more bohemian than we expected, especially because of the neighborhood we stayed in, and overall we were pleasantly surprised with how much we liked it despite it being such a large, bustling city.

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Dec 13

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Argentina: The Food

We spent just over two weeks in Argentina before crossing the Andes into Chile. It’s been a fantastic trip so far, full of all of the sorts of things you expect to experience when you’re traveling – excitement, adventure, confusion, exhaustion, making new friends, stress, more excitement, a little more stress, getting over stress, and relaxation every now and again. And plenty of eating and drinking.

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Nov 24

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Whole wheat trail mix cookies for hitting the road (or the skies)

Food is always a big part of our travel plans. Both in the way of food tourism – whenever we talk about travel or places we want to go, one of the first questions is what will we eat there? – and in that food is always a big part of planning the logistics for our trips. I really can’t go more than a couple of hours without eating something, which makes traveling a little difficult sometimes unless we do some advance planning. I’m definitely a little hypoglycemic, and that leads to migraines, and everything just goes downhill from there. One minute I’ll be fine, and five minutes later it can feel like if I don’t find food soon I might have some sort of breakdown (this sounds dramatic, but … well … you can ask Brett).

But I’m a pretty good planner, and if you’ve spent much time with me you know that it’s rare for me to be without food on my person in some form or another. I’m the one you can count on to have a granola bar in my purse, or a baggie full of cookies, or a bit of fruit salad in a tupperware container (I love these, since they’re recycled plastic and it’s virtually impossible for them to leak or come undone in my bag). I can’t remember the last time I got on a plane without at least one meal packed into my carryon.

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Nov 21

African chicken peanut soup

So. Monday. We’re going abroad for four months. No big deal.

Leaving at the tail end of Thanksgiving weekend has its pros – like: time with friends and family before we leave, and a good All-American sendoff – and its cons – like: my god, we better not have forgotten to purchase ANYTHING for this trip, because going out into the world on the weekend after Thanksgiving to buy travel-size bottles of shampoo might actually be what hell is like.

It’s a weird feeling, knowing that we’re going to be away for that long. I suppose we did about four months on our Canada trip, but we still had phones and our car, and we didn’t need to carry everything on our backs (proof), and we were still cooking quite a bit (proof). I’ve never really traveled abroad before, other than one- or two-week vacations, and I’m not really sure what to expect.

But if I keep talking about all of this, we’d snowball pretty quickly into a big dose of Bowen Neuroses, and no one needs that now. We all have enough things to worry about.

But here’s something to not worry about – what you’re going to eat this week.

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