McGuiver’s Kitchen

Culinary Adventures among other things in the Andes Mountains

I am not alone. Well, now I am, but I wasn’t for a whole month. Kristin came down to visit. We thought we would be riding in knee deep powder every day. It didn’t work out that way. In fact the ENTIRE month that she was here it only snowed once, and that was the day before she left.  But we didn’t let that stop us from having a great time. Correction, Kristin didn’t let that stop her from always being in a good mood, which in turn made me almost forget about the fact that it wasn’t snowing. So we found other things to do. Don’t get me wrong, we did get out there in spring skiing conditions 10 times I think. Which, no matter how you slice it, isn’t too shabby. Plus, I forgot that living with Kristin was basically an invitation to be a kid all the time and that even crappy things turn out, well, fun.  

So what exactly did we do since we weren’t riding every day? The times that we didn’t head down to the big city and stayed up here in Farellones, we cooked, a lot. We would go to Santiago to hike and shop and hang out with friends, but mostly to stock up for our time up here where we would make all kinds of delectable concoctions. Through this experiment we discovered that we pretty much rock at everything, why we didn’t know this before is still something I am trying to figure out.

We had interesting working conditions and liked to throw in the fact that we are living at elevation, almost 3,000 meters that translates to about 9,800ft. So if things didn’t turn out quite right we could blame the altitude, the gas oven with no actual temperature settings or that fact that we had to McGuiver everything to make it work. But that is proof of our infallible skill. We made everything from scratch. That was something neither of us had ever really done before, but we had a lot of time on our hands. Once the daily chores were finished, beds made, wood chopped, everything cleaned...we could sit down and stare at eachother or we could make food. We did a little bit of both, but I think our skills in the later improved exponentially with time. So what did we make and what ended up on our menu?

Breakfast:

                Pancakes

Baked Goods/sweets:

                Zucchini Bread

                Beer Bread

                Banana Bread

                Chocolate chip Cookies

                Sugar Cookies

                Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

                Carrot Cake

                Zucchini Muffins

                Apple Crisp w/Whipped Cream

                Berry Yogurt Bread

                Sopapillas

Dinner/lunch:

                Mushroom Risotto

                Stuffed red peppers with shrimp mushroom risotto

                Baked lemon Chicken with Garlish Mashed potatos

                Pizzas: white(pesto, cheese, garlic, tomato),

Turkey, onion, mushroom

Salami & mushroom,

Spinach, tomato, cheese

                Eggplant Parm

                Calzone (spinach, salami, cheese, mushroom)

                Black bean, guacamole, cilantro rice and tortillas

                Ravioli (spinach, salami, mozz, parm, cream cheese, onion garlic)

                Pierogi

    Tater tots

    Potatos Au Gratin

Extras (Drinks and snacks)

                Lemonade

                Popcorn (and kettle corn)

Not too shabby at all and skills that we can take home hopefully. We will have to see how well we do when the dream team has been seperated. But I think we have a pretty stong, tasty foundation.