Wrapping Up Temuco

I think we are winding down our trip to Temuco. One last major doctor visit to ensure all the parts are in working order. I took the time to try out some of the Cachayuyo (see previous post for explaination and recipe),


and yesterday bought some of those little eggs that look like Easter candy (700 pesos for 12). Turns out they taste just like regular eggs but are a pain in the ass to peel...


I also found this bag of yeast in the healthfood section. It said Levadura de Cerveza, so I bought it just cause I thought it migh be Brewer's yeast and I want to make beer!


Then, at Al Portal, the big mall in Temuco, there was an art exhibit, and I fell in love with this carving, made from one piece of wood. Awesome. And only $5,000 US!!!! Where should I put it in my house?



The carving below was Greg's favorite:


I boxed up some of my staple stuff, spices, unrefined sugar and the like, and will send a box to myself in Futa from the Correos. After I find out how much one box will cost, I may send the others and save myself the agony of dragging it back with luggage.

We met a couple of Chile forum members a few days ago (or a week, time flies) who were very nice. It was a seven hour gab-fest with everyone talking over everyone else as if we'd all been stranded on an island with no one to talk to for the past two years! A mania English-fest!

Getting my ass moving to wrap things up is always difficult. Always. Even if we are out at our house and need to go into town, I have to drag myself. I love to "mushroom" myself wherever I am. However, the homesickness for our little cabin in the wilderness is far greater than my awful procrastination, and while the grueling journey home doesn't help, I'm more than ready!

Let's All Try some Cochayuyo!!!!

Yes, it's ugly. Yes, it's almost obscene to look at or carry home to your kitchen. But...I decided after a year and a half in Chile to try this hideous looking spectacle of a sea vegetable called cochayuyo. Here is a picture:



Keeping it real, I asked at the market for an explanation of what it was, and how it was prepared. The clerk spoke, as usual, a dialect of Spanish which I am not familiar with and I was instantly lost and almost abandoned my quest for a culinary adventure. Then I remembered my own advice: When shopping in a foreign country for food stuffs, always look for the tiniest, oldest woman, who has taken 15 minutes just to choose a tomato, and ask her. A lovely elderly woman, about 4 foot 7 inches had been working the lettuce table for almost that much time, so I grabbed the extraterrestrial food item and went to ask her about it. She said this...

You soak it overnight in a pan of water with salt. The next day you rinse it well, and cut it into pieces and serve it with oil and lemon and cilantro. I got the general idea, then came home and went to my trusty Chile forum for more takes on preparing this prehistoric beast. Generally the responses were the same, except that it turns out you should cut it into at least three inch pieces first, then soak.....

I tried it today, and it was, well....let's just say the lime, olive oil and chopped parsley I used to toss it with were the only thing I enjoyed about it. It tasted like cold, boiled pork rinds. To be fare, I love pork rinds, but crisply fried, and salted sufficiently. Not giving up, I tried a few more pieces and decided YES, it does taste slightly smoky and like pork rinds. The next logical step was to make a pot of my favorite bean soup using some lovely porotos (frijoles-beans) I bought at the market. I cheated a little by adding some liquid smoke flavor and then dumped in the Cochayuyo. I have to tell you that it is absolutely excellent! You'd think I cooked the beans with some nice, fatty ham hocks, or pork rinds. It's wonderful!

Tomorrow, I will drain and mash the leftovers and add a little garlic for a bean dip and see how that sits.

note: the Cochayuyo is a seaweed, long and tubular, brown, and frankly hideous looking. It is harvested off the coast of Chile and apparently eaten as a salad, as my online chefs shared with me. When dry and newly purchased, it has a slight mushroom odor. As it is soaked and cooked, it loses the brown coloring and the cellulose cells inside swell and fill with liquid. Might be better to use some flavoring in that process...lime, lemon, vinegar...to give it a little more distinct taste.

