Prehistoric Spinach Leaves and Learning to Love Chilean Food

Check out these leaves!

Over the many months I told people I was moving to Chile, one of the first comments I’d get was: “Oh, I bet the food is so good!” I thought the same thing, but it’s taken time for Ryan and I to get used to the dishes and delicacies down here (the grocery store has no fewer than 20 varieties of hot dogs). One of my favorites was a tuna appetizer that was served suspiciously in the shape of a can with some cheese cubes pressed in and a drizzling of salsa-esque sauce. I was starving, so I ate it. I regretted it.

Since then, Ryan and I have come up with our stock answer for those enthusiastic foodies we encounter back home: “Have you ever been to a Chilean food restaurant?” Peruvian, yes. Argentine, yes. Brazilian, yes. But Chilean? The answer has been the same one hundred percent of the time. To compensate, we have Pizza Hut on our speed dial and our favorite restaurants in town, Tiramisu and La Mar, are Italian and Peruvian respectively. But I’m determined to unearth the amazing flavors this country has to offer and recent exposure to Chicken Cazuela, a rich stove-top stew comprised of halved chicken breasts, ears of corn, sweet and white potato, white rice, spinach, and a divine broth, has me convinced my mission has already met success. 

But back to the spinach for a second. I may sound like a Bay Area food snob when I say how much I’m already missing (in addition to so many great friends) fresh baby spinach and hummus and Kashi cereals (key ingredients in a large number of my meals back home), but I’m determined to not only get my head around Chilean cuisine, but also benefit form being forced to make some of my old favorites (if only it were that easy to find canned garbanzo beans!). So I went to the store and bought some spinach (above) and I feel like I’ve traveled back in time, at least as far back as pre-pesticide-revolution and perhaps back much farther. To say these leaves look mature is an understatement. They are thick as construction paper with dense, stringy stalks, and I feel like they have stories to tell of their journey from soil to cutting board. But fortunately that thickness (thanks to an inspired recipe from my aunt-in-law) will make them optimal for Spinach Chips! All you have to do is:

  • wash and dry
  • drizzle with olive oil, salt, and peper
  • bake at 400 degrees (that’s 205 degrees Celsius for anyone here in Chile)
  • 13-15 minutes or until crispy!

Can’t wait to try these. All Californian and Chilean recipes welcome!

Saludos from Santiago!

So, I am finally here. One year and four days after my husband moved to Chile, I have finished graduate school, said my long goodbye to the friends and familiar places that made it impossible to leave San Francisco for seven years, enjoyed four full days of sun (an eternity for an SF summer), and arrived in the middle of winter, six months into my marriage. My husband and I can look at one another and know we no longer have to do the count down (five more days together, four, one…). Now, we have all the days.

I don’t have all the Spanish words. Anything but. I’m in nesting mode, being patient about venturing into the six-million-strong wolf pack five flights down. I like unpacking and moving from closet to closet the things my husband has had 12 months to grow accustomed to in a certain position — and now I’m here to move his hard hat there and the ironing board there and is that the same sour cream from when I visited in March? It doesn’t matter. These are the very things I’ve fantasized about: the simple motions of coupled life. Ordering pizza on a Sunday night, kissing goodbye at the start of the day, crawling into bed at night and knowing we don’t have to check another 24-hour block of togetherness off the calendar. An open expanse of time lies ahead of us, bordered by snow-capped Andes and punctuated with tall glass buildings.

June Reunion

Our first weekend here, we took a plane 8,000 feet over those dense mountains and spent the weekend in Mendoza, Argentina, where we were each exhausted enough, from our respective year of honest labor and sheer missing, to order room service at the hotel and watch Talladega Nights in subtitles. We ventured out the next day of course, but for the time being I was in a city I’d never been, in a borrowed bathrobe, splitting a hamburguesa with my husband, and feeling right at home.

Leaving Home for Home

The Pacific, Zapallar, Chile

When you’re in a long distance relationship, it becomes all about communication. You have to rely on words to share how your day went, your mood, and that funny thing that happened in line at the grocery store. There’s no touch to stand in place of affection or apology. It’s all about what you say and how solid your Skype connection happens to be that day.

Ryan and I have been going the distance since last June. We have Skype dialed in. We know the three-hour or fifteen-minute minute windows we have to reach the other person at home. We make sure to talk everyday. But sitting here in our kitchen in Santiago, knowing I’m catching a plane back to San Francisco in nine hours, and resuming the final semester that will keep 6,000 miles between us for the next five months, makes the longing just as strong as it was the first time I took him to the airport. It was last summer for me in SF/winter for him in Santiago.

