dinner party at home

We hosted a dinner for 7 at our apartment last night, and I had fun cooking! First, the kitchen here is very nice and fully equipped so it was a pleasure to cook. Second, I liked the challenge figuring out what to cook, where to shop, and how to compensate for things I couldn't find.

Initially I was nervous. Our neighborhood markets here are good but basic, and I am not familiar with a lot of things. I initially thought of a simple fish/vege dish based on what I could find. But Pablo told us about a Chinatown that had good fish and some Japanese ingredients, so I decided to try a few Japanese dishes to make the dinner special. A great decision by Dav was to hire a babysitter to care for and entertain Tesla while he worked and while I shopped and cooked so I could concentrate. That made things so easy, and thus I had a great time cooking.

Chinatown was about a 40 minute taxi ride away, but worth it. I got a tonkatsu sauce, panko, hijiki, dashi, sake, mirin, and agedofu. I found a great fish market with 100s of fishes, but the salmon was to be delivered an hour after I got there. So I had coffee in a cafe and waited. When I got back, I was able to get a whole half of one salmon, freshly cut in front of me. It was beautiful...and cost 66 pesos!! I gleefully went home, and finished shopping for veges locally.

Dinner started with melted parmesan and roasted pears on toasties, and spicy deviled eggs. Both turned out a little weird as I didn't have the perfect pepper for the eggs, and the pears didn't caramelize. For the main courses, we had salmon marinated and baked in shoyu, ginger, sake, and pepper, croquettes (with a salmon paste that I had hoped was flaked salmon, and canned veges that were pretty awful - all hidden in mashed potatoes), hijiki salad that came out surprisingly well, and a salad with homemade dressing.

We told our guests around 9pm - a compromise for our early habits, and Argentine late dinners. Normally, folks would come in at 10 or even 11, but out of respect for us "Americans," everyone arrived on time. I was rather proud that we started eating the main course around 11 :) And folks stayed until 3am. Yay! We weren't too lame...

Paula, a guide Dav met last time he was here, the babysitter, Michaela, 2 friends of friends, and Pablo and his girlfriend and friend came. It was good to hear stories about life here. Most importantly, I'm very happy to have been able to do my favorite thing (host dinners at home) in Buenos Aires.