At the beginning of each year, I do a writeup of the past one – usually a look at four areas – Casa SaltShaker, Eating Out, Vacations, and Cooking at Home. I take a look at the high points and low points. It often takes me days of figuring it all out. 2020 didn’t take near so long to do.
Let’s start with Casa SaltShaker, as usual. We served up a whopping 27 dinners, to a near uncountable 258 people, at our shared table between January 2 and March 14. That was on track for our “typical” year, which would have come out around 130 dinners and somewhere around 1300 people. I think my two favorite dishes were a sous vide chicken breast served with spicy-sweet eggplant piri kara, and a passionfruit syrup cake with strawberry puree, shiso syrup, and white chocolate olive oil mousse.
Later in the year we did some takeout and delivery food over the course of quite a few weekends, of a much more casual style, and also baked a lot of bread for people. A lot of bread. The most ordered – our English muffins and our Peruvian pan de manteca (lard bread) – both types of breads that weren’t available here in Buenos Aires.
Easy picks on the two favorite delivery dishes, given that they were the two that I got repeated requests to make them again. Parmesan and mustard crusted chicken with mashed potatoes and green beans; and veal goulash with parsley spaetzle.
It also wasn’t hard to pick the least favorite. Everyone liked the flavors of the artichoke, pancetta, pistachio, and fontina cheese lasagna, but everyone, including us, agreed that it came out too dry. One of those dishes to be played with down the line and improved!
On the eating out front, it’s pretty easy, since we didn’t get to that many new spots. The opening of BA’s first real dim sum parlor, Royal Mansion, was the solid front runner for best new place we tried.
I foolishly declared 2020 “The Year of the Parrilla”, with full intention to try out a bunch of steakhouses around the city that have been languishing on my “to try” list for eons. Yeah, that worked out.
On the travel side, well, there was only one weekend getaway to São Paulo back in January. Highlights included a day spent at the nearby Santos beach, a visit to the city’s aquarium, a day trip to the huge street art fair in the Embu das Artes suburbs, and an afternoon spent with my former Brazilian cooking teacher, Eduardo, who moved back there years ago.
Food-wise, though we had a fascinating experience at the famed D.O.M., it just wasn’t as tasty as either of us would have liked – yet another of those high end dining temples where too much is about the experience and show versus the pleasure of the food. For the second out of three trips, I think our joint favorite two places and dishes were the spicy chicken giblets at Academia de Gula and the baião de dois rice and beans dish at Macaxeira Itaim.
Though, personally, I think my overall favorite dish of the weekend was the duck breast dish at Jiquitaia. Henry liked the rice part of the dish, but the duck was too rare for his tastes.
Home cooking… like everyone in quarantine, I started out with lofty goals to try out lots of recipes. Of course, that didn’t take into account a lot of things, like ingredient access as we found ourselves limited on when and where we could go to get things, let alone places that were simply closed down; and, how long it went on here (although for the most part we’re allowed going out pretty much anywhere, there are still some restrictions in place, almost ten months on – like no intercity travel, nor any international travel).
I think, hands down my favorite dish was the Moroccan chicken bake, Djaj Matisha Mesla, with its flavors of tomato, honey, and toasted almonds.
I really got into making Asian savory pancakes, particularly variations on Korean kimchijeon and haemul pajeon, and more Japanese okonomiyaki than I care to count.
I also kind of fell in love with an Argentine classic braised steak dish, bifes a la criolla.
I brought up in my appeal post a couple of days ago, about a couple of home repair disasters and robberies that occurred over the last months. Despite the travails, we’re still here, still strong, and with the generosity of friends, family, and even several readers and customers over the past week, we were able to dig ourselves out of the hole of the two robberies and at least put ourselves back to where paying for the home repairs just took out our “rainy day fund”, but hey, that’s what those funds are for, and we’ll rebuild it. As… I’ll get to in the next post, we ended up rebuilding our kitchen and our small bathroom. A huge thank you to all of you who contributed!
