Rambling of a Future Cook

I am really getting a culinary education here in Santiago. Who knew I would better my English teaching skills, and gain more insight to cooking. On top of that it's cheaper to dine-in than dine-out... as is probably the case where ever anyone lives. (.... sorry I got distracted by a red light flying through the sky outside my living room window...Thought it was a plane... turns out just to be the crane moving at the future metro station construction site... say that 5 times fast...) 

Learning how to cook in Santiago has been interesting. The stove top heats up really quickly! No matter how low the flame it, it's really hot. It doesn't take too long to boil water or cook anything here... Except potatoes. Those take forever and a day to fry... Or so it seems. I'll have to experiment with them more. 

This is our lovely stove.
Stoves in Chile are a lot smaller than in the U.S. 

 Cooking on the stove top isn't too bad... It gets cramped when you have more than 2 pots/pans on it at the same time, but it could be worse. You also have to light the stove with a match too. They don't have the automatic starting contraption that the U.S. Stoves have. I used to be afraid I was going to blow up the apartment when I had to light the stove, but not anymore. 

  Here is where thing's get a little tricky with cooking.. The middle dial here is for the oven. To start the oven you need to light it by hand as well. I think all stoves are different. For ours you need to light the match then turn on the stove dial to the first flame thing, and then light the oven, and old the nob down for like 15 seconds  then move the dial to where you need it. I haven't done this yet. I am deathly afraid I am REALLY going to blow up the apartment if I do. Hopefully someday I will get over that fear. 

The only down side to this Chilean stove is that there is no temperature setting (in Celsius nor Fahrenheit). So you have to carefully watch what you are cooking in the oven. I made a chocolate cake the other day for when we had friends over for dinner. It had to check it and turn it every 10 minutes to make sure it didn't burn. It turned out really good, and was very delicious, but super tricky to cook. 

Piece of my cake with some ginger ale... Milk is not the greatest here. I miss WI milk

Breakfast one morning

Other than the minor differences cooking is easy to do in Chile. Once you figure out what all the spices and ingredients are in Spanish  it gets even easier. Michelle and I have been splitting a lot of meals and she's teaching me how to cook. I'm getting back into the grove of cooking like I did when I was living in Milwaukee. (Not that I did anything extravagant, but I had to cook for myself)  This past year and a half I have been spoiled by my mom's cooking, and am a little rusty in the kitchen.

I'm exhausted.. This post is just rambling sorry! I'm heading to bed. Until next time 

Chao, 

Lesllie