Argentine cuisine is rooted in the country’s indigenous, Spanish, and Italian heritage, with a definite emphasis on meat. Above is a picado platter, one of our self-catered dinners.In the markets, we could buy Matambre, above, and Provoleta, below. For roasting and grilling. Argentinian classics.A meal at La Baita, our go-to Italian restaurant. Salad with meat, pasta with meat, meat with meat. Argentinian Italian. A short walk from our apartment is the Feria Honduras weekend street fair, on the same street as La Baita. After-dinner shopping helps digestion.Salmón And bife served with salsa criollo, at restaurant Minga. We haven’t used the apartment’s stove or oven once since we’ve been here.Steaks (above) from restaurant Don Julio’s open kitchen (below). It was only restaurant we had to make reservations at. The place was full of American tourists, which explained the early dining hour. A twenty minute taxi ride from our home base in Palerma Soho took us to San Telmo, in old Buenos Aires. A weekend street fare, originally for antique sellers, now sells everything.The fair is near the eclectic Mercado San Telmo, which, like the entire area, still sells antiques.Much closer to home, a street fair encircles Plaza Armenia most weekends. Though much of what is on offer is the same from fair to fair, there is much that is unique, too. This fair seems to specialize in hand-made clothes for children, and dolls.Back again to food, Chori, a corner counter-service eatery, is famous for their choripan (below). Sausage. Bun. Excelente.Not to be outdone, Uruguay has chivito, its national dish. Some people stuff all this into bread and call it a sandwich. We ate this one at a small table on the cobblestones in front of the prosaically named El Drugstore, a corner restaurant in Colonia, Uruguay. For a swwet snack, more than once we ate alfajors from Havanna, a chain of espresso bars famous for these little sandwich cookies. Chocolate wrapped around a crumbly cookie wrapped around dulce de leche.Speaking of dulce de leche, it’s a rare Argentinian dessert that doesn’t include it. Supermarkets have entire aisles dedicated to jars of the stuff. Here is a dulce de leche crepe cake at one of our regular spots for picking up take-away lunches for our picnics in the parks. All good things come to an end. Ciao ciao Buenos Aires.
