Rounding Cape Horn and Puerto Montt Excursion

After Montevideo, we missed the Falklands due to severe weather, had a wonderfully calm trip around Cape Horn, hiked in Tierra del Fuego and in Patagonian Chile and finished out the cruise with a stop in Puerto Montt in the Chilean lake district. My girlfriend and I took a culinary tour with a local chef, while our husbands went kayaking. We went shopping with our chef/guide at the local fish market and vegetable market, where we were able to see all sorts of wondrous sea creatures (many of which I had never even imagined, much less imagined eating!). Chile is lucky to have miles and miles of coastline, and takes full advantage of the different kinds of life teeming in the Pacific Ocean.

We were introduced to "sea squirts", which looked like barnacles from the outside but were bright red inside and full of iodine and brine, too strong to enjoy on their own, but mashed into a ceviche, they lent a seawater flavor that added a lot of depth. The gentleman at the top of the post was breaking open the "shells" of the sea squirts to get the meat out. The picture just above is of smoked sea squirts (the red things), mussels and barnacles - Chileans apparently like to smoke some of their seafood and then use the smoked items in their cooking. We also learned about "green" eggs laid by the Araucana hen, which are indigenous to South America, and got to smell and purchase a wonderful spicy chili blend, known as merken, and derived from the Mapuche indians.

The picture below on the left is of the finished ceviche. Sea kelp, octopus, whitefish, bell peppers, onion and cilantro rounded out the flavors. We also enjoyed a soup of plump mussels, which were cooked in a toasted merken spice blend and finished with milk and cream (see picture on bottom right). We saw several mussels at the fish market that were bigger than an adult shoe (appropriately referred to as "zapatos" mussels), but were told they had quite tough meat. Unfortunately, I don't have a whole lot to say on how the chef made the delicious dishes we sampled, since we were generally plied with pisco sours and not allowed to assist in the kitchen. But we did watch the ceviche being made, and tasted each of the ingredients that went into it (including the chopped up sea squirts, which are (to say the very least) an acquired taste).