I'm originally from Valparaiso in Chile and have been in Canada for 3 years now. When I was asked to cook some food for the Multicultural Festival, sopaipillas was the obvious choice, plus I'm a vegetarian and there's no meat in this dish - unlike most Chilean food which has lots of meat.

Sopaipillas are a really popular street food in Chile plus they're easy to make, and really cheap - you can buy one for about 20 cents. They're usually cooked and eaten hot with any sauce or topping you want; ketchup, mustard, pebre sauce, or chili sauce... Sopaipillas are so popular in Chile there's even a song about them called 'Sopaipilla con mostaza' (sopaipilla with mustard)...

At home though, we usually eat sopaipillas with a sweet topping called chancaca - a warm, sweet sauce made of raw unrefined sugar from sugar cane and often flavoured with orange peel and cinnamon. In Chile, it's like a tradition that when it rains mums make sopaipillas. So every time it rained while we were at school, everyone knew there would be sopaipillas and chancaca sauce waiting for us at home.

My name is Paloma, I'm originally from Patagonia in Chile, a place where is always cold and that is the reason why we really enjoy eating cazuela.

Cazuela is a dish where in Chile you can find it in any restaurant, it's a kind of soup with many vegetables and you can use chicken or beef to give it more flavou. Its really nice for the cold days and its delicious!!