plate 42: chile

There are many things I remember from my trip to Chile four years ago. Like losing one thong at the beach, walking the deserted streets on Christmas Eve searching for midnight mass, and eating intestines.

Surprised as you might be, this isn't a food I've ever hankered to recreate at home or ever eat again for that matter. However, inspired by the amazing rescue efforts to unearth the trapped Chilean miners last week, I searched for more appropriate and appealing Chilean foodstuffs, such as humitas.

I was attracted to the celebratory nature of these little presents of corn. Fresh corn mixed with tomatoes, onions, paprika and basil, all wrapped in fresh corn husks and tied up with string - they're a few of Chileans favourite things. Sorry - I couldn't help myself!

I absolutely love corn, and it's been particularly sweet this year, but I always forget what a mess fresh corn makes in my kitchen. As I slice down the cobs, the kernels seem to fly from one end of the kitchen to the other, and the silk sticks and decorates the bench, but I pressed on.

Tired and weary from a rather busy weekend, I didn't set to making the humitas till about 8.30 last night. And I didn't quite realise how time consuming they'd be. First you have to carefully remove the husks, one by one, keeping them as intact as possible since you need them to house the corn filling.

 Then you have to remove the kernels, add them to a mixture of cooked onions and tomatoes, pour in a dash of milk, and assemble the little parcels before boiling them. To make one parcel took me almost as long as it did to bring one miner to the surface in the capsule, but I take pride in wrapping presents so this was a task I rather enjoyed.

 About an hour later, the bobbing little parcels were ready to come out of the water and be opened up to eat. Having not tasted humitas before, it was hard to know what they were supposed to taste like. While they had good flavour from the herb and spice, I don't think they really turned out how they were meant to. You're supposed to grind the corn, but I don't have a food processor and as I was about to mush it up in the blender I stopped, thinking it would just turn to liquid which would make it near impossible to wrap up. So I left the kernels whole.

All this did then was boil the corn, whereas if I'd processed the corn and added the milk, it probably would have become almost like a creamed corn consistency, which would have then cooked like a little cake inside the husk. Like so...

We were pretty hungry, so maybe anything - bar intestines of course - would have tasted good at that hour, but they were quite nice. Just not as delicious as I'd hoped. Lessons learned: buy a food processor, follow the recipe, don't start cooking fatigued at 8.30 on a Sunday night.