chile:work.and.work.

the past two days have been full of work work work! yesterday started off with:

1. feeding the animals…which is adorable because there are so many of them and they all do a little happy dance when it is breakfast time. especially delilah, the only girl doggie.

2. waking tracy up with hammering. whoops. we were prepping these milk carton-turned-planters by punching holes in the bottom with a hammer and nails and it was a bit too loud.

luckily after that mishap, the day turned into a cooking marathon. andy was leaving  to go work in the hostel école that we stayed in the first morning we were in pucón, so we made him a farewell lunch. mexican food and fruit salad! this is the stove/oven i was encouraged to cook on all day:

i have to say i’ve definitely got to warm up to it. i’m not used to having to move my food around to different spots on the stove, constantly turn it while its in the oven, and wait twice as long for it to be finished…but it was definitely an experience.

(oh yeah, also tracy told me in the midst of cooking marathon she was afraid i was going to get adrenal fatigue [which is what she has, and why she can’t eat gluten or dairy and has to take a whole bunch of supplements] because i’m an active female vegetarian which is exactly what she was like her whole youth. she gave me this book.

hopefully i don’t turn out like that chick on the cover, she looks severely uncomfortable. time to start taking care of my adrenal glands i guess!)

after lunch and after andy left we were commissioned to make more food, so the next round was applesauce, followed by kale and cabbage chips from what we picked from the garden.

then a dessert craving hit and we made gluten free chocolate chip walnut cookies (with chocolate chips we imported specially from trader joe’s in ventura). then we tried out the new soy/rice/almond milk maker that tracy just started selling in her store. we made some rice milk that turned out a little thicker than i could stomach, but tracy liked it and said when she gave it out as samples in the store everyone was a fan. finally it was artichokes and dipping sauce for dinner and we were ready to hit the hay by about 8 pm. who knew cooking could make you SO TIRED. and who knew i would be coming to chile to be a personal chef? i mean it works for me, i’m definitely not complaining.

good thing we went to sleep early because the next day was filled with not kitchen work this time, but garden work. it was our first full day on the farm without andy’s guidance and we got our hands dirty. it was the supposed only non-stormy day of the week so we had to get all of the outside chores out of the way.

we washed all the windows of the greenhouse, and got to do it in sexy outfits like this:

those pants were kind of cool, tracy said she’s had them for years and years and was telling me all of the stories behind the different stains. i think she said the first ones on them were from camping in the jungle in borneo. cooool.

after that we planted bulbs, which truckee and i both really enjoyed. once again it took us longer than it should have because we were on a worm-saving crusade. the dirt we took out of the ground was going to the oven to be sterilized, and no-one wants baked worms right?

then i harvested potatoes

which ranged in color and shape from round, red ones to long, knobbly purple ones.

we made almond milk in the new machine and it was so good! much better than the rice milk, and my cereal will definitely appreciate it in the morning.

that little cup of almonds makes a whole big jug of milk. for dinner we made potato broccoli soup which we added some smoked chipotle to (yum, even got the lance seal of approval, which is tough) and experimented with gluten-free rosemary bread. i wasn’t a huge fan of the bread but tracy seemed to love it. i guess you just have to get used to the texture of gf bread.

after dinner we talked to lance for a bit, he told us about himself and this little guy, jack who is their third dog.

aka one-eyed jack. he is fourteen years old and they rescued him when he was about nine, he had been living on the mountain all by himself and was near death when they found him. they nursed him back to health and now he is just the sweetest happiest little dog. a great story to head off to bed with. we are still resorting to cups of tea to warm up the cabin, but its ok because our bed has about five huge blankets and neither of us wake up all night long. it might just be because we are so beat from the day but hey, it works!