Thinking about Eating Differently

From the first week in Futaleufu, Greg and I began to eat differently. This was not a conscious effort, but simply because there aren't supermarkets, or fast food restaurants in Futa. Aside from the invading stands of snack foods such as strange corn-based cheetos-like food bites and hideously colored candies in bags, Futa offers basic ingredients, and what they don't have, you don't need. Little home storefronts are also devoid of good fresh fruits and vegatables, noteably because most folks grow their own in front, back or side-yard gardens. There is one nice produce store and the wise rule is "get-it-while-they-got-it".

So...by beginning to cook and eat unprocessed foods (even the meats are mostly local, grass-grazed, and non-hormone, antibiotic-free fare) we unwittingly began eating healthier. But we were still in that old-mode of feeling the need to have one meat meal a day and butter, real cream, eggs, home-made bread with local jam, or honey were also in our diet. Then Greg's blood-tests and his leg issue slapped me right in the old cookbook and I realized that we had to ramp it up a notch, or ten, and truly think differently about cooking. No-fat milk, unrefined sugar, or just honey instead. No butter, no oil other than olive oil (until I find other healthy substitutes), for a while no eggs, cheese, whipping cream. No bacon, ribs, or fried chicken. Go light - real light - on the salt, have lots of beans, greens and also for a while, no meats except deep-sea fish. Lots of lemon and lime and garlic and ginger and avocados. That said, here are two nice meals/and or snacks with the only processed food being whole wheat tortillas.

Shopping list:
One bag or porotos (frijoles, beans) preferrably white or brown -garbanzo beans are excellent too.
A very large bunch of spinach
fresh garlic bulbs...at least three
five nice tomatoes
green onion - at least 6 or 7
limes - 6 or 7
whole wheat tortillas
olive oil
5 avocados
three large Portabello mushrooms
honey
pint of low-fat yogurt
coursely prepared mustard, regular, or dijon (though dijon has tons of salt)
Crushed dried peppers, or finely diced jalpeonos - depending on your palate.

Initially, buy a bag or porotos - fresh is better, but the dried white, or brown beans and garbanzo are good too. Put them in a pot and cook them with just a dash of salt until very soft. Take a bean from the pot, cool it, and if you can mash it with your tongue on the roof of your mouth, they are done.

First snack or meal-Baked whole wheat tortilla chips with bean dip, guacamole, salsa and yogurt. Any non-salt spice you enjoy - you can add to taste.

Drain (save a little liquid to thin the bean dip) and mash the cooked, soft soft beans, add in minced garlic and keep mashing as you add drizzles of olive oil and the juice of one lime and a litle cooking liquid from the beans until it is a soft creamy consistency.

Cut the tortillas into quarters and bake/toast in the oven until crisp.

Mash up two or three avocados, add juice of one lime, minced garlic, and a pinch of crushed dried peppers or minced jalapeonos.

Finely dice tomatos saving the juice. Add a little lime juice and a pinch of crushed peppers. This would be complimented by cilantro, but the King hates cilantro. No cilantro enters the kingdom.

Cut up one more lime into wedges. Snip off the ends of the green onions, chop the hollow green stalks. Assemble small bowls of the bean dip (best if warm) , guacamole, salsa, yogurt, green onion and chips with lime wedges on the King's Snack Tray and serve.

Portabello-Spinach Salad -

This is a great simple salad which is adapted from a steak salad recipe I saw on TV. Instead of a nice rare thinly sliced steak heaped on the salad, I used portabello mushrooms. It's simple...

Sautee the mushrooms in a small amount of olive oil and let cool slightly. Wash the spinach and snip off the stems. Cut more green onions, slice tomatos, mince a couple cloves of garlic, another avocado scooped out and sliced. For the dressing, reserve the liquid from the mushrooms (in fact, just use the pan you cooked them in. Stir in a tablespoon of honey, a tablespoon of mustard, minced garlic, and a big squeeze of lime. The mushroom juice gives the dressing a meaty flavor. Whisk it while drizzling in olive oil. Slice the mushrooms into long, thick slices. Through the spinach in the center of a serving plate, arrange the salad ingredients around the spinich. Lay the mushroom slices on top of the spinach and drizzle the dressing over top. You can add any kind of fresh greens...I love buying one head of fancy red lettuce to use to decorate the plate, and eat. You can make this an oriental salad by adding freshly grated ginger to the dressing and a dash of soy sauce to cook the mushrooms.

