Cooking "school"

My love of food is well-documented, full of exclamations of just how delicious a given meal was or recommendations to other people about where to go get scrumptious something-or-other.

And as you might have noticed on this blog, I love the food in Peru. It’s delicious. And while I have had some success trying to replicate certain dishes or meals in our apartment (even while I miss certain comforts from our kitchen at home, such as having more than one knife, a mixing bowl instead of using a pot, and only a toaster oven), it has been more fun to create my own custom cooking school, with classes taught by experts.

My lessons began in February with an unexpected and not-very-Peruvian course on Indian food, when my friend Vandna’s parents were in Lima for a couple of months. Chanda taught me how to make chicken curry, an incredible mango salad, and my favorite: eggplant, baingain bartha. Simon wasn’t so excited about the cooking lesson and kept bringing me my shoes as a hint to leave. Finally, he dragged in my backpack too, in case I hadn’t fully understood him yet. But he ate more chicken at that meal than I have ever seen him eat, before or since.

Can we go yet?

Simon was more enthusiastic about my next cooking adventure, since it involved his favorite drink, chicha morada. It is made from purple corn and is the same delightful, rich color. Dieuwe’s grandmother, known to everyone as Mamita, is extremely proud of how much Simon likes it and apparently brags about his love for chicha morada to her friends, so I asked her to show me how to make it. 

First we went to the market to buy ingredients. It was fun to watch Mamita handle and reject a load of ingredients before telling me to hand over the money.

Looking over the purple corn

Choosing spices

Quiz: which one of the following four ingredients is not used in chicha morada?
A. quince
B. pineapple peel
C. orange zest
D. cloves

Answer: orange zest. Chicha morada is such a weird concoction of ingredients. It seems to me that someone was playing MadLibs while they came up with the recipe, but it certainly tastes good at the end. You take a kilo of purple corn cobs, remove the kernels from the cob, put the naked cobs and all the kernels into a giant pot, and fill with water. Add half of a very ripe quince, the peel of half a pineapple (but not the fruit!), six cloves, three pieces of cinnamon bark, bring to a boil and wait. After about an hour or so, the purple corn kernels will have burst slightly. Remove all the liquid and save it as chicha morada concentrate. Fill the pot again and boil for another hour or so to get an undiluted batch of chicha morada. Chill. Add lime juice and sugar to taste just before serving. 

Washing the corn

Simon enjoyed helping rinse the cobs and trying to take the kernels off

Add lots of water...

The MadLibs ingredients

After about an hour of boiling, this is what the concoction looked like. Mamita frequently took out ladles of corn kernels to see if they had burst yet.

After we made our two batches, we put the concentrate into the freezer to enjoy later. There must have been a slight leak in the bag, however, because the next morning frozen chicha morada covered the freezer, which was not the most fun to clean up. Assuming we can find purple corn at Saraga, I will be excited to surprise Simon with chicha morada on special occasions and serve it at our ice cream socials.

Of course we needed to toast before trying our batch of chicha morada!

Chicha mustaches = a satisfied Simon

My next cooking adventure was sushi, of all things. Sizable populations of Chinese and Japanese people in Peru means that markets selling Asian food are plentiful and so having a sushi class at Spanish school isn’t too far out of Peruvian bounds.

Our instructor gave us a brief introduction to sushi and explained how the end result was beautifully shaped: a perfect circle, the symmetry of ingredients, a clean look.

Symmetry is important...

There were five of us in the class, four women (one was Japanese, and she was clearly an expert already... I’m not sure why she was taking the class!), and an Australian named Ralph. As the “h” is silent in Spanish, everyone called him Ralp, which I found hilarious.

Our instructor carefully demonstrated each step and I was proud of my beautiful roll of sushi, until I cut it and realized how warped it was. This explained why my Japanese neighbor had been slightly horrified at my roll the whole time. As I assembled my roll, she would giggle and point, which eventually made me start to laugh too at the weirdness of the situation. “Too much rice! Too much ingredient!” I tried to hide it but, no luck. We all were to show each other our plates before moving on to the next dish. Ralp decided to examine everyone’s sushi, complemented everyone one by one, tasted a couple, and then got to mine. He winced. “What happened over there, Alison?” The good news was that he didn’t even try to taste mine; more for me!

Gee, can you guess which plate has my sushi on it?

Our class, with Ralp hiding in plain sight

I brought my sushi home, Simon tasted a tiny bit, but had a better time repeating his new word, tushi. Now, when I pull out paper and a pen to jot down what we need to get at the market, Simon tells me to add, “agua, tushi,” until he sees me write them down.

My final cooking experience was amazing. I took a lesson from a Peruvian-born, German-trained chef named Yurac who operates cooking classes from his rooftop kitchen. I signed up for the meal featuring special Andean ingredients and ensured it would all be gluten-free. Every course of our four-course meal was incredible. And the emphasis on presentation was huge; every time I thought our dish was done, ready to be served, Yurac had us add one or two or three more things to make it even more beautiful. 

