when ewwww becomes mmmm

One morning years ago I found R man pulling something out of the oven for breakfast....R man...baking?
I was scared.  I could tell by his face that he was hoping to impress and bedazzle me and my great love for oatmeal....(a true Minnesotan breakfast...grunt, grunt) So...he had boiled up some oatmeal, added lemon and sugar to it and then baked it in the oven...or something like that?!?
Of course, he wouldn't tell me this until I first tried it....and ran to the bathroom screaming believing he had lost it and added comet to a pile of dog poo and threw it on a cookie tray to bake....(lemon baked oats)

Then there's the time I came home to a pot of boiling wrinkled up ....balls.... that looked like little mini ...lets just say brains!  "what is that?"  "what are those?!?!?!?"  "Rodolfo!" "AHHH!!!!!!"  These turned out to be a traditional extremely popular dish of rehydrated dried peaches boiled in sugar with barley (Mote con Huesillo).

But I know....my own food traditions involve some eccentricities!

Root beer.  I love root beer.  To R man, it tastes like rotten mud water.  Root beer is not allowed into the R man household....the smell of it, the look of it...it all really freaks him out.  The fact that I love it with ice cream in a big cup is absolutely mortifying for R man.

On another day, Rodolfo walked in on my dinner preparations to a can of tuna, a can of cream of mushroom soup, a bag of spiral pasta and a bag of potato chips with a look of complete horror....."I'm not eating that...whatever that is you're making, I'm not eating it!"  (tuna noodle casserole)

There are weird freaky foods in every country that local people are passionate about that just don't translate right, no matter how much we want them too.

 R man will never convert me nor I him to some of our local favorites....however, there are some Chilean cooking techniques I've become rather fond of that I would have 'poo poo'd' in the States....here's a few....

Tomatoes
In Chile, they peel their tomatoes before cutting them up for salads...the tradition comes from when people used to get sick from some chemical or bacteria that used to be on the outside of the tomato...even though the outer skin is no longer harmful, they still do it.  I used to be annoyed by this incessant need for peeling, but then I realized...it's waaaaaay easier to cut up a tomato without that hard outer skin attached!  It doesn't turn into moosh if your knife isn't super sharp!

Onion
You know when you put fresh onion in a salad raw and it gives you that nasty taste/breathe for forever after?
By rubbing salt into your onion with your fingers and then letting it sit in some warm water with the salt, it takes the edge off of the onion and makes it sweet, but leaves that yummy crunch!

Boiled potatoes
Why did I never hear of this before?!?!?  It's awesome!
If you're making potato salad, boil your potatoes the day before you need them, whole, with the skins on.
Stick them in your fridge for the night and the next day, they're cooked, easy to peel and not too hot to handle!  It saves so much time, stress, and you get more potato out of the deal, because you haven't peeled half of the potato into the trash!

Pressure cookers
Ok.  These things make me nervous and I'm not ready to try it out, but they are really cool!  For cooking beans particularly.....they cook up beautifully in a very short amount of time!  I've heard they can explode though...but it's definitely a cooking technique I want to learn!

Lemon
This fruit is a staple here for adding flavor to anything!  It's in every fresh salad complementing any type of vegetable.  A base to many cocktails, particularly the pisco sour.  Chileans love lemon!  Now, I do too!  It's going to be sad to leave the lemon culture behind, since it adds so much flavor to foods and it's so healthy!  Although, adding lemon to oatmeal?  Seriously...that's taking it too far!!!!