Adventures in Crepeing

As of last Sunday I had been sick for the past two and a half weeks.  I had spent this time mostly consuming tea, soup, vinegar and broth, so when I finally felt better it seemed that a good way to celebrate my renewed health was with something decidedly unhealthy:  Nutella and banana crepes.

We’ve been talking about them for awhile now and they turned out to be everything we imagined and more.  Unfortunately, neither of our cameras were working at the time, so I don’t have any pictures, but I’m sure we’ll be repeating the meal many times in the coming weeks.  In fact, crepes in general will probably be showing up on the table much more often seeing as we found out that you can make them with rice flour as easily as with wheat.  (I finally get to eat pancake-like foods again!)

Though we’d been meaning to try making crepes for awhile, we never got around to it until one afternoon when we found out that a former roommate in my sister’s apartment was returning to claim her refrigerator.  We had half a side of salmon – which we figured wouldn’t last long in the open air – as well as some butter and milk that also needed to be consumed.  So I mixed up some crepe batter, sliced an avocado, sautéed some onions and whipped up some spicy mayo while my sister’s boyfriend cooked half the remaining fish.   We originally bought the salmon for sushi and it was so tasty that we ate half the crepes prepared with raw salmon and half with cooked.  Most of us preferred the cooked salmon crepes, but only because they were even more savory than the uncooked ones (which were pretty amazing to begin with).

Just North of Santiago’s city central (Plaza de Armas) is El Mercado Central, the city’s fish market.  It’s a huge building whose core is a big room filled with tables for customers of the surrounding seafood restaurants.  These restaurants are surrounded on three sides by large hallways filled with raw seafood vendors.  These hallways are in turn surrounded by chicken, beef and cheese vendors with external storefronts.  I avoided the seafood restaurants because I have yet to find a restaurant in Santiago with both really good food and good prices, but immediately felt at home amidst the raw seafood vendors.  On our first trip there I bought reinetas (some kind of white meat fish, similar to tilipia but a little more fatty) for fish tacos, then returned a couple days later for the salmon.  They charge by the kilo, but you can’t purchase in units smaller than a whole side of fish, so I got a full fillet (a little over a foot long) for about 3USD.  And, oh my, was it tasty.

Since then, we’ve returned for more salmon, but there are still a number of things I want to try, especially the eel (does anyone know how to cook that?) and the octopus (once I figure out how to prep a whole octopus).  In addition to that they sell clams, mussels, shrimp and more.  So if you’ve got any good seafood recipes send them my way!