But you know, there are a lot of things in my life vying for being the straw to break that camel's back, like my SLOOOWWWWW tablet and/or wifi. Just trying to type what I'm looking for into google can take a minute or more. But this is a constant, and it only bears repeating because I am incurably impatient.
I found a recipe, and planned out my shopping list accordingly. While I'd love to go to my sweet little green grocer lady (who gave me a little Nativity scene ornament for Christmas, because GOD are Chileans NICE!), I have hardly any cash, and I doubt she accepts credit cards, plus it's a tiny shop, and I needed more than just a few veggies she may very well be out of. Which brought me to the Santa Isabel grocery store right around the corner.
It's a small grocery store, so it won't always have the selection one would like. But I was (naively) confident it would have all I needed for these spicy mayo burgers.
I was doing ok until I, as usual, went to read the ingredient list on the surprising selection of mayo they have, because if there's one thing Chileans love besides avocado and bread, it's mayonaise. I wasn't hoping to find a real mayo like it might be possible to find in, say, Whole Foods (and I say MIGHT!), but one with minimal ingredients. Which quickly turned into one without soy oil as the first or second ingredient. To (over?)simplify, soy is bad for the thyroid, so I avoid it when possible, or just use it sparingly. Which was not the case with my wall of mayo. I was pacing in front of them, telling the bottles and bags that this country is unbelievable in English, which is my custom in the grocery store. Really, my talking aloud in frustration to the products in Chilean grocery stores is as normal to me as standing in line at the register to pay, staring in disgust at the fucking weird braided mullet the male cashier paid someone to do to his hair. In essense, food is my therapist.
While thus pacing and griping, the thought of just making the mayonaise myself occurred to me, particularly because I have the ingredients necessary to do so. So I decided that once I got home, I'd force myself to finally do what so many others before me have done (and I always think of Mercedes when we were in college who did this BY HAND), and make my own damned mayonaise.
Of course, first I had to go home with all of the other ingredients I needed for the burgers. It was toward the end of my list when I had to decide if "salsa" is the same as "limon" here, meaning it stands for at least 2 different things. Lemons and limes are both limons. I wasn't sure if the tomato sauce section included both sauce and paste, but one thing they ALL included was tomato juice from concentrate, plus additional sugar and salt, and any other number of questionable ingredients, by which I mean questionable regardless of being in Spanish or English. Naturally, this pissed me off more, because while I know that premade isn't ideal, sometimes you don't want to make this stuff yourself.
And that's the rub, really. I often made my own chicken soup/broth, but sometimes I'd run out and still have a recipe I needed it for. In the US, you go to almost any grocery store and you can get SOME soup/broth in a can at least, though your larger stores will have better options in a carton. They don't have canned soup or liquid soup, actually, ready-made in Chile. The soup section of every store I've been to has been a wall of small packets. It's one thing to make soup using boullion; it's another to make soup out of mainly chemicals and wheat. Every last packet of soup, even if it was just supposed to be vegetable broth, contains wheat. It's actually one of the first 3 ingredients in all of them. Which, if you've been following along at home, you'll know that I'm supposed to avoid THAT shit as well. It's getting to the point where you see wheat as an ingredient in so much shit here that doesn't need it, that I wouldn't be surprised to find that they're pumping it into the smog we're breathing.
In the end, I couldn't let myself buy tomato sauce with all the other stuff, especially as I still have a tomato at home. So I took my stuff up to pay.
Which was going fine until we got to the palta (can I just type this? I don't think in Spanish or say anything-po, but when I think of avocados, I think palta. And it's shorter). Most of the stuff I get in the produce section doesn't need to be weighed, but apparently the 2 paltas did. It should be immediately understood that the registers don't have scales, because that would make life a little bit faster and easier, and that is NOT what buying shit in Chile is all about. No, it's about waiting in various lines in one store and employing a person in different parts of the store to do separate things. So I had to take the avocados back to be weighed.
Which brings us to the other thing Chileans LOVE with all their might: plastic bags. They want everything in at least one plastic bag, but the more the better. And the cherry on top is to either tape that bag closed, or tie it in a tight knot that no human can again untie. I had 2 paltas; that was it. I surprised the scale girl by telling her I didn't need a plastic bag.
But it turns out, I did. Or at least the guy at the register did. When I gave him the avocados and the scale sticker, he looked confused and asked me about the plastic bag. I told him I didn't want one, so then he wanted to know why she hadn't given me one. Eventually i thought maybe he thought I'd only had 1 weighed, and only the plastic bag would give him the confidence he needed to know they'd both been weighed? I'm not sure; I only know that he began calling to people across the store to have a fucking pow-wow at his register over these 2 avocados, THE LAST TWO THINGS I WAS BUYING. I was unable to comprehend, never mind peacefully and beatifically just smile as 4 Chileans tried to find meaning when there wasn't a plastic bag to give them one.
Thankfully, it only took all four of them 2 minutes' discussion to allow him to finally total it all up and let me pay. The dude had one more surprise for me: he spoke some English. He said to me in English that it wasn't his fault-- the girl had weighed them with the wrong code, so it was her fault. His words. Naturally I didn't much care; I just wanted to take my groceries home and rectify my sober situation at once.
Which I will do, now that I have finally made my very first batch of mayonaise. And why is it green? Because I needed a refined vegetable oil without a strong flavor (so no EVOO), and a lot of it. The bottle of grapeseed oil fit the bill. Interesting note: when I was in Argentina at a winery, they asked if anyone had ever heard of grapeseed oil, and explained it like it's a rare secret we're getting a privileged preview of. Really? That stuff was the shit in like 1999, right? Yes, I've heard of it. And since Chile has lots of grapes due to wine, there is PLENTY of grapeseed oil, cheap. The oil is green, hence my mayo is a little green. But it's SUPPPPPPER smooth & tasty and creamy, and that's really all that matters. That, and enjoying it while restoring my calm and sanity, one drink at a time.
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