Empanadas

The hotel knows I like empanadas, and twice, they sent up a couple of warm ones to my room for supper. Apparently, the maître d was rather shocked one evening when I wanted only pumpkin soup.

Noticing that I crawl to morning briefings with only coffee and rejecting everything else, they've begun to try rotating figs (done in all manner), grilled potato cubes, hash browns, pain au chocolat and granola and fruit parfait, just to see which ones I'll eat. They quietly place the items at the side. I've been nibbling! How to reject hash browns?! I wonder why the hotel keep trying to feed me. Do I look stick thin? My error-free digital weighing scale reads 46.3kg. That's a 3kg sustained weight loss from the start of the trip. By the end of this trip, the weighing scale is likely to read 44kg.

Most nights, I'm too tired to eat anything else on the fancy menu. The brain has begun to conjure up images of sambal and ikan bilis. The serious cravings for sambal-anything have kicked in badly. So with the memory of sambal, nothing else compares. The fries for lunch the other day had NO CHILLI SAUCE to go with it. Only tabasco. Pathetic.

I really like these savory empanadas. Especially those filled with crunchy bits, onions and mushrooms. I understand the ones with meat fillings are awesome too, best sort of munchies with alcohol. But I prefer mine with no meat. I'm not too sure about the ones sweet-filled sort with prunes and raisins. But I figured they would be very similar to hamataschens which I like a fair bit. There're various styles of empanadas and I want to try them all!

Yah, empanadas are the non-spicy Latin American version of our Southeast Asian curry puffs. Buenos Aires does them Tucuman style with a cosmopolitan spread of fillings. Next week's crazy itinerary will see me in many other provinces in the country, except the one area I want to go- Patagonia. SIGH. In the provinces, I'm going to eat ONLY empanadas and NOTHING else.