Pastel de Choclo (Chilean shepherd’s pie) – Chile

We had an internet outage for a day so I am behind on my culinary travel posts. As we are still in the C’s and I had some defrosted ground turkey, CHILE was the next stop on our cullinary tour du monde. I was actually very excited because I had a recipe from years ago that the mom of a student of mine had given me. She is Chilean. I used to do cooking with my students in their houses when I taught in private schools in NYC and Greenwich. 5 course meal type of things. Anyway, this mom, who was a wonderful person, brought this dish as a surprise for us to try “Pastel de Choclo” I always remember it being delicious. I don’t know why I have not made it all these years, but think about it and her regularly. So this was the weekend, and it did not dissapoint. It is fairly simple to make and very tasty. The entire family loved it. Scott and Eva would have eaten the entire thing in one sitting if I had let them and were fighting over who got the bigger portion. It is basically a type of shepard pie, but different. The bottom layer is ground meat and onions. Then you sprinkle that with sliced olives and raisins in equal parts. Finally, you puree a bunch of corn, add some butter and basil. Oh, and you finish it with a bit of confectionaires sugar on top before baking it. We LOVED it. Debating top 10 or not. I would say yes. Still under discussion. It should be noted, I HATE olives, BUT they were fine in this dish 🙂 The recipe I used had no milk in the corn mixture. I would recommend this and will type it up. Some recipies add a pinch of cumin to the meat – may try this next time, but wanted to try it her way first. Finally, some recipies add sliced hard boiled egg to the middle layer. That would probably be good too. Her recipe was very similar to the goya recipe, but no milk and no goya seasoning – just salt and pepper. If you don’t have fresh basil, you can use dried.