April Fools!!!

Yesterday’s post might have weirded out some of you but I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching lately. You know what? I feel great!! I stayed up into the early hours of today discussing with my wife, plus a few phone calls to friends and family, on how to combat the various demons inside of me. What a relief! I feel as if I’ve unbuckled a backpack with a ton of bricks off my shoulders. What’s the great news?

I’M GOING VEGETARIAN!! Seriously! No, really!

Well, at least for a year just to try things out. That’s the time table that we all thought would be appropriate for me figure out where I want to head in life with regards to my overall diet. Strange huh? Now, I’m sure this comes as a disappointment to many of you, that’s an understatement, but I sincerely hope that you understand how important all of this is for me. It’s a personal challenge that I truly need to overcome.

I’m also sure you are wondering what will become of this site, but fear not my friends. All of the previous posts and images will remain. That is the past and there is no need to do away with a wealth of information that could still benefit so many. Also, there are so many tasty vegetables and grains that can be cooked on the parrilla, so perhaps I can sway this site toward a theme of vegetarian asado. Chimichurri is vegetarian so I can continue to post many different versions of those as well.

Now when I see beef shortages and people crying about the high prices of meat I won’t have to shed a tear. Not even one ounce of guilt will enter my mind.

Whew, I feel so good to get this off of my chest. This morning I had an absolutely fantastic wheat germ and goji berry shake. I feel a whole new energy already!

April Fools!!!

-Well my plans to update the design of this site and a few other things have been squashed for the past three weeks due to my ISP screwing over all of its customers down here with connection speeds slightly better than what I had with Compuserve back in ‘93. So while I’m sitting here flushing money down my crapper because I can’t really work and waiting for the new ISP to connect–already a week late, you’ll just have to put up with my foul mood.

-Thankfully none of that farm mess happening up north has affected us much down here. Sure the shelves that hold milk and flour were filled halfway for a few days but beef was always in good supply. Felt just a little guilty filling up homemade flour tortillas with marinated flank steak or carving into a fat colita de cuadril while everyone up Buenos Aires had to dine on pasta. Ok, nothing to laugh at but why not add a little levity to this horrible situation. Hopefully this mess is will be sorted out. Was quite saddening last week to see thousands of liters of milk being dumped when there are tons of schools with no funds to buy milk or bread for their students no matter what the agricultural situation is.

-This past Thursday, a post over at Serious Eats’ Slice inspired me to finally give the 24-hour slow rise a shot for pizza dough. I’ve heard about this method for years, it’s a key to great bread, but just never really followed through with it. Not sure why, maybe because I never plan for pizza, it’s just a spur of the moment craving on any given day; and it has to be made or ordered on that day. So, after reading that post and the comments that followed, I jumped out of my chair and got to work. Actually from the start I liked this method. No warming water. No 5-15 minute wait for the yeast to start burping away in its warm bath. Just mix, knead, and toss in the fridge. Come Friday I was quite happy with not having to do all of the previous tasks. Although I pulled the dough out of the fridge two hours ahead of time, it was still quite cool to the touch but I could wait no longer. However, as the author mentioned, the dough was notably much more pliable and easier to work with than same day dough. Into the oven the pie went with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and a split of half ham/half cantimpalo. (My wife always has to have ham pizza….) No pizza stone at the moment so this was pan pizza. A few minutes before removal, a sprinkling of minced fresh parsley and garlic.

Wow, what a difference in both taste and texture from what I normally make. Granted, the dough should have been kneaded a bit longer and pulled out of the fridge earlier but, still, the crust was quite robust and fluffy. I believe this method will be the norm from now on.

There I was, this past Sunday, in the process of laying out about 5kg of meat when, POW (plus a few clinks), the rack started to list at 30 degrees to port. A bolt that clamped a chain/clamp assembly to the winch appeared loose. After frantic attempts to tighten the bolt, while preventing my arm from becoming brazo a la parrilla, it was determined that the grooves in the clamp stressed out a bit. Heat does that to you. “Let’s try this,” one suggested, and a minute later, after hammering a screw in between the clamp and winch shaft (hammers work so well at fixing stuff), things were back in order. After around 2.5 fear-filled hours–I didn’t even dare to raise or lower the grill–the asado was served. For now, the parrilla is out of commission until I can find a replacement part and disassemble all of the grease splattered parts. Sigh…more smoking.