No matter how much bean dip I make, there is never any left. I also sweat finely chopped spinach and add it to tomato sauce for pasta.

So far these past two weeks we have had NO meat. We had salmon steaks once. No eggs, no cheese, no fat, no butter, almost no salt, no processed foods except the tortillas ...lowfat yogurt substituted for my beloved sour cream. I found whole-wheat linguini, fat-free powdered milk (we'll switch to regular milk later in el campo where there are no antibiotics or hormones in the milk) and we haven't felt cheated or starved. I have not ripped open a package of any processed foods except the tortillas and yogurt.

Greg has my home-made granola with low-fat yogurt and bananas for breakfast. I toast raw rolled oats, wheat, walnuts, sunflower seeds and some other odd nuts which I don't know the names of in English, raisins, fresh grated coconut, puffed barley all drizzled with honey and dusted with fresh grated cinnamin and nutmeg. I toast it, mix in honey, then bake it low for several hours then let it cool and break it up into containers.

I hope my trusty home-boys (mother and father) will be sending me yogurt, kefir and butternilk starter soon. That way I can just make my own and not have to buy it. And, I hope to have my little window pots of spinach and lettuce go throughout the winter, and nurse a cherry tomato plant too. I will continue to dry and toast garlic along the way...it may diminish a bit of the medicinal properties, but the taste is unreal. Armed with my big box of other spices, and a big ginger root which I will put in dirt and grow, I'm ready to get back to the Twilight Zone which is my little homestead outside of Futa and snuggle up for the winter with good food, good company, and if I'm lucky, a little electric to fire up some music while we watch the snow fall.

We have the pig dilema to deal with. What to do with the fattened hog? I may butcher and trade the bacon, ribs and lard for other things. I also thought of selling it live, or keeping it and breeding it to sell the piglets. Hhhmmm. Things to think about. but I do know we won't be having bacon. Maybe just lean chops. It would be more convenient for me to not deal with butchering, but I will think about it and talk with Nono.

Eating better and differently isn't hard. It just takes a catalyst to shove you forward....as in, "We simply cannot eat these things, or this way anymore" and here I find myself making "choices", learning a different way, and having a good time with it. I cannot help but "present" Greg's meals to him!

"Tonight I am serving a Wonderful Spinach Salad with sauteed Portabello mushroom and a Ginger, Honey Mustard Dressing. " Oooh! Ahhh!

or

"Our Saturday evening meal is a Baked Salmon Steak with a Yogurt Dill Sauce and a Watercress Salad with a Olive Oil Lime dressing and toasted garlic." Watercress, he says...isn't that rabbit food? Shut up and eat, I say. And he does.

(I will edit this post and add photos of the meals later.)

Standing tall and looking gooood!

And here he comes, walking down the street, singing doo-ditty-dum, ditty-dum, ditty doo....

Trip to Temuco and a Femoral Bypass

Greg and I headed out on a cold, overcast Monday morning at 6 a.m. on a bus to Chaiten. Four hours later we were boarding the ship in the harbour. It is a pleasant eight-hour trip to Puerto Montt. We plugged in the computer and watched movies and listened to music. Unfortunately the weather was rainy and cloudy, so the views along the coast were mostly obscured.





In Puerto Montt we disembarked and walked across to a crappy 5,000 peso hospadaje to spend the night. This is the kind of electric pole you will find outside a hospadaje charging so little. We had a nice view of all the street dogs below, and the Duena warns me not to go outside at night!

Innovative Electricity Hook ups

In Puerto Montt we took a bus to Temuco. The purpose of our trip was medical. Greg had recently experienced increasing pain in his left leg when walking...it became impossible for him to walk from the house up to the road without crippling pain, and a visit to the doctor in Futa confirmed that he had a serious problem. There was no pulse in his left leg below the knee, and little above. The doctor in Futa referred us to a vascular surgeon in Temuco at Clinica Alemana, which is not a clinic, but a full-fledged, modern hospital. We arrived in Temuco around midnight on a Tuesday and at 7 a.m. Greg was admitted and wheeled away to start all the tests; angiograms, echo-somethings, EKG, blood tests, the works. A couple of blockages, hardening of the arteries in the leg, On Friday he was discharged with femoral bypass surgery scheduled the following Wednesday.

