I now have something like my own kitchen, be it a partial and partially furnished one, in the quincho, or the covered outdoor grilling area where there is also a stove and a newly purchased refrigerator. We've been investing in the minimum necessary kitchen accoutrements: kitchen towels, tupperware, a dish rack, a salad spinner. The latter has got to be one of the single most useful kitchen accessories; I use it every day to dry salad greens and fresh herbs and it far more efficient than the towel or paper towel alternative, which is time-consuming and cumbersome, and always leaves your greens soggy and makes your dressing watery. Salad spinners are pretty exotic in Paraguay, however: there were only two units, both on display in the store and everyone who has seen it has looked at it quizzically and asked what it is for. Moving into the quincho kitchen also instigated a daily covert knife war. At night I would go to my Tia Silvia's kitchen and take the sharpest chopping knife (which incidentally was too dull to cut a tomato before david sharpened it) to make dinner with. Then, each morning, my aunt would sneak to the quincho and steel it back while we were asleep. Since then, we bought our own extremely cheap chopping knife from the supermarket and my cousin's wife made gift of a second one after hearing about the knife wars. To make the kitchen fully functional we'd need to get a microwave and a toaster oven, but in the meantime we just walk over to my Aunts's kitchen if we need to heat something. Despite our incomplete kitchen I've managed some pretty good meals.


1. Tofu salad with carrots radishes and thai-style dressing. We discovered what might count as Asunción's china town the other day on the outskirts of the largest public market. Just outside the market's labyrinth of clothing, electronics, crafts, produce, meat, medicinal herb, hardware, and just-about-anything-you-can-imagine vendors are a strip of Chinese restaurants and grocery stores. I have been told there are a cluster of Korean restaurants and shops as well, but they are harder to find because they are unmarked mom and pop affairs. At any rate, the tofu bought was actually made in Paraguay and was really delicious. It was not as firm as we are used to in the U.S. which made it kind of a mess to brown, but it had a really good flavor and was really creamy. We would eat tofu at least twice a month in Boston, so I'm glad we won't have to go without it here. It would be kind of ridiculous too, given the amount of soybeans produced in Paraguay.


2. Rosemary roasted chicken and sautéed radishes with mustard-chive sauce with mashed potatoes. This was a really great meal. After seasoning with salt and pepper, I slid some some garlic and rosemary leaves under the skin of a few chicken quarters and pan seared them until the skin was nice and crispy. They went into the oven to finish while I made their mashed potato bed and sauteed some radishes we got from the market in butter and olive oil with garlic and green onion, followed by a deglazing and short steaming with dry vermouth, and finished off with some brown mustard. The skin was perfectly crisp and the flesh juicy and succulent.

3. Mostacciole al pesto with baby lima beans, smoked bacon, and zucchini. The difference between fresh versus dried vegetables in Paraguay as opposed to the U.S. is quickly becoming the bane of my kitchen. Ironically, after the sweetcorn and pea mishaps, I was prepared for the 'fresh' lima beans I purchased from the supermarkets refrigerator case to take at least 30 minutes of boiling to transform their starchy toughness into buttery creaminess, and felt very clever indeed for not falling prey to the freshness ruse of Paraguayan vegetables for a third time. And so, after browning the garlic and smoked bacon with the lima beans, I deglazed with some vermouth and added enough chicken broth to cook the beans. Unfortunately, they cooked very unevenly, and my judgment that they were done was based on what turned out to be a very unrepresentative sample. So while some of the beans were creamy and buttery, others were unpleasantly crunchy and raw tasting. It made me really mad, because I made a very deliberate attempt to avoid this pitfall, and because this meal would have been absolutely perfect had the lima beans been done right. The flavor and texture of the few beans that were cooked paired perfectly with the richness and smokiness of the bacon, and the freshness of the zucchini and pesto.

4. Ingredients for roasted pork spring rolls. I brought back some spring roll wrappers from Boston because all of the other ingredients to make them are available here, maybe the wrappers too if we look in the Korean shops (but I really doubt it). After going through all the trouble of bringing thai basil seeds here (none of which sprouted incidentally) I realized that the variety of basil in Paraguay has remarkably similar strong liquorish flavor and is a more than acceptable stand in. I marinated a couple of pork loins in garlic, fish sauce, pepper, sugar, and a little olive oil and roasted them in the oven. As stinky and offensive as fish sauce smells--and really isn't rotting fish a flavor that most of us would think to avoid rather than add to our dinner--it adds a really wonderful savory quality to anything you add it to. I think it makes a great marinade for this reason, I read somewhere about how anchovies are actually a secret ingredient for many chefs and that they find their way into some unexpected dishes for similar reasons.


5. Roasted pork springrolls with peanut sauce. When you get these at a Vietnamese restaurant they are usually filled with rice vermicelli, but instead we fill them with julienned carrots, green onion, and bean sprouts, in addition to fresh basil, mint, and cilantro . Generally, I think that trying to be as authentic as possible in recreating the cuisine of other cultures yields the best results. But I'm never a fan of starch-filled starch, and I really think that filling them with julienned vegetables is an improvement. They are even lighter and fresher tasting this way. It also helped that, instead of the miserly bits of leathery pork that you sometimes get, we used tender slices of rosy-pink pork tenderloin.


6. Vietnamese sandwiches made from the leftovers. We had the leftover pork in some sandwiches with some grapes and peaches. The fruit has been really excellent. David discovered that the pears here rival Harry and David of Christmas-time fame. I never would have bought them, because besides the box my mother will get for Christmas, I've always found pears to be a rather joyless fruit. But these are juicy and sweet, and have a firm but yielding texture and are just slightly gritty. It's strange though, because the pears from Argentina and Chile (the likely source of these pears) that make it to the U.S. are usually tough and flavorless, or slimy and pasty.

7. An extremely improvised soup au pistou. I made this to use up the last of the zucchini and the pesto. It was definitely not bad given how I unplanned it was and that it was missing some of the principle ingredients.


8. At long last my first real caprese salad in a very long time. At the agroshopping I discovered that someone, specifically a cooperative of Japanese farmers, had beat me in introducing the wonders of heirloom tomatoes to Paraguay. They only had one variety however, and it except for one lumpy one that we quickly seized, you wouldn't necessarily know that they weren't just really sweet, juicy, and meaty regular tomatoes. After purchasing them, we went directly to the cheese stand and picked up some fresh mozzarella. I see some more pizza in our future. Also a lot more pesto. David made me buy an absurd amount of basil from which we made an absurd amount of pesto. I guess we are just making up for missing out on nearly the whole summer and fall in the U.S.


9. Arugula and watercress salad with heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil mustard dressing. The arugula and the watercress are really wonderful here, much sharper and spicier than in the U.S. The dressing was good, but owes its odd color to the fact that the only vinegar I had was a small bottle of watery balsamic.


10. Classic leek and potato soup. Another improvised meal, but a good one. My mom made this a lot when we were growing up and I happened to have all the ingredients on hand. I forgot that I still had a piece of smoked bacon or I would have added that too.