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Yet another reminder for those who keep shelving the idea of traveling to Argentina to sample some beefy beef. Hurry up! In a few years I’ll be writing about how to grill a 2 kilo slab of soy sh*t. Maybe not. But seriously, don’t be surprised if sometime in the near future that grass-fed beef you were expecting turns out to be super greasy feedlot garbage seasoned with a heavy dose of hormones and antibiotics. [links from Estanciero Mike]

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“I’ve never been to Tierra Del Fuego but I know it’s cold and there are a lot of penguins” -random Buenos Aires native

“You live in Tierra Del Fuego? That’s like right next Antarctica right?” - a bunch of people around the world

I created Argentinax.com(I think it was a former pron site before I scooped it up) to expose a little bit of my surroundings for anyone interested but then it fell by the wayside. Part of that was due to lame exposure like a crappy image link on the right column here plus maybe a link or two in posts. (The daily traffic has always been about about one visitor less than this site, which means one visitor per day) Nor did I put much of anything into it. Just a few photos every month or so with little commentary. Of course, the main goal was to post something simple like photos but time, procrastination, and weather kind of ruined it all. Also I might add, some posts that were better suited over there, ended up here thus ruining the focus of asadoargentina.com. So, what to do and why the hell am I talking about penguins?

Well, once again, I heard about a comment related to penguins swarming all over Tierra Del Fuego. Like there are some waddling around in my backyard at this moment or that I have to swerve around them while driving.

Also, I was talking to someone a while back who couldn’t believe there are flamingos down here in summer. Yes, flamingos. They aren’t all hanging out with Crockett and Tubbs up in Miami you know.

(Sorry for this poor excuse of an image. Those pink pixels are flamingos standing way beyond a fence in the middle of a large pond. I really need to get a digital SLR with a good lens.)

So, I want to expand upon my original idea with ArgentinaX, posting about my surroundings to let others know what it’s like down here, but also a few other things. At times, as I’ve done here on occasion, I want to write about something totally unrelated to the focal points of these two sites. Just “blog” about anything that may interest me. Cover other local foods. Post a Youtube link. I don’t know, but in a way where things are separated to an extent, yet integrated as well. Similar to various blog networks out there but on a much much smaller scale with content updated on a whenever basis–like how I am now.

I hesitated on posting this because I’m getting tired of the whole “sorry I haven’t been posting for a while but I promise blah blah blah” pitch that all of us “bloggers” give from time to time. Pssst, the busy excuse is code for feeling lazy, burned out, or “I have better things to do.” Like many of my other ideas, if it works out it works out. (If I’ll even follow through) If not, don’t worry I still love working on this site even if I don’t post that often.

First of all, a belated Happy New Year to everyone and many thanks to all who took the time to read through my poor writing and/or offered their comments and opinions throughout these years!

There are many things I need to take care of this year that I didn’t do on the last one so we’ll see where that goes. The custom-built smoker was taken care of but the home-brewing idea fell by the wayside and that can’t happen this year. Speaking of smoking, many thanks as well to those who offered tips on taking care of my pork shoulder/butt problems. After some serious fighting with my conscious I left some of those chunks of meat to smoke away until the right temp for pulled pork. They came out so well that they practically fell into shreds on their own.

Speaking of smoking again, I’m extremely impressed with quebracho blanco as a smoking wood. So much so that I still haven’t tried quebracho colorado and lenga.
Also, everyone else was quite impressed at our New Years Eve feast.

There was a little chopped pork left over so I did a quick stir-fry along with red onions, green bell peppers, grated carrots, and a splash of Dale’s sauce that I picked up on my recent trip to the States. Mmm mmm, the meat came out like fried bacon. I came across Dale’s years ago when I lived in Alabama and I think it is mostly available at stores in the Southeast U.S. Maybe that has changed. Anyway, the stuff is awesome. A concentrated soy sauce mixture that fully marinates meat in 15 minutes–no more or else it’ll be too salty. If you haven’t tried it but can buy it, do so!

One last thing. Due to my primitive category system and the current design of this site, some posts are a bit buried and hard to find. I’m in the middle of creating a site map with all of the posts linked on one page.

Just popping in to give a heads up to those looking for round wooden plates. Ignacio was nice enough to drop a comment with a link to a Mercado Libre seller. (thanks for that!)

http://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-31913740-platos-de-madera-calden-regalo-de-navidad-20-cm-_JM

Looking at the description and comments, I take it that the seller will ship to pretty much anywhere.

