Food bag

I have one. And in-between the candy that I put in my food bag, I also eat meals. (Actually, I've really been trying to cut down my candy intake, but anyone who knows me also knows that I enjoy some sugar here and there.) Inspired by a comment that my cousin left on my blog earlier this month, I thought I'd leave some of my opinions on Peruvian food before I leave here and forget all about it. I wish I'd taken photos of the meals that I'll describe...maybe I'll find some and put 'em in later. And note that the exchange rate that we've had during our 3-month stay has varied from S/.2.68 to S/.2.95, being on average 2.8 Nuevo Soles per dollar. We'll start with some of the most traditional dishes.

Lomo saltado: This was definitely my favorite dish soon after we arrived to Peru. It is a plate of strips of beef, fried potatoes, onion, tomato, green onions, and probably some other stuff that I can't think of at the moment. It's a bit greasy, but it's pretty good, especially with some salsa de ají (hot sauce). Sometimes they even include a portion of white rice. I found it as cheap as $2, but in nicer restaurants it ran from $4-8.

Ají de gallina: A thick yellow sauce made from...well, I don't know, but I assume there's some ají (hot pepper) in there, the sauce is cooked with shreds of chicken. A good portion of this sauce is served with mashed potatoes or rice, or both. It's pretty good! We haven't had it for a while, come to think of it... Again, we found some cheaper plates for $2 or $3, but as expensive as $8.

Pollo a la brasa: Some good rotisserie chicken! A normal-sized portion is a 1/4 de pollo (a leg or wing with part of the breast), served with fatty french fries and sometimes a small salad of lettuce, tomato, and cucumber. We found some for less than $1.50, but if you're willing to spend $3 to $3.50, it's worth it.

Pollo con arroz: I'm cheating; they have so many ways of cooking chicken and different sauces that they cook it in or add to it that this is far from one plate. But they always add rice, mashed potatoes, or fries. These usually end up being $1.50 to $2.50.

Bisteck a la plancha: A big, thin slab of meat. Always served with rice or french fries, or occasionally mashed potatoes. Surprisingly simple, it usually has a pretty good flavor. Bisteck apanado is the same thing with the meat having been fried with bread crumbs. And bisteck a lo pobre is the same yet again, but with a larger portion of rice or potatoes and a fried egg on top, sometimes including a small salad. Prices vary from $2.50 to $7.

Pollo a la plancha: A chicken filet with fries or rice on the side. As with the bisteck, it usually has a good flavor despite not looking like much. With both dishes, I always liked to smother it in ají or rocoto, both being hot sauces made from the pepper that they're named for. I can't handle spicy extremely well, but I keep trying. They're tears of joy... Pollo a la plancha itself is usually $2 to $3. If you want pollo a la milanesa, in which the chicken has been breaded and fried, you'll pay a couple dollars more.

Pollo al limón: This little discovery at a restaurant up the street from our hotel in Arequipa was a gratifying one. I could've included it in the above paragraph with the other chicken dishes, but it was so good that I thought it needed it's own recognition, despite being cooked in the same manner and served the same way. It's cooked in a lime sauce, and it is soooo rich... I love lime. I pay $6 for it at El Royal.

Ceviche: Speaking of lime, we have to talk about ceviche. I've also seen it spelled cebiche, seviche, and sebiche. (The reason behind this is because there is no phonetic difference between the /s/ and the /z/ and the 'c' followed by 'e' or 'i', nor between the /b/ and the /v/ in Spanish. Some, however, depending on which Spanish-speaking country you're in, may tell you that there really is a slight distinction in the pronunciation, but as a general statement, there is not. The 'y' and the 'll' have the same problem. Anyway, if you want to talk phonetics and pronunciation, I'd love to have a linguistic conversation with you another time. Back to szebviche.) Raw fish marinated in lime juice with cilantro. Oh, I do love lime and cilantro, and for that reason Mexican food will always hold a special place in my heart. Ceviche is good, but not too much. There is, of course, the risk of getting sick from the raw fish. Peruvians keep telling us that it is 'cooked' by the lime juice, but I just can't bring myself to believe them. Lime or lemon juice doesn't 'cook' other foods, they flavor them. For me, ceviche is good in small quantities, like an appetizer shared by a few people. And often, it is served as an appetizer.

Salteñas: Actually a Bolivian creation, a salteña is a fist-sized, hard-baked bread with vegetables and meat inside, usually beef. And usually, they're juicy. I've had some mediocre ones, as well as some really amazing ones at La Salteñita, a small shop in Arequipa.

