Meat is meat, right? In Chile we get our meat at the supermarket, just like you do in the States. But what you get here varies between slightly different and WAY different than what you buy there.
Let’s take chicken for example. You can buy boxed containers of boneless skinless chicken breast just like you get in the States…or you can buy chicken feet. Yeah, the yellow knobby feet of a chicken. You didn’t even know they were classified as a meat, did you? Well, if you can’t afford to actually put chicken in your chicken soup, you can at least boil some feet in the water and make yourself think it tastes like chicken. And you can buy a package of these feet in the supermarket, right next to the livers and gizzards and other assorted chicken pieces.
And there’s the beef. Except this poor beef got butchered according to a completely different map than ours does in the States. I want sirloin or brisket or even rump roast. I find pieces of beef that I can’t identify their previous location on the animal. I guess someone in the States decided how to cut up beef there, and someone else decided how to cut it here. I still haven’t figured out which piece will turn out like I want it to.
At least there’s always ground beef. I mean hamburger meat is the same everywhere, right? Wrong! Here if you want ground beef, you have to choose between 4% fat and 10% fat. Why so little? No, they don’t put their cows on a fat-reduction diet. They grind up steaks! At one supermarket we used to go to, they didn’t even have ground beef in the case. You just had to ask, and they would freshly grind your steaks into hamburger meat. Why not just eat steak?, I ask!
I can also buy fish, with or without their heads. And lots of other seafood things that I might mistake for cacti if they weren’t in the ice with the other seafood. Something they call a loco looks pretty scary to me. How would you begin to cook or eat something so spiny and prickly? Good thing Mark doesn’t like seafood except for fish. I don’t have to figure that part out much!
My favorite meat that I buy here that I haven’t seen before in the States is a turkey breast that comes in a oven-ready tub. All I have to do is take off the outer wrapping, dump in my seasonings (ask me for that recipe sometime!), and cover it with foil. It takes an hour in the oven, or 20 minutes on the grill, and turkey dinner is ready! Yummy!
Rachel’s favorite part of the meat section is the pork. Not because I ever buy pork, because I don’t. Mostly because it has the silliest looking cuts of meat in the whole store. She especially likes to laugh at the cuts that have a snout in the plastic wrapped foam tray. Now THAT is gross!