This is an example of the emphasis on presentation. For ocopa, a spicy sauce made of peanuts, yellow peppers called ají amarillo, an oft-used Peruvian herb called huacatay, and queso fresco, we start with beautiful peeled potatoes. Peruvian cuisine boasts a wide variety of potatoes. At one point there were over 3,000 varieties in use.

I chose a representative sampling for my plate. 

We've blended the sauce and Yurak tells us to carefully spoon enough on our plates to completely cover the papas. I assume we are done and ready to eat.

Not so fast! We add the ubiquitous condiments of hard-boiled eggs and black olives. Ok, now we're done.

Except we need to add a little fan of carefully sliced ají amarillo to the dish. Now we are really finished.

Chupe de camarones y pescado. So delicious! 

Alpaca steak, asparagus, and quinoa salad. The quinoa salad has been pressed into a mold and then upended onto the plate. Peruvians are really big into molds, especially for rice. I've come around and purchased molds of my own by now - it is much more fun to eat foods in pyramids and domes. Peru grows a lot of asparagus but, Yurak told us, almost all of it is for export. Few Peruvians eat it. It was always at the mercado near our apartment, for pennies - a regular -sized bunch cost the equivalent of $1. Therefore, we ate a LOT of asparagus. The mercado vendors were shocked to hear that Simon could put away the entire bunch of asparagus by himself.

Ah, lúcuma. A more delicious fruit has not been found. We are starting to make lúcuma mousse here.

Here we go on presentation again. We each drizzled algarrobina syrup on our plates, then spooned lúcuma mousse on top. Done?

Of course not! By now I shouldn't have been surprised. Yurak showed us how to take aguaymanto, these cute little berries, each of them in their own little delicate paper-like package...

... and then flare them each into aguaymanto flowers.

While my spoonfuls of lúcuma mousse aren't exactly artful, check out the rest of the plate: the aguaymanto flowers, a twisted slice of orange, a fan of apple, and aguaymanto jam next to the mousse. What are we waiting for? Let's eat!

Yurak, me, and my classmate Michael, overlooking Miraflores from Yurak's rooftop kitchen

I wanted have one more “class” before we left for home: I wanted to learn how to make the salsas at La Pollera, our favorite pollería down the street. When I asked if I could hang out in the kitchen while they made their salsas, they told me that they would “check and get back with me.” I knew that meant “no”. However, our waiter (I say “our” waiter since he was ours nearly every time we went) knew that I wanted to learn how to make the chimichurri in particular. One night he quietly slipped me a list of the ingredients for the chimichurri that he’d sneakily scribbled in the kitchen. Yes! So I suppose I have one more cooking class, in my own kitchen in Indy, to figure out their ratios and replicate their stellar results. I even have the little wooden spoons to help create the overall effect, so it must taste the same, right?

Still, I have my eye on a very beautiful Peruvian cookbook for my Christmas present. Did you hear that, Sam? Now I'll just have to cross my fingers that I can find Peruvian ingredients stateside.

Proof that Simon is a Hess

Hesses (my dad’s side of the family) love their condiments, especially ketchup, jam, and peanut butter. 


As an example of our excess, but also to explain that my dad would take exception to that wording, I will quote him: "On the first day, God created ketchup. It's not a condiment. On the second day came peanut butter. Everything else is a condiment."


My dad and I once ate the entire contents of a Heinz ketchup bottle – and made significant headway on a second one – while enjoying our sides of fried potatoes at breakfast at The Cup in Tucson. Sam always makes fun of me about how much ketchup I consume when we eat burgers or papas. Whatever! Whenever we are at a cookout, I secretly eye everyone else's burgers – topped with a tiny smear of ketchup - and pity them for missing out by not having half of the bottle on their burgers. Ah well, more for me!

Jam isn’t meant to be a tiny, barely visible layer on your toast; it should have some height to it. Ditto when one eats peanut butter. PB&J’s are thick, substantial, wondrous-to-behold delicacies. This obviously means we go through jars of jam and peanut butter frequently too.

To be fair to the Hesses, I’m generalizing about Hess behavior based on my dad, his four siblings, two of our nephews, and my brother and me. I'm not entirely sure where my cousins stand on this all-important issue. I missed the last family reunion and therefore couldn't track the quantity of jam/PB/ketchup consumed over the 3-day weekend.

Before we came to Peru, Simon didn’t really take notice of delicious items like ketchup or jam. That changed in October, when we spent a week at the beach in northern Peru, recovering from the señora and getting ready to start volunteering with Manos Amigas. He liked the toast Sam prepared for him each morning and started asking for more – more butter, more jam. 

Butter + jam + beach = happiness

Simon is now making up for lost time with his toppings. He likes peanut butter so much that we hide it and save it for special occasions, like travel treats. He has the toddler manner of throwing himself into whatever he’s eating, so he’s kind of funny with butter faces especially.

Butter + dinner roll - bib = potential disaster

Simon has been known to call his Grandma Schumacher via the ketchup bag. It's cheaper than Skype but very one-sided.

