Allie loves the ferias!

Wednesday and Saturday are feria days in Santa Cruz, making them my favorite days of the week! A feria is like a wonderfully cheap and not at all pretentious farmers' market. While this might not be true for Valparaiso, or any of the larger Chilean cities, the vendors here in Santa Cruz are incredibly friendly and honest. A few of them know me by name (La Senorita Allie!) and one even has his own nickname for me (Mi Riena, or My Queen! I love it!) Ferias are by far my favorite thing about Chile.

Look what I got today for less than $10 US!



That's right. Avocados, spinach, arugula, carrots, corn, bell peppers, chili peppers, garlic, potatoes, tomatoes, chives, squash, and a dozen of the best free range eggs I've ever had. The amazing deal of the day was 4 little red bell peppers for 100 pesos or 20 cents! Wow!

Chile has better and cheaper food than any place I've ever been. The food culture and cuisine on the other hand.... well, they leave something to be desired. But the raw ingredients! Oh, the raw ingredients! And for these prices? Incredible.

I've taken my stay in Chile as an opportunity to cook with ingredients that are pricey in the states and experiment like I've never been able to afford to before. For example, cold peach ginger soup, gazpacho, blackberry bars, fresh tomato sauce, blueberry pie, strawberry corn muffins....

In the US I would never throw a perfect fresh peach into a blender. Here, at about 20 cents per pound, I can afford to do whatever I'd like with them. This has been great because I've been able to figure out which recipes will really be worth mangling my $5/pound fruit when I get back to the US, and which yield a result no more pleasurable than eating the fruit on its own. (Cold peach ginger soup is a keeper, my friends!)

Not pictured in the above photo of my bounty is one ear of corn that was already given to this floppy tongued little monster to mangle till his heart's content:



Take me seriously when I tell you that a full ear of corn is the best and cheapest dog toy ever. There are just so many different layers to enjoy! It takes the dogs literally days to work through one of these. At 100 pesos (20 cents) each, they are quite a deal.

Oh, and Bella likes fruit and veg too! I think that she is the only dog I've ever known that could happily be a vegetarian. You don't even want to know how many peaches and avocados she ate one day when we stupidly left her home alone with easy access to the fruit basket... And then the puppy ate all the pits! And.... messiness ensued. End of story.




Besos,
Allie