The Night of Firsts

Friday, Jan 30

Friday was very unexciting. I spent much of the day catching up on e-mails and straightening up my life. I really need to continue progressing with my Spanish and find a job both here and for when I return home. Tonight, however, we met up with an American named Kevin who Lily had met a week earlier at a land conservation conference in Valdivia. He had been teaching English in Santiago for a year and was now traveling through the southern part of Chile. He stopped through Puerto Varas on Friday night to stay through the weekend so we invited him over for and asado American style.

There were a lot of firsts tonight. We used our grill for the first time. We purchased lighter fluid “gel” the night before and tried to use it to ignite the coal. Unfortunately this stuff is literally the flammable gel that they put in the centerpieces at the Kowloon to create a small bluish flame. First of all, the gel didn’t ignite anything. Second of all, I’m pretty sure if used enough of it to act as an ignition propellant we might as well have nuked our steaks in the microwave and saved ourselves the trouble and potential hazard of dealing with a fire on the small enclosed patio.

Luckily, I learned the volcano technique at Rodrigo’s asado a few days earlier and was more than eager to give it a shot. As most of you already know I’m a closet pyro, and any excuse I can use to make a giant flame, I take it. So I made 7 or 8 newspaper rings and stacked them one on top of the other. I stacked the coals around the newspaper ring and made a mini-Osorno in our $15 BBQ grill. I rolled one more piece of paper to use as the ignition stick, lit the bottom, and stuck it down the center of ring stack. Immediately the entire grill ballooned out in an impressive ball of red and orange as if the real Osorno awoke from its 150 year slumber and began to rain molten lava into Lago Llanquihue. The flame was short lived and so was the BBQ fire with only a few of the coals got singed by the newspaper explosion. The good news was I had been watching Bear Grylls religiously for the past 2 years and finally got to use one of his survival techniques in a non-life threatening capacity. I started to blow through the bottom of the coals and coaxed the faint glow into a full blown BBQ of red hot coals. Finally we were in business for the first time with our grill.

We grilled thin steaks, red bell peppers, and longaniza sausages, which I’m pretty sure are the Latin America version of linguiza. Washed down with Austral and Cristal beer we had a great meal. A new friend, a new beer, and a new challenge overcome…I would say we had a pretty good night.