Surgery done and a complete success, he is planted back in the room and his first two concerns are the hydro system at the house, and the TV remote. This is a guy with priorities!

Greg has a snack after surgery...precious TV Remote laying within quick reach.

He will be sprung on Monday if he's a good kid this weekend with physical therapy and walking. We will spend the rest of the month here for follow up before heading back to Futalandia, and hopefully an electrified house.

Anyway, aside from the obvious lessons like paying attention to your aches and pains, and having emergency plans when living in remote areas, there is another lesson. Chile is not a third-world country, it has incredibly talented doctors, surgeons and health care professionals, as well as excellent facilities. Just because Chile is south of the border does not mean it has substandard health care. In fact, so far, this has been an incredible experience...and we feel like we made the right decision in staying here in Chile, instead of making the trip back to the US for evaluation and surgery. From Greg's first visit to a doctor in Futa, to his surgery at Clinica Alemana in Temuco was two weeks. We even got a complimentary DVD of his angiogram! I know many folks are apprehensive about medical care outside of the US, and while there are some countries which should cause concern, Chile is not one of them.

All is good. I'll get some shopping done, stock up on some spices, get some spare parts for the truck, and May 30th, start the slow trip back to Futa, where it is fully into winter now with freezing temperatures and snow!

Our smooth experience was facilitated by Zandra Valenzuela and Charles Spencer, our good friends at www.allsouthernchile.com who have once again rescued us. Zandra is an attorney (and law professor) who along with her husband Charles, have put together a team of relocation specialists and they tackle everything from property purchases, to visa issues, translation services, and assisting with situations such as medical emergencies. Dr. Marcelo Lagos at Clinica Alemana was wonderful and patient with our Spanglish. Typical of many Chileno docs, he's cute too.

So in our five-star hospital room, we are enjoying a continental breakfast while listening to some nice jazz on the computer as I tap away at this post. Yes, in-room wi-fi! Greg is already surfing channels for some Futbol. While we'd rather this trip had been for pleasure, the experience has been one of the most pleasant hospital experiences we've had.

Nice Fish

Just some picture of my life

Above: Rio Desague
Bordering our property

Tres Monjas, a view from the road side of the property.

Greg contemplates the river.

The humble cabin with the Rio Azul raging below in the background.

Opposite view from Tres Monjas. Who could ask for anything more. Ahhh, maybe electricity? Nah! Who cares with this view.

Making apple Chicha

Greg and a visiting dog. He stayed one day, got in the garbage and left. He apparently uses the same barber as Greg.


We head up here to Nono's farm to help make apple chicha in an ancient contraption in one of their outbuildings.

The pressing side where all the good stuff comes out.

The grinding, chewing side. Apples go in and are ground down through, dropping into a wooden trough. Later, we feed the pressed apple bits to the two pigs.

Two days later, Nono and Ismael took us to a spot on the Rio Desaugue, a half mile up from our house where we lassoed some monster salmon. I'm waiting for photos to post because if I told you how big these fish were, you simply wouldn't believe me. Yes, lassoo!!!!

A Day in My Life

An old friend wrote and said, in part, "What do you DO? I mean, what is life like there?". Maybe he was imagining me throwing on my sheepskin cloak and slinking out into the frozen hinterlands to hunt rabbit and wild boar. Well, not quite. Anyway, here is what a typical day might be for us (excluding going to town and making the futile attempt to finish errands and buys supplies):

We wake up with the sun, or light (as it is now mostly cloudy, or overcast. Greg makes me coffee and stokes the woodstove and has his home-made granola. I have my coffee under my nice fluffy, warm covers, then go downstairs carrying my empty coffee cup and our candle holders. I get my second cup of coffee and set in front of the fire with my "wax bucket" and clean off the candle holders and reset them with fresh ones for night. Then I might write a letter as I have more coffee, and then wash up last nights dinner dishes (wasn't worth the waste of candle light the night before).

