There probably isn’t anything we’ve had more often in Argentina than Alfajores, a cookie treat. A cookie sandwich, Alfajores are a dessert we had never heard of but now can’t get away from. Generally covered in chocolate, the most traditional filling is dulce de leche (sort of like caramel), but they come with every kind of fruit jelly, jam or chocolate cream you can think of, and they’re all pretty good. The wrappers say “dulce” to describe the sweet ones, but honestly these things are so full of sugar you can get a toothache eating more than one of them (unless of course you are Danny who likes to eat as many as he can!).

Alfajores are found all over South America, and apparently Mexico although we didn’t run into them until Argentina. Here they are so common that they’re often served as a snack on the bus and as an artesanal delight in expensive giftshops and dulcerias. Some of the fancy ones have neat chocolate designs or nuts on the top (and usually a thicker chocolate coating), but even the grocery store pre-packaged varieties are yummy. My favorite are the fruit filled ones while Danny prefers the dulce de leche ones.

According to the locals, Alfajores are different in each part of the country, and a source of local pride, but honestly I’ve found them to be very similar everywhere we go. The most famous varieties seem to come from Cordoba, but we’ve sampled them all over the country, from north to south, and trust me, they’re all delicious!!

Mate itself is basically a type of herbal tea (sort of looks  like oregano or crushed tea leaves) that is very popular down here. Rather than filling a coffee mug with water and dropping in a small filter bag with tea leaves inside, with Mate the cup itself is special. No ordinary mug will do. The  mate cup (actually just called a Mate) is actually a hollowed out gourd. Since the inside is an organic material (the outside is often decorated) that soaks up the flavors of your Mate overtime so the gourd collects more flavor. Sort of like a caste iron skillet.

To drink mate you also need a special metal straw enclosed on the bottom with a  strainer. The entire mate (gourd) is filled up with the yerba mate, what we in the north would call the tea leaf. Since there is no filter bag, the straw has to do the filtering.

To drink, you fill the gourd with hot water (often kept in a thermos), a little bit of sugar and sip it down, adding more water only when you want to drink it. This however does take some practice as drinking hot water through a straw is not exactly the best of ideas…and that’s forgetting the fact that this is a metal straw. Whatever you do, don’t jiggle the straw…metal doesn’t exactly make the best filter and that can make it so some leaves come on down your throat.

Mate is a social beverage and often the mate gourd is shared among friends. One person finished the “tea”, fills it with more water and passes the gourd to another person. Like an herbal tea, mate has a bitter taste and often people add a little bit of sugar to the mixture to soften the flavor. Mate is often referred to as a stimulant, and its use is similar to that of coca leaves in northern andean countries. If you can find it in the US I highly recommend trying it!

So now we happened on a better idea. Once a week this blog will be devoted to the food and drinks that we eat. We’ve done this only once so far, with hot chocolate in Colombia (word has it that we inspired a hot chocolate drinking party with that one) but now we’ll do our best to make it a regular occurrence.

Now we’re left with the question of where to begin. What to make our first food. The answer we settled on is clear as we’ve titled the post empanadas. The reason; we’ve eaten these (or something similar) in just about every single country we’ve been in since we first stepped into Mexico seven months ago.

So last night (really, last night) we made empanadas here in Argentina. While in Salta we were introduced to some of the best we’ve ever had but now that we’ve made our own, I’m slightly partial to those. As you’ll see in the video, we made baked empanadas filled with sautéed onions and ground meat. You can fill them with whatever you want, but this being Argentina home of red meat, we filled ours the traditional way.  Buen Provecho!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkCItijmSYs