Olives = Disgusting, yet Olive Oil = Delicious. Inexplicable.

Since it looks like I’ll be heading back to the 305 a little earlier than I expected (only until January! Don’t worry, good people of Argentina, I’ll be back!), now seems like a good time to share four new Miami-based blogs that I just discovered.

The first is Miami Dish, a very cool blog about Miami food and events, which I found via Twitter. (I still haven’t gotten around to learning how to use Twitter properly, and I was just about to abandon it when I saw a “tweet” by Miami Dish. Twitter, Miami Dish bought you another chance.)

The second, also found via Twitter, is Greener Miami. For being such a clean, stylish city (last spring, Forbes named it “the cleanest city in America“), Miami doesn’t make its green initiatives very obvious. Public transportation isn’t great, traffic is heavier than you’d think, and I’m pretty sure my building didn’t recycle a single bottle in the three and a half years I lived there. The more blogs like Greener Miami, the better, in my opinion - especially when you consider that, if Al Gore is right, and the sea level does rise, South Florida is one of the places with the most to lose.

Two others I found on Miami Dish’s blogroll:

Mango & Lime: another great food and restaurant blog. The recipe for portobello quesadillas looks pretty fantastic, and the restaurant reviews are great. When I get back to Florida, I’m sure I’ll be checking out this site a lot more often.

The South Florida Daily Blog: a useful aggregator of news stories, blog posts, discussions about all of South Florida. It was SFDB that directed me to this Sun-Sentinel news story about local businesses trying to silence critics on the Internet by suing them. (Just when I was starting to give Florida a little credit.)

The best guacamole in the world was created by Chef Scott Linquist at New York’s Dos Caminos. The rest of the food there is pretty fantastic, too, in my opinion. There are locations at 50th & 3rd, at Park between 26th & 27th, and at West Broadway & Houston.

You can find the recipe for the guacamole here, at Elizabeth Laney’s blog.

You can also find it at a bunch of other places by doing a Google search for it, but I’m linking to her blog because when I did the search, I not only found the guacamole recipe, but also her recipe for Gruyere Baked Grits, which looks tremendous, and which I plan to try this week.

This recipe is my own invention. I made it this morning for the first time in a while, and it was great. (The vegetarian initiative continues to evolve.)

You’ll need:

- 3 eggs
- 1 small tomato, cored, seeded, and chopped
- 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
- Some shredded mozzarella cheese
- Non-stick cooking spray (or butter, if cholesterol is not a concern)
- A little salt
- A little pepper
- A small bowl
- A fork
- A frying pan
- A spatula
- A plate

Here’s what you do:

In the small bowl, lightly beat the eggs with a fork for a few seconds. Mix in the tomato, garlic, and mozzarella. Cover the frying pan with cooking spray, and turn the burner on medium-high heat. Let the pan heat up for like 20-30 seconds. Pour the contents of the small bowl into the frying pan, and, using the spatula, push them back and forth in the pan until the eggs are done to your liking. Dump the eggs onto a plate, and season with salt and pepper, if seasoning with salt and pepper is your thing.

Buenos Aires has an empanada place on every corner. My favorite one is called Cümen-Cümen, on J.L. Borges & Guatemala. (There are two other locations, as well.)

The best thing on the menu is also the smallest and cheapest thing on the menu: the empanadita de dulce de leche. When eaten hot, it’s awesome.

My visits to Cümen-Cümen progressed like so:

Visit #1: “Por favor, una empanadita de dulce de leche”.

Visit #2: “Por favor, 3 empanaditas de dulce de leche”.

Visit #3: “Por favor, 12 empanaditas de dulce de leche – son para una fiesta.” (Yes, that was a total lie, and no, I didn’t eat them all at once. Y’know, no one likes to be judged.)

Most taxi rides in Buenos Aires are routine affairs. You get in, go from A to B, and get out. Nothing exciting - completely forgettable.

On the other hand, if you take enough cabs, you will have a few rides that are exceptionally memorable.

On one late-night taxi ride, I had a driver, who I’m pretty sure was drunk, talking at me in rapid-fire Castellano for the whole trip. He had no idea that I didn’t speak his language, and politely kept steady eye contact with me, breaking it only to make the sign of the cross and whisper a quick prayer each time we passed a church.

I was puzzled after the first prayer, but after it became clear that we would not be stopping for intersections, red lights, or pedestrians, I understood and was thankful for it. Rather than stop at these places, he would tap the horn a few times and speed through. I can’t complain, though. I made it home in record time, and I learned that I can continue to be a good listener even when I think I’m about to die.