Empanadas: A similar idea as the salteña, but more well-known, empanadas are also bread baked. Inside is usually meat with spices, but sometimes some vegetables as well. There are also cheese empanadas. I think most people know what an empanada is, actually. Nod your head in agreement. My favorite thing is that their name is literally "something inside bread." I bet the original name was "carne empanada" - "meat baked inside bread," which was later shortened to just "empanada." That, however, would be a personal assumption, based off of the feminine ending of the word empanada. How many times did I just say empanada? Say it that many times, fast.

Papas a la huancayina: Meaning "potatoes served in a style invented by women from Huancayo," they're boiled potatoes served with a yellow sauce made of mayonaise, ají sauce, crackers (smashed), and something else I can't recall. These are good, although not amazing. I just think they deserve mention because Chelsea and I made them a few weeks ago as part of a cultural assignment.

El menú: Also deserving mention not because it was my favorite, but because we ate them so often, is the menú. We actually got some strange stares from people before we figured out what the menú was, because we'd go into restaurants wanting to see their menu and calling it a 'menú'. While in nicer restaurants a 'menú' is a menu, it is more often called a 'carta.' Menú refers to the 'meal of the day.' And that doesn't mean a special, it means whatever is being cooked in mass quantity, and always included two courses; a caldo (soup) and a segundo, or main dish. The soup was usually a broth with rice or small pasta (fideos), potatoes and sometimes other veggies like a piece of corn, and a piece of meat, while the main course was a serving of chicken or beef cooked in some sort of sauce served with a portion of...you guessed it, rice or french fries. Or sometimes mashed potatoes. We have eaten dozens of menús, sometimes not so great and other times amazingly flavorful. Prices are always low, from $1 (careful with those ones) to $2.50 (that's an expensive menú). The price is so low because it is cooked in mass quantity, with enough servings for dozens of people for lunch or dinner.

Somewhere along the line of describing all these foods, I realize I've begun to sound like a tourist guidebook. Maybe that's due to the fact that I've been reading one quite a bit lately? Oh well. Hopefully you haven't given up reading yet. How 'bout some drinks!

Inca Kola: Mentioning Peru without mentioning drinking a lot of Inca Kola would be something akin to blasphemous, I suppose. It's as common here as Coca-cola in America. It's a highliter-yellow soft drink that reminds one of drinking bubble gum. In fact, I've heard friends back home call it the "bubble gum drink." I like the stuff, really. I'll try to bring some home for my family.

Chicha morada: Another drink that's as old as Peru, and another thing Chelsea and I made that night of cooking. It's not hard to make, you just boil chicha (purple corn) for half an hour, pour out the water, and then boil the corn again for a minute, and add the new water to the old. Then you add sugar and lime juice to taste. We also added apple skins and pineapple shell (skin?) to the pot we boiled water and chicha in. It's hard to describe the taste of chicha, since there is no purple corn in the States (at least, not to my knowledge). Chicha morada is pretty good, though not my favorite. I assume it is somewhat of an acquired taste, since some people are really enthralled with it. Possibly the same as horchata española and jamón serrano were for me in Spain.

Now for a few desserts and pastries.

Leche asada: This was one of the first pastries I bought, and I bought it in Pampas. I don't think I've had many since, but it was really quite good. It was a cup made of...pastry bread, or whatever you call that hard, sweet bread...with fried milk in the middle. It was the texture of a flan, or thereabouts.

Tarta de manzana: I told one of my fellow students that I had the best apple tart of my life after eating one from a bakery up the street from our hotel in Arequipa. I don't know why it was so good, it seemed really simple - flaky pastry bread baked with some apple mash in the middle.

Flan: I may have had the best flan of my life in a restaurant in Nazca. Maybe not, cause I had quite a few flans in Spain, but the one in Nazca was really scrumptious. It was an egg flan, but not too egg-y. Maybe it was a hybrid egg-vanilla flan.

Alfajores: My description just wouldn't be complete without mentioning these. They're cookies, I guess, or maybe a sandwich...two layers of what I'd call a shortbread with manjar (dulce de leche or caramel) in the middle, with coconut or powdered sugar (or both) stuck around the outside. They seem pretty classic around here, and we had some famous ones in the Valle de Tambo, the diameter of a softball, or even a little bigger. Others are the diameter of a baseball. They're all right, though I'm not in love.

This ended up being quite the blog post!