Bizarro Argentina

Aldea Luna and environs, as seen from the Violet Path

I just spent a week in a place that while geographically in Argentina, is nothing like the Argentina I know. The Argentina I know is a place where red meat and red wine are the two major food groups, where women go on soup-and-candy diets because giving up solid foods is one thing but eliminating refined sugar is unthinkable. Where dinner starts at 10 and ends whenever it's time to go out - so like two am, one at the earliest.

Aldea Luna, the guesthouse-cum-family farm where I've been volunteering for the last week, is Argentina turned upside-down. The menu, for one, is all vegetarian and milk-free. (We did have eggs from the farm's chickens.) And I was asleep every night by ten to wake up the next morning with the sunrise. We had dessert once, the first day I got there - crepes with orange and banana. In most of Argentina, that passes for a healthy breakfast.

Aldea Luna is remote. As in, an hour bus ride from San Salvador de Jujuy - in itself a pretty provincial city - in a rickety bus with aluminum sheeting covering some of the windows that in the US probably would have been retired about fifteen years ago. Everyone seemed to know everyone else (except, obviously, me, the lone gringa), and a few gave the bus driver cheeful messages to pass onto other riders. It ocurred to me that this was like rural-Argentina e-mail equivalent. From the bus stop, it's another hour hike in the woods to the farm, where's there's no internet, and mostly solar energy. To charge electronics, watch TV, etc, there's a generator that's turned on a couple of times a week. Shower days are Wednesday and Saturday, and the water is heated with a wood stove. I hate showers - I think they're boring - so I was totally into the enforced filth.

The dough, pre-rising

I woke up every morning to warm fresh bread, which by the end of the week I was making myself.  It's really filling, on account of the wheat germ, and perfectly textured - it has that dense doorstop-quality that I love, but is somehow simultaneously light and fluffy.  The recipe, which is super-easy, is as follows, with totally mixed-up measurement units in a reflection of my metric-system-addled brain.

Wheat Germ Bread

1.5 kilos white flour
2 cups of wheat germ
15 grams (1.5 grams) of dry yeast
3 tablespoons of vegetable oil
heaping spoonful of salt
water to texture (about 4 cups, probably)

Mix together all of the dry ingredients.  If you want to be on the safe side, activate the yeast with a little water and sugar before adding to make sure the salt doesn't mess things up.  Add water, slowly, until the bread has the consistency of dough.  (If you've never made bread before, this takes a little experimenting, but basically stop adding water as soon as the whole thing holds together.)  Separate into three separate balls and knead each until the gluten is activated.  Again, this is something that you sort of have to do by feel, but it's maybe about twenty times for each ball, and you can feel the dough become more elastic and resistant to further kneading.  Let rise for approximately three hours, under plastic or a wet cloth to preserve the moisture.  Bake at 350 degrees until done.  I have no idea how long this might be, since Elizabeth baked the bread in a Dutch oven on the stove, but you all know what baked bread looks like.

After breakfast I went to work. I was mostly responsible for tending to the garden - weeding, watering, mulching. I spent more hours than I care to remember hunched was the broccoli plants, pulling out weeds with a trowel and my bare hands, getting to know that the grasses always came attached in a long line by a root deep underground and the clovers tended to cluster together close to the stem of the broccoli plant. In exchange for four hours of work a day, I got free housing in a gloriously warm bed, up in the loft of a cabin I shared with two Brazilian WWOOFers. Food, which was probably about 70% harvested from the garden (everything but grains and tomatoes, really), cost an additional ten dollars a day for portions so big it makes my stomach hurt to think about. Tartas made with eggs from the chickens and greens from the garden, canelones with corn from the maizal, salads whose component parts (lettuce, beets, carrots) I pulled out of the dirt and then tossed together in a bowl.

My broccolis, ringed with ash to keep the worms away.

It was glorious to have so many fresh vegetables after the raw-food avoidance that marked Bolivia. But by the end of the week I was literally having dreams about sugar. A massive store filled with cupcakes topped with the kind of frosting so buttery that when it gets warm the butter melts and the sugar starts to separate out and get almost grainy. That was a really vivid dream. The next night it was ice cream.

The food was good and plentiful, the company - owners Elizabeth and Martin, their son Matias, all-around helper Gerardo, and the two WWOOFers - was great and gave my Spanish the workout it needed, and I managed to husband the battery in my phone such that I was able to get through several hundred pages of Infinite Jest, which I had impulsively downloaded onto my Kindle app the day before my internet fast started. But the best part of Aldea Luna was the dozens of kilometers of hiking trails that covered the back end of the property. Every afternoon, while the WWOFers and the family were working, I explored a different path, accompanied by one of the farm's five black labs. They went up the mountain and through streams and I got lost and then found and lost again, only to end up sloshing through one of the two rivers that borders the property in my borrowed runber boots until I found my way back.

As a side note, I decided to volunteer for a week to keep costs down, and it was definitely the right decision. Holy shit, has Argentina gotten expensive in the last three years. Still cheaper than the US, but things that I remember costing three pesos (as an example, Toro Viejo, a particularly horrendous cheap brand of wine) now cost more than twice that. Inflation continues to stampede along at about 30% per year, and the government continues to report it at 10%. I asked why, if even tourists know they're lying, they continue to erode their credibility. The answer, Martin told me, is that debt grows with inflation. With their false reporting, the government has to pay off its debt at 10% instead of 30%.