RTWdinnerparty Leap Day Edition: Summer Salads in Buenos Aires

Welcome, friends, to our corner of the web! On this Leap Day, we’re hosting our second {digital} dinner party as a way to take a pause and enjoy an exchange with fellow travelers we’ve met through Twitter. For the backstory, see #RTWdinnerparty: Friends, foods, and table talk from travels around the world.

Pull a chair to the table and enjoy! When you’re done here, head on over progressive-dinner-style to our friends’ #RTWdinnerparty dishes and stories. Link roundup at the bottom of the post.

{Meet and Mingle} Bethany and Ted, here. Welcome to our dinner party. We’re just eight weeks into our journey around the globe; this hot on the heels (ha!) of eight years of dreams and schemes and plans.

As landscape architect and social worker, we’re taking time during travel to experience and share observations about the world through the lens of compassionate care for the planet and its people. At each destination, Ted puts new friends at ease, investing in conversations and teasing out details; Bethany heads up writing and photography to wrestle with tensions, catalog milestones, and share with readers an honest look at life across cultures.

Beautiful Buenos Aires, Argentina is temporarily home base.

We arrived on Valentine’s Day, via a harrowing airplane ride from southern Patagonia (see Daily Travel Journal Day #41). We’ve paused for a bit and set up house in a cozy little apartment, complete with seafoam green glass shower tiles, cement kitchen countertops, and a solitary steak knife. (Details forthcoming on the cutlery.)

{Dinner Specialty} Summer Salads

We could <insert salad photo> right here and be through, but, well, you’ve seen Portlandia, right? It’s not all a joke. You’re going to hear the story of the food before it’s served.

We bid farewell to the season’s corn and tomatoes and peaches about six months ago, in Oregon, but sweet resurrection of flavor is now upon us in the southern hemisphere!

In the Pacific Northwest, it’s grey skies and drizzle about now. In Buenos Aires, it’s harvest time!

At home in Portland, we were often up to our ears in fresh fruits and vegetables, sourced from excellent farms around the Willamette Valley. Ted’s and my celebrated pastime is cooking together and hosting friends for long-planned and last-minute meals. Almost as soon as we dropped our bags at the flat, we were off and running to find a source for local, sustainably sourced ingredients to feather our new culinary nest. (Birds. Fruit. Mixed metaphors. You get the gist.)

Our first destination: El Galpón Organic Market in Chacarita near Lacroze Station.

Sponsored by the Asociación Mutual Sentimiento, El Galpón emerged as a space for farmers and social organizations (Centro Comunal de Abasteciemiento) to provide consumers with natural products, without pesticides, in order to promote the importance of environmental responsibility, protection of worker’s rights, and fairly priced organic and sustainable food purchases.  The organic craze has yet to hit the city, but with the help of the CCA and the MAPO (Movimiento Argentino para la Producción Orgánica), slowly but surely they are working hard to encourage awareness of the benefits of organic production and consumption. -Pick Up the Fork

Feeling giddy as though we’d found a SE Portland time/space warp, we claimed armfuls of favorites and packed them home through Subte transfers and a sea of funny stares.

Golden ears of corn
Brown speckled eggs
Raw milk in recycled bottles
Blue cheese and cheddar in thick, delicious slabs
Fresh loaves of wheat bread
Sweet heads of garlic and paper-skinned onions
Perky radish bunches and shiny purple eggplants
Mushrooms and chorizo
Small batch jars of jam and dulce de leche
Potatoes and pickles and pears and plums
And, of course, an aromatic bunch of basil to truly make the kitchen feel like home…

Perfection until we returned to the apartment to prepare a feast and discovered one tiny problem:

A quick scour of our “well-appointed” center of domestic living revealed: no kitchen towels and no kitchen knives. Towels, we could live without. One scrubby sponge pinch hits for most chores. A kitchen knife, on the other hand? We’d been using our charming Opinel on the trail, but it was still buried in the backpack.

Queue the silverware drawer’s solitary steak knife, in all its serrated glory!

We made this little baby work hard for its home: slicing plums, dicing onions, chopping peppers, cubing potatoes, and teasing out crumbles of cheese…

Buenos Aires’ sweltering February heat and humidity meant boiled corn and potatoes and a quick sauté of onions went straight to the fridge and returned once cool to mix with tomatoes, mushrooms, and basil for a bright veggie salad.

A quick combination of plums, apples, and fresh raw milk cheese in bowl number two, and voilà!

Two blissful summer salad to brighten our table and christen our kitchen.

On the road, beat-the-heat vegetarian flavors, courtesy of an Argentinian steak knife.

{Table Talk} Updates on our recent travel escapades:

The past two months of meals brimmed with adventure, conversation, listening and learning as the riches of other cultures infused our lives with fresh appreciation and deeper curiosities…

Sweet mangoes and kindness in the slums of Lima.
Fresh fried trout in backcountry tents on the Inca Trail.
Rainy season BBQ in Jupapina.
Indigenous Andean grains at the nursery in Mallasa.
Unsalted tomatoes and beef on the Salar de Uyuni.
Thirtieth-birthday wine and chocolate in Torres del Paine.
Craft beers and the future of Chile in Puerto Natales.
Sweet little salads in our own home-sweet-home-away-from-home in Buenos Aires…

Foreign flavors, new-found friends at the table, richness and zest for life, somehow all still characteristic of that very same elemental truth we experience whether home or abroad: broken bread, shared with dear ones, bringing life.

To our digital friends participating in the #RTWdinnerparty, thanks for being a part of our online community, for sharing your stories and experiences and photos and thoughts, for being honest and lovely and bringing beauty to the world.

To our friends at home reading along, thank you for the kind notes and updates, thank you for the memories of meals and conversations and the promises of future reunions to enjoy more of the same. We love you all so much, and this experience of the world is made richer for knowing home is a place of deep roots and dear people.

We’re contentedly settled in one spot until the 14th of March, when we again pull the house apart, stuff our lives into bags, and carry on toward the next series of discoveries. Come the 21st of March, we set sail across the Atlantic Ocean, spending 16 days making our way along the coast of Brazil, visiting ports at the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, and Casablanca, and stepping into the next chapter beginning in Barcelona, Spain.

Sail along with us here on the blog, keep in touch, and enjoy the meals between now and when we see you again!

Cheers,
Bethany & Ted

February 2012 Leap Day #RTWdinnerparty link-up:
(We’ll continue adding links as #RTWdinnerparty posts are published)

@twoOregonians – (Salad) Summer Salads in Buenos Aires
@BeersAndBeans – (Appetizer) Bloomin’ Onion Bread
@InspirngTrvlrs– (Drinks) New Zealand, Chilean, and Belgian Beer
@RTWsomanyplaces – (Drinks) Oregon Microbrews!
@backpackforever – (Main Dish) Guatemalan Chicken with Jalapenos & Onions
@idelishtravel – (Meat) Genghis Khan Style Grilled Mutton
@NewYorktoNomad – (Dessert) OnoPops in Honolulu

Interested in participating in the next link-up? Invitations are issued by @twoOregonians.
Head to the #RTWdinnerparty page for details and watch @RTWdinnerparty for updates.