Also, taxi drivers here speak English more often than you’d think. One morning, as my driver and I were sitting in rush hour traffic, the driver threw his hands up and said “Do you believe this? Same shit, different day. This traffic was the same shit yesterday. Always the same shit at this time!”

The traffic was, in fact, worse than usual because of a protest* going on, and he started to rant about the President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner: how she’s an idiot, doesn’t know anything about the country, doesn’t care about the people. And then he remarked, “But you know about that! You have Bush! He’s the same shit. The same shit as Kirschner. Everywhere, it’s always the same shit! What do you think about Bush?”

I let him know that I didn’t vote for Bush and quickly changed the subject to the weather, which, for July, was unseasonably warm. “This is our winter!” he said, “Do you believe this! Here, it’s this hot in the winter!** It’s very nice; look at what I’m wearing in the winter! Not like where you come from, right?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” I said, “I came here from Miami.”

“Oh!” he said, “it’s the same shit there! Always hot! Same shit as here!”

Yep.

But wait a second.

I think warm weather is nice. He had just said he thought so, too. I wouldn’t think of two places that have warm weather as having “the same shit”. Traffic problems - sure. Incompetent politicians - of course. But nice weather? I’d call that having “the same really good thing”.

And then I got it: he thought that “the same shit” simply meant “the same”.

He’d probably heard one of his passengers say “same shit, different day”, didn’t recognize the phrase, and, when he asked what it meant, was hastily told that it just meant “the same”.

I didn’t have it me to correct him, and I don’t mean to make fun of the guy, but I did tip him especially well because I knew I’d definitely get a lot of mileage out of this story.

*North American protesters should take a trip to South America to learn how protesting’s done. Here, you’ll find none of this “honk if you support workers’ rights” garbage. We get all-day events, parades with dozens of giant marching-band drums, abandoned trucks blocking major traffic arteries. One group came up with a catchy song and sang it from the back of a vegetable truck with a microphone, huge speakers, and full-band accompaniment. This is major-league protesting. I don’t how effective it is in terms of getting what they want, but, in terms of performance, these protesters commit.

**Not usually. If you’re coming in July or August, bring a coat. You’ll need it.

Okay. If you’re an American, the last couple of months have probably felt like you’ve been getting screwed by a rhinoceros unusually challenging times. I know this turn of events has added some extra excitement to my life.

There are some things you can do to make yourself feel better, though.

One of them is voting – but, in most states, you have to wait a few more weeks to do it (until Tuesday, November 4th), and it looks like that game is winding down a little early this year, anyway. (Let’s hear it for Florida!)

Still, please vote; it’s never a sure thing until the guy takes office. Especially if you live in Florida or Ohio.

The other, more immediately-gratifying thing you can do is eat panqueques con dulce de leche – one of Argentina’s most significant contributions world happiness:

If you’re in Buenos Aires, Miami, or New York, you should make your way to Novecento. I used to live across the street from the one in Brickell (Miami). Take my word for it on this one. Order the panqueques, with ice cream.

In the likely event that you don’t live in any of those places though, or, in the even more likely even that you’re on a budget, you’ve got to take a slightly longer road to get your panqueques.

First, go to Pip In the City, (the source of the picture above) and get her recipe. Pip has graciously provided it as a public service to the entire world.

Second, find someone who you love very much.

Next, find some way to get that person to make the panqueques for you.

Finally, eat the panqueques.

After taking these four simple steps, I guarantee you’ll feel much, much better about everything.

Buenos Aires is not, as far as I know, known for its great Chinese food. However, if you happen to be in the Las Cañitas neighborhood (which is where all the cool kids, including me, live), there’s a take-out only place called Min-Min which makes a mean chao mi fen con verduras (vegetable chow mei fun - like lo mein, but with very thin rice noodles). There are two nearly identical locations: one at Migueletes 623 and one at Olleros 1767. (There’s also a different, nice-looking Chinese place on Maure, but I haven’t tried that one yet - I’ll let you know when I do.)

Speaking of good Chinese takeout, if you happen to be in Miami, Florida, Kim’s Chinese Restaurant in South Beach (at 1245 Lincoln Road) is the best you’ll find, and it’s not bad at all. The only thing they don’t do very well is General Tso’s Chicken.

