As an artist appreciates great art, a chef appreciates great food.
When I tell people I am a chef, the first thing they ask is what my favorite meal to prepare is. Being the typical indecisive female that I am, I’ve never been able to come up with a favorite dish to make.
My answer: I love creativity in cooking- I usually don’t use many recipes & I never measure anything when I cook so I love to take an ordinary simple dish & explode it with creativity, imagination & originality (like plain old French toast- stuff that bad boy with some crème anglaise, candied walnuts & bruleed bananas, top it with dulce de leche & caramelized strawberries, torch that baby up to brulee the top, add a nest of spun sugar & you’ve taken something boring & turned it into a gourmet breakfast. Boom).
On the other end of things, because I’m competitive, I always love a good challenge so making something a bit more involved that requires 48 different ingredients while preparing 9 side dishes all at the same time is my kind of a wild Friday night!
I am definitely one to prove correct the stereotype that Americans love to eat & they like their meals big. I love entertaining, filling my home with loved ones & cooking all types of foods for them whether it’s a backyard BBQ with slow cooked ribs, buttermilk cornbread & sweet potato fritter cakes, or the fancy shmancy gourmet stuff like roasted leg of lamb with a rosemary chevre sauce & balsamic reduction.
Cooking is a passion of mine & food is something more to me than just fueling my body; it’s an experience, creates an atmosphere of community, & brings people together which is my favorite part about it all.
So as a daughter of the Almighty King, I have the honor of traveling around the world this year to represent Him & to be the hands & feet of Christ as I serve others. As an aspiring culinary connoisseur, I have the honor of traveling around the world this year to experience new & authentic dishes, flavors, ingredients, foods, & community & to share all of these things with you! Bon appétit!
The food’s I’ve eaten in Chile:
Ah, yes. The Empanada. One of Chile’s staple foods. Your typical street food, the empanada is like a hand pie you can keep in your pocket (not recommended) made out of a broken or puff pastry & filled with anything you can imagine! Some are just plain cheese, others are like this one you see pictured. This is the first empanada I had purchased on the street & my taste buds exploded with flavor when I bit into what reminded me of my mother-in-law’s delicious French meat pie with gravy. To my dismay, as I continued munching into the center of my steamy pocket of Heaven, I discovered something suspicious. Deep down in the depths of my empanada, I found a chopped up hard boiled egg AND one single olive with the pit. I love French meat pie with gravy and I love hard boiled eggs and I love olives. But I wasn’t the biggest fan of all 3 of these things meddling together.
Chileans eat a lot of sandwiches. Both of the ones you see above were big, fat, American-sized sandwiches with carne (beef skirt), queso (cheese), & palta (avocado). Simple yet so delicious. Even the street sandwich in the top photo was prepared fresh by a cool lady named Nelsa who cut up our avocado to order & cooked each one of our steaks in front of us because of the care she puts in to her little business.
You’re probably thinking how weird this dish looks. I did too when I first saw it. When you ask a Chilean for salsa, they aren’t going to give you what we know as salsa. To them, salsa is just what they call a sauce of any kind. What we have here is an appetizer of boiled whole potatoes with a cold salsa de queso (cheese sauce). Not sure what’s going on here with that one rascally random olive & balancing egg act but I also don’t know why Americans add kale to perfectly delicious fruit smoothies so to each his own! Regardless, I felt like I had eaten my weight in potatoes & cheese sauce & it was delicious.
How to make 7 gringos feel like they’re at home! Except instead of this mass amount of golden fried nom-nom-ness taking 5 minutes to prepare as it does in our familiar culture of impatience, it took an hour & a half for all 7 of our meals to be ready. But we were far from angry because after we placed our order, a worker pulled up a chair in the corner of the restaurant, began peeling dozens of potatoes, cut each one into french fry sized sticks, & fried them up for us. Talk about fresh.
Chileans also eat lots & lots of pan (bread). This bread is called Hallulla which is one of the most popular types of bread in Chile. It is a square or circular flat roll with a starchy filling & like most breads, is best when freshly baked that day. You can find this bread in almost any market or store & we’ve usually eaten this stuff almost everyday as toast or with cheese & avocados.
My kind of a meal! Simple yet delicious (this is what I mean when I talk about eating with atmosphere). This was my late lunch after a long day of bike riding through the driest desert in the world during one of our days off: just a simple meal of toasted bread, cheese, honey, & butter eaten on the small patio of a tiny cafe on the romantic streets of San Pedro, Chile.
This is an artsy photo of instant coffee. Little did you all know, I have an alter ego; her name is Franchesca & she is a coffee snob. When Franchesca was told that basically the only kind of coffee Chilean’s drink was instant coffee, she cringed up into a ball & died a little on the inside. You can make instant coffee & put it in a fancy mug placed upon a colorful glass coaster & sip it with your pinky up & sunglasses on in a courtyard in San Pedro with Michael Bublé playing in the background, but at the end of the day, it’s still instant coffee. The moral of the story is that Franchesca learned quickly that whether coffee is brewed instantly, or in a French press, or a percolator, or an aeropress, or a turkish gezve on the top of a Hawaiian volcano, it is always a blessing from God. Franchesca has come a long way.
Ok. You may know what your most favorite-ist flavor of juice is in life. You may have had orange juice, apple juice, grapefruit juice, cranberry juice, peach juice, mango juice, grape juice, tomato juice, or spiced melon cucumber passionfruit tangerine plum boysenberry açai peppered lemon juice. I am here to tell you that you have never really, truly had a juice loving experience until you have tried maracuyá juice. Especially drank out of a cool whoopdeedoo bendy straw!
This masterpiece was the result of a delicious mistake I made during a date night with Jonny! I ordered something off the menu titled ‘torta panqueques de chocolate’ so naturally I thought I was ordering chocolate pancakes (yum!). The waitress placed this in front of me & I would have been mentally ill if I had sent it back. It was the most moist piece of chocolate cake I’ve ever had with a perfect raspberry filling. Our romantic evening ended with me accidentally calling our waitress a bad word & apologizing over & over again (Google translator doesn’t always behave the way you want it to).
Our hosts introduced us to one of their friends, Demaris & her husband who own the best cafe in town. I’ve loved talking with Demaris about our mutual love for baking & cooking & her style of cooking is exactly what I love. One day she surprised us & had all 7 of us over her cafe for a 3 course lunch on the house! She made us a butternut squash soup with homemade croutons, the most delicious quiche I may have ever eaten, shredded carrot & raisin salad, corn & pineapple salad, & huge crepes with her homemade caramel sauce.
Thank you for everyone’s support, prayers, love, & encouragement. We couldn’t do this Kingdom work without you! We are still making our way to becoming fully funded & need to raise another $4,000 by November 30th to keep us out on the field doing the Lord’s work. Please consider donating so that we can keep eating cool food….just kidding 😉
In His Love,
K.S.
