Poblacion La Victoria

Tus sueños son tus derechos - Your dreams are your rights

La lectura es la puerta a la cultura - Reading is the doorway to culture. 

- Bulletin boards in the Municipal School of La Victoria 

I have two things to share today. One is the story of our first school visit, and the other is a cookie recipe, because you asked for it. 

First, La Victoria. On Friday morning we drove away from the apartment complexes, shopping centers and universities of Santiago Central, and as we entered the neighborhood of Poblacion La Victoria, I could feel myself relaxing. Outside of the van window I could see the colorful rows of tin-roofed houses, little tiendas covered with fabric canopies, and murals on every wall I knew from El Salvador. In short, my Latin American home. 

We spent the week listening to lectures on the political and economic aspects of Chilean education, and though I absolutely appreciate the opportunity to learn those things, by this point I desperately needed to be inside a school. Just get me some cafeteria tables and chalk, please. 

Most municipal schools in Chile are extremely poor quality, but this school is special. It's not a magnet school, it's not part of any special initiative. It just belongs to a community that cares about educating its children and uses its resources wisely. We heard the vision of the school from its director, watched students perform Chile's national dance at an assembly and I met some awesome nine-year-old girls who sang Adele with me. And we left (although I would have been happy to have stayed there for the rest of the semester) with new hope. 

And of course, cookies. A realization: The drinking age here is 18. Do you know what that means? It means I can bake cookies with rum in them. Happy 21st birthday to my friend Katherine. 

Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies - Chilean Style

1 cup + 1 tablespoon butter

1 cup granulated sugar (you will not find this next to flour in the store. Let's not be ridiculous. It will be next to the tea, obviously) 

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract 

1/2 cup packed brown sugar (disregard the packed part, because Chilean brown sugar is utterly unpackable) 

1 large egg

1 large egg yolk

2 1/4 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 cups chocolate chips (Or broken-up hershey bars, if that's what you can find) 

2 tablespoons rum (You really can just pick some up at the mini-market, and no one will bat an eye)

Actually just go ahead and disregard all those measurements, because some of them will end up in grams and others will go completely out the window, because there are no teaspoons in your apartment. 

Brown 1 stick and 1 tablespoon butter. Once you ask your host mom where the matches are so you can light the stove, there's no screwing this part up. Brown butter is delicious in any language. 

Cream the other stick of butter and the granulated sugar until creamy. Add what you think is vanilla, and discover that what you have actually bought is Cola de mono, extract of a Chilean Christmas drink, according to Wikipedia. Not sure why I didn't read the label more carefully. Figure, whatever, they already have rum in them. You will find vanilla in a closet that is nowhere near the kitchen and you had no idea contained food. You're going to want to add that too. Beat until incorporated.

Add the slightly cooled brown butter and the brown sugar and mix on medium speed (or, without the luxury of an electric mixer, with your hands) for about 2 minutes. Add the egg and egg yolk and mix until fluffy and incorporated. 

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, salt and baking soda. Look up how to say baking soda in Spanish and search through a box of spices, because apparently baking soda is not a household item here. Your search will be fruitless; substitute baking powder. Add all at once to the butter mixture and mix until incorporated. 

After failing to keep the fact that you are putting alcohol in cookies from your host parents, who are making potato salad in the kitchen all this time, ask your host dad to open the bottle of rum for you. Remember, there's no tablespoon, so when you add some, just go for it. Say, Why is the rum gone? to yourself in Captain Jack Sparrow's voice. (Don't worry, parents, its not actually gone, I wasn't that liberal) Fold in the chocolate chunks. 

Cover bowl and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. Try to figure out where to find a cookie sheet. I'll tell you. It's inside the oven. Preheat to 375. Just kidding, that would be way to simple. Don't worry about converting to Celsius because the oven doesn't even have temperatures on it. Just let your host mom do it. 

Put your cookies on too low a level in the oven, it will take them about 5 minutes to burn up and fill the entire apartment with smoke. Take two will work better. One pan down.

At this point, your host family will inform you that you're going over to your host grandmother's apartment, but to just bring the cookie dough because her oven is better. Once this summer I had a dream where the whole time I was trying to make lemon bars and I kept running into problems and bringing them with me. This was exactly like that in real life. 

Successfully bake the rest of the cookies in your grandma's oven. There's no consistent baking time, just watch them and try not to burn anything else. They will be flat, spongy and stuck together because you will be given a metal bowl in which to cool them. But don't worry, your host family will rave about the wonderful "North American Cookies" and your fellow students will just be excited about the rum. 

Original Recipe: Bakergirl

Spanish language success of the week: Finally learned how to say crafts: manuelitas. "Little manual labor." Also a tour guide told me my Spanish was impeccable. I can assure you that's not true, but I liked the sound of it. 

Photo credit: Kendra Layton