Greg and I dress up for the day...adding socks, flannel shirts, boots...and get about the day. He usually goes out to cut or stack wood and clear paths, and pick out wood that might make nice shelves. I fill up the wood box, which is actually a giant basket I made, and he takes out the ashes. I might chop up vegetables to spread on a screen to dry, or toast up some chopped garlic and peppers to save for winter. I might make some beef jerkey, or start on some more granola. I might go out and build a smoke fire for the peppers and jerky, or rake up around the house. Or we might tape off and paint or varnish a bit more. There is always sanding and varnishing to do. Or I might take a pail of pig food up to Nono's house (kitchen scraps) and pick up rocks for around the front porch on my way back.

I start on dinner around noon, or shortly after. Make bread, start some pasta sauce, things like that. Turn my drying vegetables and peppers. Water my indoor garden. Re-organize the tools that sit in the living room and are always in disarray. If it's nice out and not raining, I hang out my feather comforters in the sun, and my pillows balance in the windows upstairs. Paint a little.

As the day grows dim, and it does so now earlier, and earlier...I take the candle holders with fresh velas and set them where they go. Make a salad out of beet greens, or carrots, or whatever I have. Get supper almost ready and feed the fire. I might go out and wheel around a few barrows of split wood and stack out back.

Then it's dinner time and we always have a lovely feast. Two nights ago I made fresh linguini and a basil, toasted garlic tomato sauce which we had with my fresh bread and a beet green tomato salad. After dinner, and sometimes before, we light the downstairs candles. We watch to fire in the woodstove. I tease out some more wool and stuff pillows for the furniture. We let the cat in, play with it a bit, then take our candles upstairs, light a few more and snuggle into our lovely, decedent bed to read until we fall asleep, or the candles burn out.

Some days we go to town, come here and check the internet and news, buy supplies. Today I bought rain gutters for the front and back porch, envelopes, brown wrapping paper and tape. No one had the long, thin screws I need for the shelves Greg and I are making for books. But always...we long to be back out at our house, with the warm wood fire, stunning views of the mountains and glaciers and the rivers raging down below.

Other variations might be making a coat rack, or sewing a quilt, or planting plants outside for next spring. Sometimes I get caught up in a book and just read. Or I might hike with Nono, or hang curtains, or unload the truck of canning jars and supplies. Other days we trek up and down to the hydro house and wonder and wring our hands about why it doesn't work. I might scrub out some clothes and hang them by the wood stove, or collect herbs and dry them there too...oregano, basil, or mint.

And on other days, or afternoons, I write. The spirit of Isolina calls me and I sit down and write a story about her. And when that happens, I break only to make food for Greg. Nothing more. Dishes pile up, the floor gets gritty, and the story flows. And, I write letters to family which I send, and go unanswered.

A day in my life.

Futa before and after Volcan Chaiten

It is almost one month away from the one-year anniversary of the Volcan Chaiten awakening, and I was searching for a certain YouTube video of the event for someone, and happened across this one, which is Futaleufu specific. I know that the Chaiten people had, and have it much worse, I'm don't want to take anything away from the hardships they had, and continue to have. But I liked this video because it represents what our lives were like here.

While many people, organizations and government entities pitched in here in Futa, the army guys from Coyhaique, the Bomberos from Valdivia, the truckers from Osorno...the glue in the whole situation were the Carabineros. There wasn't a task they did not perform. Evacuation, water distribution, impromptu ambulance service, road-side assistance, general welfare checks, passing out masks, delivering messages, locating wood for heat, and giving up a recreation room for a team of emergency volunteer vets. They traveled by truck, horse and foot out into el campo to deliver messages and supplies and check on folks who had no way to get anywhere. Toward the end of the video you will see the Chilean head of the Carabineros visiting Futa...he probably picked up a shovel and helped out. Sadly, this much loved and respected man died in a helicopter accident not long after, in Panama, on a trip to discuss training Panamanian Police in the tradition and caliber of Chileno law enforcement Carabineros.