In other news, my connection has been horrible this week with total outage on Wednesday and part of Thursday. Someone in-the-know told me that the ISP gods up north literally don’t give a flying @$!# about us islanders. I honestly don’t know why because the demand is definitely here–there’s actually a waiting list with the competitor Speedy–which really isn’t a better option but oh well(they offer up to 2 megs too). Maybe, like many others, they think 100 people reside here and we all rub seal fat on our skins and eat whale meat, when in fact this city alone has almost 70,000 people. The GDP per capita, puts this province at something like #2, right below Buenos Aires city–alright, that doesn’t mean much but why not toss it out there.

Anyway, all of this has put me in a sour mood and if you think my writing already sucks, you don’t want to see anything new at this moment. Since the weather has been great, I figured fishing would be the best next option to fill my time since I can’t get any real work done. Well, I haven’t caught a damn thing this season and that’s putting me down even more.

So it’s time to put all of that aside and enjoy the coming holiday. If I’m not around until then, Merry Xmas!, happy holidays, or have a nice Monday/Tuesday if you are just going to go about your daily life as usual.

…enough with the fancy pants “steak” cuts

If anyone out there still reads this site, we’ve spent the past three weeks visiting and vacationing with various family members. Time goes too fast and eventually one has to get back into the ‘ol routine. Sucks. Too bad. Oh well. I was able to clear my head a bit and am quite inspired to try out a few new things on different fronts.

For any who sent e-mails and comments, I pretty much unplugged myself(so refreshing to do that) except for some spot checks. I’ll sort all of that out in the next few days. Just popping in for now but maybe I’ll bore you with some bits about our trip next time!

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Update:

Ok, after consulting with Dave, the creator of Spam Karma, everything should be fine now after resetting a few things. This was all due to my major screwup while upgrading Wordpress recently. Basically, I should have called the electrician at the time instead of shoving a screwdriver into the electrical outlet to see if I could fix it myself. Everything looked fine on the surface but I short-circuited a few wires. Read that as do not attempt to rebuild tables in MYSQL yourself when you do not know what you’re dealing with. Anyway, if anyone has a problem commenting in the future please let me know. And do give Spam Karma a try if you use Wordpress and have a spam problem.

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My Skynet version of anti-spam comment blocking has been wrongly nuking some comments from those who enter blogspot.com blogs into the url field. Some babies may have been thrown out with the bath water because of the recent upgrade or my mass deleting (I get spamed a lot). If your comment didn’t appear please let me know. I’ve relaxed the rules a bit but if your comment does not appear immediately after posting please let me know here. Just in case I miss it.

In case you didn’t know, Google has a nifty custom search engine beta going on that anyone can use. Basically you can create your own little search engine that focuses on topics or specific sites that you like. It’s very cool. Anyway, every day I perform various searches related to Argentina and after a while I get tired of using the site: command to seek out information of the same topic on different sites. Today I thought why not just create a Google CSE? So I did. I took part of the list of blogs over at Bloggers in Argentina to test things out at first.

Let’s say I want to search for Palermo restaurants. Just for example purposes, the top results are a bunch of blogs or travel guides basically stating that Palermo has great restaurants. But that’s not what I want. I want to view some blogs or travel guides that actually review restaurants. Luckily enough, I can add a tag to each site in the search engine that covers this topic. For example, Buenostours.com, Argentinastravel.com, and Saltshaker.net get tagged with dining. So if I search for Palermo restaurants, all I have to do is click on the dining link at the top of the results to receive refined results that give priority to–or only list–these sites that offer dining reviews. Not 100% perfect but still good.

Still needs a lot of work, but there is enough to play around with at the moment for building ideas. This started out as something for me to use personally but I figured why not let others use it as well. The stats only show popular queries and how many queries performed by time/date in case you are worried about privacy.

This isn’t an attempt to steal BIA’s show, btw, that was just a good list to start from. Plus, I won’t be listing what sites I have included and I’ll be adding non-blogs as well.

If you want to try it out you can go here search.argentinax.com

That redirects to the actual URL of http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=007078810743690362250%3Aatijtfg02fg , which is a tad bit hard to remember. I just created this yesterday, so it’ll take a bit of time to fix up. Let me know if you like it or have any ideas.

If anyone tried to post a comment since yesterday and it hasn’t appeared yet, please try again.

Sighhhhh….what a day

The sh*t hit the fan on upgrading to the latest version of WordPress.

Lessons learned…

1. Make sure you are paying attention.

2. When they say turn off all plugins before upgrading, turn off ALL plugins.

3. Do not jury rig WordPress in such a way that sooner or later things are bound to go seriously wrong.

Well after cleaning out the rigging of the backup DB, moving that DB to another server, installing a fresh out of the box unrigged previous version of WordPress, upgrading both WP and the plugins, and fixing a few kinks here and there, I think everything is back to normal!!