My First Argentinian Asado

I have been in Argentina two weeks and already I want to start writing my blogs in Spanish, but I will hold off in fear of possibly alienating everyone who doesn´t read Spanish.  However, stay tuned for my poetry to now be written in both Spanish and English.  That will happen on my poetry blog which I will let you know about in another couple of posts or so.

The Argentinians are beautiful people and I am also starting to meet people from the neighboring countries of Paraguay and Bolivia.  The warm heartedness of the people are expressed in many different ways including men greeting men with a hello kiss, including the police officers on the street.  Imagine in Estados Unidos seeing a policeman in New York, Chicago, or LA kissing another man on the street to greet him hello.  Its just one of many parts of the culture here that is unfamiliar to myself. But I am starting to understand how it all works, and becoming more familiar with the customs in my new life.

Tonight was a very special experience.   I was invited into the home of some friends who had made a barbecue on their terrace and when I arrived they had meat all over the grill, including chorizo, blood sausage, and several different cuts of beef.  Clearly, I was not familiar with what I saw, but I knew that coming hungry tonight was a good idea.   In fact my eating habits have changed and are now more in line with the way people eat down here, especially the times that they eat.  So, I have been eating breakfast at a regular hour, and then a very tiny lunch, and then a dinner later than I would normally have eaten back home.

The traditional asado has very healthy meat.  In fact, I know the beef and the meat I ate was very good because after eating a lot of meat, I didn´t feel full, and I didn´t have that strange feeling after having eaten meat back home.  It must be the way the cows are fed here, grass fed, and it must be just the over all quality of the meat.  I felt really good after eating and did not have a meat hang over.  The past couple of years back home I have dramatically reduced my meat intake and was mostly a vegetarian except for a very rare occurence when I would have meat.

The way it works here in Argentina is that the meat courses role out in an specified order.  Basically, it goes from the lower grades of meat to the higher grades of meat as the evening progresses and the wine continues to be poured and the plates are made of wood.  The plates are these flat round pieces of wood, with a groove and the edge where the juice from the meat goes, and the plates are wood which allows for easy cutting.  So, everyone pretty much has their own cutting board with their own deal in which to savor your meal and use your utensils accordingly.

At this particular barbecue or asado in español, we started out with an appetizer of chorizo and empanadas.  Empanadas are served everywhere in Buenos Aires.  You find every Tom, Dick, and Sally sell empanadas.  Literally every single block in Buenos Aires you can find a restaurant and also a place to buy empanadas.  They come in all flavors and sizes, including carne, vegetables, queso, y papas with spinach.  I love the empanadas.  In the states you can think of them as kind of mini calzones, but the empanadas don´t really have cheese in them, unless you ask for the cheese, and the dough is much cakier than the pizza type dough of calzones at home.

So the empanadas and the chorizo was the first course.  This was the part to whet your appetite and get you ready for the meal.  The main meal included a nice cabbage salad with tomatoes.  The cabbage is a nice way to have a salad, but the cabbage wasn´t as heavy as a normal cabbage, and I almost thought it was lettuce until the host told me it was col, or cabbage in ingles.  There was a nice vinaigrette with a bit of oil as well mixed into the salad.  So here you have this rather small round wooden place with your meat and your salad and your meat sauce which was kind of hot sauce with some other cilantro mixed into the home made sauce for the meat.  As the cuts of beef rolled off the asado, each one a bit finer than the next, and the typical Argentinian rolls which are long round rolls, that I have actually never seen before.  In Argentina, they do not sell loaves of bread anywhere in the panaderias, but rather rolls of different sizes and shapes and pretty much the same consistency.

It was a lovely meal, and it lasted for many hours.  The course of the dinner went from about 7pm till midnight.  The conversation was mainly in Spanish the whole night with some English mixed in to appease the English speakers in the room which included myself and another woman also from Estados Unidos.  I was able to catch bits and pieces of the conversation as the evening wore on, and it will be nice in the future when I can actually understand what people were saying, but I am able to get by and get general glimpses of what is being said, and I enjoy the challenge and appreciate the light.

The final course of the meal was the dessert.  It was a traditional pastry that you find here in Buenos Aires, along with strawberries, and a new dish that I haven´t seen before.  You find it in many of the stores here, but I don´t even know the name of it yet, but will update you in a future post on the exact name of this delicious desert, its kind of like a pudding or jello all combined into a new consistency of something else served with a nice soft cheese that I have already bought once at the market that I am pretty much addicted too.  Its kind of like a cheese with more of a cream cheese texture but heavier than that.  So it is very tasty.

The evening included someone from Montevideo, Uruguay.  Montevideo is about three hours by boat from here, but if you try and drive its a long way because of the Rio Plata which goes many miles up into Argentina.  So, you have to cross the river by boat, and then get in a bus to keep moving along.  One of these days I will visit Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, and Bolivia, all neighboring countries of Argentina.

A nice night was had by all, and I was extremely happy to have the opportunity to participate in this new experience of the asado.  If you ever get a chance to come to Argentina, I know you will experience the beautiful Argentinian people and their way of entertaining with a beautiful creation of epicurean delight.  Stay tuned for more food adventures along with other experiences I continue to have in my new place of life and living.  I am very fortunate to continue to have these opportunities in my life and I am happy to share these experiences with you.