This past Saturday evening we had a Thanksgiving dinner and I baked some cornbread as my contribution to the potluck.
Baking cornbread in Quito is not as simple as baking cornbread in Memphis... at least not for me. Even as a fluent Spanish speaker there are some words that just don´t come up too often and it takes living in a Spanish-speaking community to pick them up. So I spent quite a while looking up things like buttermilk and cornmeal.
After the vocabulary comes the issue of conversions. How much is a cup in the metric system? What is 425f in celsius?
Then the issue of how to bake something properly at 10,000 feet altitude. That 10,000 feet changes things. I´ve always baked at sea-level, and recipes are naturally written for sea-level, even high altitude recipes are only written for 3,000-6,000 feet!
I allowed myself enough time to bake two cornbreads, and it was a good thing. The first I overcooked because it still seemed very moist when in retrospect I should have taken it out. I learned my lesson with the second and it received lots of compliments.
I´ve also figured out chocolate chip cookies at 10,000 feet. Lucho (same person as Luis) says I could become rich selling the cookies!