Food and Comfort

A neighbor of ours in Chile, who is an artist, lives ten kilometers up a stony road in a house he built by hand out of dreams and trees. He is caring by himself for a sick loved one, and the little community along our dirt road in the country has come together as a team—a spontaneous, supportive equipo—to lend a hand. The deer farmers on the lake bring flowers and fresh asparagus and offer transport. The wife of a rodeo rider up the road brings over firewood. The local shaman—who's also a trained anesthesiologist—stops by daily, and another neighbor has been sending over home-cooked meals for the vegetarian patient three times a day.

Today, the rain is greening the spring hillsides and shaking the apple blossoms, and I'm making up a pot of Chilean comfort food—carne mechada. It's pot roast in another language, and it's delicious—a blend of beef, onion, peppers, and cumin that tastes like home.

It's really like a combination of pot roast and chili with shredded beef. Here in Chile, they often make it with Punta de Ganso, one of many mysterious cuts of beef in this far-distant farm country. I've had to buy the equivalent of the Big Book of Chilean Meat  to make heads or tails—literally—of what's in the butcher shops. But near as I can tell, Punta de Ganso is a lot like bottom round with a cooler name. It makes great carne mechada.

Every grandma from Venezuela to Chile has her own recipe for it, and here's mine. I hope it brings some warmth and comfort to our neighbors and good friends when we share it with them in the coming days.

Carne Mechada

1 1/2 kilos Punta de Ganso, or 3 lbs. bottom round
1 large onion, sliced
1/4 bottle dry red wine
4 bay leaves
2 cloves garlic, smashed
2 carrots
Salt and pepper

For the sauce:
2 tbs. olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
1 red pepper, chopped
12-oz. can tomatoes
1 tbs. Worcestershire sauce
1 tbs. basil
2 tsp. cumin
Salt and pepper

1. Place meat in a large pot with onions, carrots, bay leaves and garlic. Add red wine and water to cover. Simmer for three hours until the meat pulls apart easily with a fork.

2. In a large saucepan, heat the olive oil and saute the chopped onions and peppers until soft. Add the rest of the sauce ingredients and simmer together for 30 minutes.

3. Remove the meat from the pot and shred it with two forks. Add the shredded meat to the sauce and stir together. Add the basil, cumin and salt and pepper to taste.

Pot Luck

Some of the best things in life are accidents. You take a chance, follow your nose, not sure how things are going to turn out — but that's the adventure. I'm a city girl, but I ended up part of the year on a farm in the south of Chile. We're talking sheep, dirt roads, ox carts, pickup trucks, and pigs at the local pool parties. Like Green Acres, in Spanish.

I'm a cook, too, and a long-time student of The Silver Palate, Chez Panisse and Gourmet cooking bibles. Give me a recipe, and I can cook just about anything — as long as I can forage for in- and out-of-season ingredients, no matter how rare or obscure, at my neighborhood Whole Foods, Safeway or Molly Stones.

Ah, that's the challenge. We do have supermercados here in Chile, in our small town at the bottom of the world, but what's available depends on the day of the week, the weather, the haul of the fishing boats and the luck of the farmer. You just never know.

The day before yesterday, for example, on a late-winter September day in the Southern Hemisphere, I was browsing the local produce aisle for inspiration, daydreaming about broccolini, bok choy, arichokes, and haricots verts. But what I actually found in the bins were four simple, seasonal vegetables: pumpkins, carrots, onions and leeks.

So I roasted them up, found some chicken stock, wine, cumin, rosemary and a bit of Parmesan in my kitchen, found an apple in the fruit bowl for a little sweetness, found my hand blender in the back of a drawer and stirred up a pot of Found Soup, just the thing to take the chill off a Chilean winter evening.

Found Soup

2 onions, sliced
4 medium chunks of fresh, seeded pumpkin
1 lb. carrots
1 apple, quartered
2 leeks
1 tbs. butter
1 tbs. olive oil
1 tsp. cumin
1 tbs. rosemary
2 cups chicken stock
1 quart water
Finely grated Parmesan cheese (or a Parmesan rind, if you have one)
1 cup wine, white or red (or both)
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. On a baking sheet, toss the onions, pumpkin, carrots and apple with olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast until soft and browned. Melt the butter with the olive oil in a large soup pot. Saute the leeks until softened. Add the roasted vegetables, chicken stock and water. Puree with a hand blender. Add the Parmesan and bring to a simmer. Add the cumin, rosemary, wine, salt and pepper to taste. Add anything else that will make it delicious.