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Sky High: Into the Peruvian Altiplano
Peru is a captivating country that continuously ceases to amaze me with the depth of its food, culture, climates, and friendliness of its people every time I visit, which fortunately is quite often. Many people have Peru primarily on their bucket list for one...
Tips for Pairing Vegetarian Dishes with Wines
There’s a popular saying that “red wine goes with meat and white wine goes with fish, or white meats”. Although this may be very overly generic, what happens when you take a break from meat and focus on vegetables; or are vegetarian? What happens to the...
Crazy Crunchy Healthy Papas Fritas
I have not been cooking much home as of late. Travel does that. We just got back from our last trip to Patagonia. We took off for the weekend to stay at a newish hotel, Tierra Patagonia, and immerse ourselves in those southerly wind blown lands again. They cast...
Mission Possible: Cooking Tasty Vegetables
It is totally possible to make a whole meal out of only vegetables. However, less than a year ago, I never would have believed that. This is now my “baseline” diet when eating at home. After changing my diet dramatically y cutting out gluten/wheat and all meat...
South American Fall Getaways
Yesterday evening, I needed to blow off steam from the office and went out for my favorite vuelta, walk, around Parque Forestal from the Fine Arts museum to Plaza Italia and back. Earlier that afternoon, it had been an infierno outside but now, as the...
Cranberry Bean Salad with Caramelized Leeks and Fresh Herbs
My casero at La Vega takes the time to shell kilos upon kilos of cranberry bean. She always greets me with a hearty smile. I landed last Tuesday, on my birthday, in Chile. Since I moved to Chile over twelve years ago, one of the things I relish every...
Fresh Apricot Chutney
Before moving to Chile, now over twelve years ago!, January used to be the biggest drag. Bleak, cold, gray days that I had to endure until spring. My birthday at the end of the month was always accompanied by a blizzard. Not being a cold weather person, it was...
Diversity: Chile’s Wine Buzz Word
Imagine this. Twelve dramatically different wine valleys packed into a 1,000 mile north to south mid-section of the country, no more than 100 miles or so wide at any point. Vineyards sit in the piedmont with jagged, snowcapped peaks cutting into the sky. Others...
Three New (Awesome) Chilean White Wines
Chile is really carving a niche out for itself with its white wines. Every year, they just get better and better with Sauvignon Blanc blazing the path. Long gone is the style of the over-oaked, caramel-laden Chardonnay. That is so California. So 1990s. Chilean...
Life After Gluten
Three years ago I said adiós to gluten. At the beginning, it felt like a wake that lasted weeks and months. Good-bye pizza, pasta, sandwiches, pancakes. Don’t even talk about baguette or brioche. The evidence was all too clear. I felt bad, no, make that awful,...
Jungle Love
The air is heavy, humid and so full of oxygen it feels weighted. In the distance, bolts of lighting make contact with earth and a stormy breeze ruffles the palms. There's a scent of grilled meat perfuming the air. Next to the river, dozens of street food...
Eating Healthy While Traveling
This year I have been a bit of a road warrior. In fact, when I departed on a recent business trip to the US, I calculated that I had actually been home (in Santiago, Chile) about 4.5 months the entire year. Not a bad thing. I totally thrive off of being...
Bubbles & Bites
I love bubbly. Any kind. Champagne, Cava, Prosecco, Sparkling wines from California, Argentina, Chile, etc. etc. If you asked me what would be my preferred wine to pair with food for the rest of my life it would be (good) bubbly. What never bores me with...
Empanadas The Chilean Way
Over the Dieciocho, Chilean Independence, holiday, we traveled to Talca to see my husband’s parents in the countryside. Since it had been quite a while since my last visit, I petitioned a carga, order, of Señora María’s empanadas from the nearby village of San...
Peru is Coming to Texas!
After a very long weekend (5 days!) for Chilean Independence holidays, I am getting ready to head north for my third tour in Texas at Central Market’s cooking school in early October. Since many of you reside in the Lone Star state, I wanted to share the...
Rancho La Puerta & Tuna Tiradito Recipe
The starting point of our RTW trip was, fittingly, at a fitness spa in Baja Mexico, Rancho La Puerta, where I was invited to be guest chef on South American cuisine at their cooking school, La Cocina que Canta. To call Rancho La Puerta simply a spa is rather...
World Travels, Part I: China
In July, my husband and I took off on a 33-day round-the-world trip spanning three continents. One of the big motives of the journey was to go to Asia. I had not yet been, and it has been high on the list for a long time. After much debate as to where,...
The Last Passage
If somebody had told me that six weeks ago my life would have been turned upside down, I wouldn’t have believed them. It was not a trip abroad, or even within Chile. No, no, no. It was a journey in my own home, my own being, deep into my soul. Vika was...
and the meaningful
