Charquicán and Crema de Zapallo Camote con Hongos

ABSOLUTE YUMS

When Brian and I were at the Costanera Centre earlier this year, I bought Juan Pablo Mellado's "Hecho en Chile" so that I could learn how to do two things: (1) speak Spanish, and (2) cook Chilean food. For our first post-Chile cooking date, both Brian and I tried to do just that when we decided to make charquicán and crema de zapallo camote con hongos straight out of the cookbook.

My post-Kensington market haul from Superstore

Since the cookbook was in Spanish, I had to translate not only the recipe but also the ingredients to English. I was at Kensington Market the day before our date, so I tried getting some of the ingredients from Latin American grocery stores, under the assumption that they weren't widely available. But I stood corrected when one of the grocers told me that I could find most of them at my local supermarket (eg, Swiss chard--I really should google what ingredients look like before I go out and get them!), though I was right to check Kensington first because I managed to get my hands on choclo per the recipe.

Hello, Squash!

We don't have zapallo camote here in Canada, but the net told me that butternut squash would be an okay substitute. So I rolled with it. And now I know how to work with the darn thing: It was so massive and certainly difficult to chop up! Mind you, Brian had to work with crazy amounts of zapallo camote that was even more difficult to deal with. At least the squash got soft enough to cut at some point! His zapallo camote was rock solid all the way through, and he probably needed a machete to help the situation!

Soup so good

Both Brian and I were soup virgins, and he learned the hard way that one needed a blender for this sort of recipe. Thankfully, I had my mom's blender to work with, but he didn't, and he ended up having to mash everything up on his own.

Understandably Brian didn't feel like having soup after the ordeal, but I ate my version and actually liked it. It was a great mix of textures, especially with the smoothness of the soup, the buttery mushrooms, and the crunchy, homemade croutons.

Yums (though not as pretty as the soup!)

We both fared better with our charquicán, a much easier recipe and a better use of the zapallo camote and the squash. With that said, we did introduce a couple of "innovations" such as sprinkling some merquén over the dish.

While we won't be making any crema anytime soon, we really enjoyed making the charquicán and will definitely be including that recipe to our repertoire. :D