Cooking Nightmare Gone Well?

It’s hard to improvise when cooking, especially when one is in a foreign country, with ingredients in a foreign language, and when they don’t even know how to cook in the first place. Welcome to my life.

I wanted to cook. I’ve been having cravings for peanut butter, but that unfortunately does not exist here in Salta. So then I decided maybe I’d make dinner one night. But after going to two different grocery stores and not finding what I needed, I decided to start more basic—sweet! Ideally, cookies, or brownies, or even my Mom’s amazing banana bread…

Off I went to the store—I found the essentials, butter, sugar, eggs, flour, but I hit a road block when it came to brown sugar. I found azucar negro (black sugar) and decided that would have to do. However, I actually think its white sugar dyed black, because while I was using it and smashing the chunks, I kept seeing white specks…oh well, its improvisation right?

Next problem, chocolate chips. How do they NOT that chocolate chips? They have bars of chocolate, chocolate cookies, chocolate CHIP cookies, chocolate truffles—but no chips for cooking! Do they REALIZE what they are missing out on? Luckily, Laura knew of a store that had them, and we drove into town and found some (thank goodness!).

The biggest problem: baking powder. Now I found baking soda, but no baking powder. I finally went to a grocery store further away with Laura and she found me some. Since it was in a foreign language and looked promising I didn’t question. It wasn’t until I was actually cooking that I opened the box and realized it was yeast. Yeast in Spanish is ‘levadura.’ Baking powder in Spanish is ‘levadura en polvo.’ Not much of a difference in name (in Spanish), but HUGE difference in outcome.

I checked online to see my options. Using baking soda without the powder would make my cookies salty and taste GROSS (says a few websites). Yeast would just be a big mistake. Since the powder and soda make the cookies rise, I decided I’d do without both and just have ugly flat cookies.

Now with the “right” ingredients (or lack there of) I started “mixing.” The big problem is that Laura doesn’t have a mixer—so some was manual and some was used with a machine normally used to slice vegetables into small pieces. Well, it worked, whatever, I improvised. With the mixture finally complete, now came the task of the oven.

They do not have an electric oven, where you can set the time and temperature. No. It is one temperature, warm or hot. I decided to have Miguel set it at warm so as not to kill my cookies. Since I had no idea how long to put them in for, I checked them every few minutes. However, I had no idea how to tell if they were done, since they didn’t look like normal cookies since they lacked baking powder and baking soda.

I eventually decided somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes was enough and surrendered to the reality that these cookies would not win a prize.

Now they are sitting on a plate in the kitchen, looking sad and oddly dark, not burned, but dark (must be the black sugar).

I took a bite. Crunchy, like a cracker, but it sort of melts in your mouth if it sits for a while with the sugar dissolving on your tongue... Not bad for my first batch of improvised Argentinean-American cookies. But I can't say all my cooking improvisations in the past have turned out so "well." But I'll give myself some credit for using what I had and checking online before doing anything stupid.

Tomorrow's goal: Find baking powder.