Shopping List...

November 9th, 2008

Sunday evening in Buenos Aires is a quiet time. I rarely go anywhere on Sunday but this morning we were out of groceries and had to go out. Jimmy went with me and we found ourselves in Jumbo, the hypermercado, which looks like a big Safeway in the states but with electronics, household goods, clothes and other various necessities in addition to groceries. Our experience this morning was so different from our first trip there 4 months ago. That day it took us 2+ hours to find our way through the aisles of different looking choices and figure out how to put a meal together from what was available. Now we are in and out in under an hour and home again. Savvy enough to know when the taxi driver is taking us the long way around and grounded enough to call him on it (he cut the meter so we only paid the fair amount) we have found our footing. It is good to have found a groove here.

When we go to Jumbo we always buy sushi. So far, it’s the best sushi in BsAs. I swear. That isn’t because it’s so good. It’s because sushi is new to Argentina and so they don’t do it well yet in general. There isn’t a supply chain for good, fresh fish. There aren’t any Japanese sushi chefs. There aren’t a lot of the supplies available to sushi restaurants in the states and there are people here running sushi restaurants who’ve never had sushi anywhere but here so they don’t have any reference point. Sushi restaurants in BsAs have 2 kinds of fish, salmon and something white. That’s it. All the rolls have one of the two kinds of fish and sometimes they put other things in too. I get super excited about one place we go because they put chives in some of the rolls and vegetables in sushi are a real treat. Most rolls have cream cheese. I’m almost used to it. The sushi at Jumbo is always fresh and they have the best sticky rice I’ve had yet. Time is changing Buenos Aires, slowly.

That’s why the other thing I do when I go to Jumbo is walk a little more slowly up and down each aisle because they are always bringing new things in. I found foil sealed tuna a couple of weeks ago and had to explain why it was better than canned in my sorry Spanish to a woman who wanted to know why I was buying it. Every time I go I find some other thing that they never had here before. One week when I bought frozen blueberries the check out girl spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out what they were. They were packaged in Spanish, she had simply never seen a blueberry before. The closest she could come was raisins. I gave up after a while. How do you explain a blueberry? In a second language?

We eat more simply here than we did in the states. We eat a lot of brown rice, fruit, chicken breasts (Supremas), milk, eggs, vegetables in season, they do have Orowheat bread and I found a place that makes fresh whole grain breads as well. We eat lots of sweet potatoes and white tuna (we can buy it frozen). I cook simple foods and we sit together and eat the way people do when there is much to do. We talk and our meals are our breaks from the day. I enjoy cooking and my skills as a cook are more important here. There aren’t many packaged foods to rely on so I have to make what we eat taste good. I don’t have my own spices yet from our storage container and I don’t know how to buy all the things I would like to cook with but my friend Don did bring me some real vanilla extract! I have found that I can get by and make good, healthy, bountiful meals, with much less than I am accustomed to. Still, I daydream sometimes about shopping in fully stocked super markets in a country with a well developed supply chain and taste for variety. It is the taste for variety that Argentines lack. They are satisfied with what they have. A friend told of an Argentine visitor who, upon discovering pears in his salad, refused to eat, explaining that fruit and salad don’t belong together. Having come from a culture that gets excited about new things, different things, I laughed when I heard that story. I still get excited about new things. Not even things I’ve never seen before, just things they’ve not had here before. Following is a list of things I’ll be excited to buy when they finally become available in stores around the city:

Soy Milk
Bottled Salad Dressing
Albacore and Ahi Tuna
White onions
Clean prepped spinach
fresh, sliced cheese in ready made packages
Cranberries
1/2 & 1/2
Big, fat scallops
Lamb chops
Big cereal boxes
OK big boxes of anything
Creamy yogurt with real fruit in it
Cottage cheese
Sour cream
Pecans
Tofu
Chocolate chips
Ziplock baggies - I know, that’s not food
Emergen-C
Oh I could go on....