Kitchen Issues

I admit to having dreams of time in Argentina spent luxuriating in the kitchen.  No job, no rush, no hurry.  Nobody eats until 9pm.  What could be easier?  But I find I’m working with a very limited, foreign kitchen here in Trelew.  For example, instead of temperature settings, our oven says “muy caliente” and “caliente” (very hot, hot).  What’s the Celsius conversion on that?  

I like the "suave" setting

Finding ingredients in the grocery stores is a translation challenge and we’ve learned a few things.  They don’t use dill here, or if they do, we haven’t found it. Same with breadcrumbs and pickles.  We find only two types of dried beans, located next to hundreds of types of pasta.  Cheeses are a bizarre mystery, but the wine selection at even the smallest markets is awesome.  Yogurt is good - it's all sweetened like crazy, but we're not complaining.  Coffee is weirdly bland and the selection is dwarfed by choices of dried mate (an Argentinian tea that is an afternoon ritual here).  Fruit is good (peaches, cherries, and nectarines are in season now), but fresh vegetables are limp and tired-looking.

Another discovery is that, with no books or reliable internet service, I’ve had to cut the cord on my reliance on recipes.  For normal people, this won’t be considered an achievement, but anyone who's known me in Durham knows that I rely heavily on The Barefoot Contessa or those Cooks Illustrated people for even the smallest thing (egg-boiling, spaghetti sauce).  Those who know me from before that will wonder why Malin is writing about cooking at all. 

Mac and Cheese with cornflakes (where are breadcrumbs?)

Soooo...recent successes of which I am pathetically proud:  macaroni and cheese made with mystery cheese and sauted corn flakes on the top (no bread crumbs, remember), pan-fried mystery white fish (all we know is that it wasn't squid), roast chicken and gravy, chicken and rice soup, chili (and without locating anything called "chili" in the spice section, no less), granola(actually I burned this), and (ta-da!) NYT no-knead bread.  

Cooked this on "caliente" setting...

Even though these are all re-creations of recipes from the aforementioned sources, I didn’t look them up in a book, and they still tasted good.  Does this mean I'm a grown up?