This leads me to my final recommendation of the morning: if you want the best General Tso’s Chicken in America (and, in all likelihood, all of the Americas) you have to go to New York, a fact that surely comes as no surprise. The place from which you have to order, though, may surprise you quite a bit. It’s called Wu Liang Ye (at 215 East 86th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues; there are also locations in midtown on Lexington Avenue and on West 48th Street - but I’ve never been to either of them), and it looks like a typical Manhattan Chinese place, which it pretty much is. Except for the all-white meat General Tso’s.

To get the best version, you can’t simply order the General Tso’s Chicken. You have to specifically ask for it with all white meat, and they’ll do it for you, no questions asked. The difference is striking, and I expect thank-you notes from the people who take my advice on this one. I mean, I’m telling you about life-changing General Tso’s here.

At the end of May, one of my best friends got married, and at his wedding I learned that he had become a vegetarian. Actually, he had told me this about a year earlier, but since he lived in Washington, DC and I lived in Miami, I had kind of forgotten, and I didn’t really believe him until I saw him turn away the surf and turf – which was excellent – at his own wedding dinner.

The man became a vegetarian as a result of his becoming a doctor. Apparently there were things he learned in med school that convinced him that meat-free was the way to go. Plus, he’s always been a dog person, which I believe had some bearing on his decision as well.

At around the same time as the wedding, my sister got a new baby dachshund. Her (the dog’s) name is Madison:

The pup’s got personality, and is even more adorable in real life, if you can believe it. So I grew kind of attached to little Madison.

Now, obviously, I would never eat a dog, and I would flip out in a major way if anyone I knew told me that he or she had just eaten dog for dinner last night. But this got me thinking: cows, pigs, and most other animals have personalities, too. People give them names, keep them as pets, take them to the vet, talk to them in baby-talk voices, and all that.

I ate them. Regularly. In huge quantities.

You can see where I’m going with this. Like countless nine-year-olds who get their first dog, cat, or hamster, I felt like a criminal for eating animals, who, had they been a little luckier, could have lived happy lives as people’s pets. Also, I had the expert advice of a close friend who was (and is still) walking the vegetarian walk. So I, too, decided to become a vegetarian.

Unfortunately, about a month after I made this decision (and I had stuck to it for the whole month!), I moved to Buenos Aires.

This is a place where, by my estimate, 90% of the restaurants are steakhouses. So I caved. Over the past few months, I’ve eaten an obscene amount of steak (more than at any previous point in my life). The best was at Cabaña Las Lilas in Puerto Madero.

(You don’t have to my word for it, though, check out this write-up by the New York Times from 2006, part of a piece called “Meals Worth the Price of a Plane Ticket” – pay no attention to the prices, however. Because Argentina’s continuing inflation problem, everything has gotten dramatically more expensive, on the order of 2 - 3X, since the review was written.)

Las Lilas provided perhaps the best meal I’ve ever eaten in my life. No joke. I had the “lomo” (beef tenderloin), but I would imagine that everything else there is pretty spectacular, too.

People have said that the restaurant is touristy, overrated, and overpriced. Touristy, maybe (I managed to find it, after all), but it is, without question, rated appropriately, and it would be well worth a visit at twice the price (which it almost certainly will be by this time next year).

Buenos Aires is also a place in which supermarkets sell a 12 oz. cut of Angus beef for the same price as a cup of Ramen noodles (AR$5.00 or about US$1.55; you can check the current exchange rate here).

If you’re living here, and you do decide to go the supermarket route, I can recommend no better recipe than Patent and the Pantry’s Balsamic Steaks. I’ve made them like five times since I’ve been here. The taste-to-effort ratio on this recipe is ridiculously high. Virtually no effort for a fantastic meal. When you’re finished cooking, your plate will look like this:

(That’s not my picture, it’s Gwendolyn Richards’, but the plate really will look like that. Mine did. If this woman hasn’t already published a cookbook, she really should.)

The bad news is that these recommendations - of a steakhouse and an easy, delicious recipe for cooking steak - come with a surprise ending. That picture of Madison has gotten to me again, and I am trying to be healthier. I’m giving vegetarianism another shot. That’s right. I’m going to do it incrementally this time. Red meat will be the first thing to go.

I just can’t look at pictures like this one:

without thinking that somewhere, someone thinks that it would be perfectly normal to kill poor little Madison and eat her, and that I might be doing the same thing to an animal that’s just like someone else’s loving, loyal pet.

But I don’t mean to stop you from enjoying the recommendations I’ve just provided. I’m serious. Go ahead. Do whatever you want.