We only have sixty-three days to wait this time before I’ll be back for spring break. Then another two-and-a-half months, then we’ll have made it. It will be June again, a year will have passed, and I’ll be making my own way in Chile. We’ll be together, the adventure well underway, and the 6,000 miles will be between us and our family and friends instead.

It’s summer here right now, mid-January. My husband is right before my eyes. Tomorrow I’ll wake up in winter, a California winter, but winter nonetheless. And my husband will be “back home,” where we’ve just re-arranged the furniture, added some sweet new houseplants, and watched a ridiculous Alien series every night after dinner for the past week. It’s all fun with him. I’d wait for a bus for days as long as we were waiting together. I know it will be fun “back home,” too. I have the friends I miss, a thesis to finish, and quality time to spend with my mom, who has been the extent of my immediate family until now.

If home really is where your heart is, I suppose I’m leaving home to go home. I wonder if it will always feel that way.

Boogie-ing in Punta de Lobos

The Point at Punta de Lobos, Chile

So, I may be a boogie boarder after all. Just as 2011 may be the year of taking on new adventures and new identities: I was fortunate enough to marry the most wonderful man, in the city where we met, surrounded by family and friends, on the eve of a trip to our new home in Chile. There may have been a blizzard on the East Coast that grounded some dear ones, but somehow cousins arrived at 3AM the morning of the wedding (after five previous flights canceled), somehow my best friend from college secured a flight on Delta (after two hours on hold thanks to a secret number no other Delta customers seemed to have), and most of all, I looked down that aisle at the man I love and finally understood what it means to have your breath taken right out of your chest. I would avoid the cliche if it weren’t so undeniably true.

We flew out the next day to Santiago, landed on New Year’s Eve morning, ran back to our apartment for a quick nap, and then drove out to the coast, a part of Chile I’ve been eager to see after leaving an apartment in San Francisco where I can hear the waves crash at Ocean Beach. We drove through pine trees that reminded us of Tahoe, horse-studded hillsides that reminded me of my hometown of Portola Valley, and turned onto the dirt roads of Punta de Lobos that didn’t have to summon any comparison to home. We were there. By the Pacific no less, but some 6,000 miles away. Within 24 hours, we traveled from winter’s rain to summer’s rays, from “single” to newlyweds, and from the familiarity of home to the excitement of another hemisphere’s landscapes.

I recently completed a surf project for a class assignment and also to understand my husband’s passion a bit better. I learned how to read the water, took a lesson after a few lackluster attempts on my own, and finally rode some waves! The rush was electric and the exhaustion rewarding, but Punta de Lobos is known as big wave country. As my husband tells me, it has some of the best lefts in the world. Those lefts also have some 20-foot faces. In other words, not the place for beginners to make a splash.

Instead, I took a tip from the local kiddies and rented a boogie board. In my effort to challenge myself to take on surfing, I might have lost track of how fun it is to splash around in the smaller waves. How stabilizing it is to still have your feet on the sand when you jump for the wave that looks right. How thrilling it is to catch one that takes you all the way into shore. How long that rush can last. How your body can still meet the challenge of an ever-moving ocean and how good that physical use can feel. How the concentration and the letting go can funnel your mind into the present moment. I simply loved it.

All the while, I knew my husband was out there, too, catching the larger waves just around the point, the same waves that eventually tempered down into the white water I was hopping on and hoping to ride to its completion, however momentary. We were still riding together, he and I, as we get to on the long, glassy wave curling ahead of us — one we’re equipped for with equal skill, as partners.

Part IX: Waves. Words.

OB, SF

Surfers constitute some six million travelers, whether they paddle out at their local breaks or trek their boards across the globe in search of waves and, by extension, new cultures, geographies, and ways of being. Yet, once out in the water, they may all share a similar moment of the collective journey: the feeling of being right at home.

In the creation of this project, the act of writing has been the connective tissue I attach to surfing, to traveling. Even as I put this adventure out into the world, in many ways I’m left with a similar sensation I felt at its outset: envy. Envy for the surfer who prioritizes the waves, who yields, who commits in order to  catch a medium forever on the move.

My goal is to give the same respect to my writing, which requires many of the same lessons I’ve learned preparing to take on the ocean: patience, discipline, and the willingness to stretch beyond self-imposed limits. Waves. Words. Both are always breaking. It’s just a question of whether or not we show up to ride.