Food, glorious food

Peruvian cuisine is getting a lot of attention these days, and I don’t exactly know why. It’s delicious, but then again, I tend to always love the food wherever we travel. Regardless, there is a lot of Peruvian pride for their culinary creations as well as the global focus on their ingredients and flavor combinations. 

Peppers, called aji, and corn (choclo) drying out

Papas waiting to be used at a restaurant... someone is trying to sneak his next round of papas!

The tastiest limonada on the planet... they throw the lime rind in the blender too.

Eating is such a highlight. It can also be nerve-wracking, between being celiac (and therefore constantly wondering if I can trust the waiter swearing up and down that there is zero gluten in whatever dish, wherever), and having two bouts of food poisoning a couple of months ago. That memory is still fresh. But mostly, we love the food. 

In a country where there are 84 different microclimates, the variety of food that is grown is sizable. Peru’s food has some interesting influences, from the coast and its plethora of fish and seafood, the mountains and its potatoes, quinoa, and amaranth, to China and Japan, of all places. Over a hundred thousand Chinese workers were recruited as contract laborers for sugar plantations and guano mines in the mid-1800s. The Japanese were recruited for work on cotton plantations around 1900. Just like immigrants everywhere, they brought their foods and techniques with them.

Chifas, Chinese food joints with a Peruvian twist, are everywhere. The vegetable vendors at the mercados sell wonton wrappers and bean sprouts. A popular appetizer is deep fried wonton rolls filled with cheese or avocado. Talk about a melting pot. Sushi and Japanese restaurants are pretty common in certain neighborhoods.

I’ve already written about ceviche and its prominence in Limeño cuisine. Also typical are causas, sculpted mashed potatoes filled or topped with some sort of salad, usually tuna or chicken salad. 

Causa with ceviche

Mom and I both ordered the vegetable causa, which was beautiful...

... but Dad's simple tuna causa tasted better.

Papas a la huacaina and Lomo saltado are two dishes that appear on nearly every restaurant menu, especially the menú del día (the lunchtime menu that is often a bargain, with several courses for a lot cheaper than they would be a la carte). The papas are boiled potatoes covered with a rich sauce made of aji amarillo, an orange, spicy pepper, and queso fresco. Lomo saltado is essentially a beef stir fry with tomatoes, red onions, and aji amarillo… and papas fritas. Somehow papas fritas worm their way into nearly every dish.

Indian food is our go-to comfort food back home, what pizza is to most people. Here it’s pollo a la brasa, rotisserie chicken. My guess is that pollerías are the second biggest restaurant category in Lima, assuming that cevicherías are number one. There are several giant pollería chains here, often occupying the same block, with of course many mom-and-pop pollerías rounding out the scene. The standard order is a whole chicken, roasted on a spit, which comes with salad, papas fritas and various salsas.

At this point we have sampled pollo a la brasa at many different places and swear allegiance to La Pollera (a play on words with pollería, but it means “skirt”). We stumbled across it shortly after we arrived and live 8 blocks away, which is dangerously close at times. We go every week or two, it’s always deserted when we go, and we always ask if we can sit on the closed-off second floor so that Simon can play in their fabulous playroom. We are such regulars there that the time their credit card machine broke and we didn’t have cash on us to pay, they said, “that’s ok, you’re here all the time, we know you are good for it.” I’m going to try to trade on that familiarity in a month or so when I ask to watch them make their salsas, particularly the chimichurri. It is so good that Simon, who loves ketchup as much as his mother and grandfather, has even been known to ignore his ketchup to dip his papas fritas in the chimichurri. If that isn’t a testament to its fabulousness, I’m not sure what is.

We actually don’t eat out all that often, although it certainly sounds otherwise in this post. I try to cobble together Peruvian dishes based on a food blog published by the national paper, a sampler cookbook Yannina & Mario gave me for Christmas, and what looks good in the mercado.

Zapallo macre is the giant squash at the mercado that I am scheming how to grow back home. 

This is a tiny zapallo macre. I've seen some that are as big as Simon!

I hadn’t realized how much Simon loved crema de zapallo (squash soup) until the time I ordered it as a restaurant – as my meal – and he finished the entire bowl, smiling and nodding his approval after every bite. So, I make it fairly frequently at our apartment, even more so now that it is turning cold. It’s so simple: a kilo of zapallo macre plus one yellow potato, cubed and in a little water, heated to boiling and then simmered until softened. Two red onions and four cloves garlic sautéed in some oil, adding in 2 cups of chicken broth later. 1 T curry is optional, S&P to taste. Blend everything in the blender. That’s it. I think some people also add milk or cream to it, but since the zapallo macre is really creamy by itself, it doesn’t need it. We eat it with avocado and queso fresco. ¡Buen provecho!