Simon knew we were going to make papas for dinner and so he immediately got out the ketchup from the fridge, climbed up into his chair, and commenced being protective of the bottle.

Butter + breakfast roll + jungle vacation = content child

Then again, maybe Sam is a closet Hess, too. The other morning we were making a list of things to get at the store. Sam told me to add ketchup to the list. “Are you serious?” I asked. “We have tons of ketchup!” “No, we’re all out,” he said. “We need more.”

I gathered up all of the as-of-yet unopened ketchup, all purchased by my lovely husband at one time or another, loaded up Simon’s arms with it, and told him to go show Daddy how much we had.

A slightly ridiculous quantity of salsa de tomate in our household. This makes me think that while other people stock up on water for natural disasters, we must stock up on ketchup.

We did not end up buying ketchup.

Monument worthy

In the town square in Urubamba, in the middle of the Sacred Valley, the anchor for the main plaza was not a huge statue of a Peruvian revolutionary or military hero. It was a monument of a giant corncob. Now that is my kind of monument, one dedicated to food!

I wondered out loud to Sam what my monument would be to, were I to build one. Garlic? Guacamole? I started listing off all the foods I have missed and am excited to eat within  days or hours of returning to Indianapolis.

Sam looked at me as if I were crazy. “You don’t know? Think!” He gave me a minute to remember. “Your monument would be to ice cream!” Of course!

Accordingly, for my birthday, we went to my favorite ice cream place here and ate lots and lots of ice cream. From the presentation to the tiny spoons, it was wonderful.

Now this is my kind of bowl of ice cream - huge!

Punctuating the experience was Simon cheerfully chirping his birthday wishes: “Happy Mommy! Happy Mommy!” With a huge bowl of delicious ice cream and a lovely family, I am definitely a happy mommy.

Even Simon is wowed by the size of our bowl!

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!

Adventures at the supermercado

Last fall I wrote about our local mercado, the one I shop at daily and is one fabulously short block from our apartment. It had taken me awhile to realize that nearly everything I needed or wanted from the supermarket (a 25 minute walk, assuming zero stops at parks along the way) could be purchased at one of the tiny puestos in the mercado. I just needed to ask around until I found it.

This has nicely cut down on treks to the supermarket. It’s a haul and it’s expensive. Still, there are things we want, like good coffee or a block of chocolate. So there we go, every so often, fueled by our addictions.

What is interesting about the supermarket is that they tend to have people stationed strategically in different departments, hawking their product. For instance, in the milk aisle, someone from the brand Gloria is there to help you pick out the right can of evaporated milk or box of whole milk. Ditto for the soap section, diapers & wipes aisle, ice cream nook, and cookie area.

This whole side of the aisle is nothing but milk, boxed in nearly every way imaginable, with about half of the milk options being evaporated milk. 

This is the (compared to the US) tiny ice cream section. There are no giant freezer aisles here , just little arrangements of kiosk-like cases for similar products. The D'Onofrio lady is watching me check out her competitor's products. D'Onofrio has a lock on the Peruvian market. Unfortunately, they are a Nestle-owned company.

In the toiletry/pharmacy section, there are about six women stationed to sell beauty products. 

Every single one of these women was selling a different brand of toothpaste. Walking by feels a little like running the gauntlet.

There are an equal number of helpers in the wine section. I’m not entirely clear whether they work for the store or for a brand. 

In the meat and fish sections, there is a line on the floor indicating where you should park your cart (perpendicular to the cases, about 3 feet away) so that the carts don’t impede pedestrian access to the display cases. Parking tends to be pretty orderly.

Eggs are at checkout (unrefrigerated) as an impulse buy, like a candy bar would be in the US. Other items are in surprising places. At least, they are surprising to me and my sense of supermarket categorization. Last fall I was at Plaza Vea for baking soda. I scoured the baking aisle with no luck. I asked for help. “Baking soda? In the spice section.” Okay, whatever.

Recently I was at Wong and needed another round of baking soda. I went first to the spice section. It wasn’t there, so I figured perhaps it was in the baking section. Maybe Plaza Vea and Wong just categorized their products differently. Giving up, I asked a couple of people for help, and someone finally guided me to the toiletry/pharmacy section. It is safe to say I would never have looked for it there.

At the checkout, there is a preferential line that we can join if Simon is in tow. But we have to be careful that elderly ladies will not push their carts in front of us and cut in line. After it happened several times, we learned our lesson and are aggressive about guarding our place. 


We went to the store today to get some photos to accompany this post and I was busted before I got half of the photos I wanted. "Please don't take photos here, señora," the plainclothes store manager-type person said. I half expected him to confiscate my camera. Thus, no funny photo of the meat market cart lineup...

Shopping is always an adventure.

Welcome to our neighborhood

Something I have noticed about Lima is the tendency to group stores and products together in specific regions, perhaps for easier comparison shopping. Such as: one street downtown has store after store after store selling only copy machines. If you want fabric, you go to Gamarra, where there are approximately one million stores all appearing to sell the same bolts of fabric. And so with our neighborhood, Santa Cruz, at one end of the larger neighborhood of Miraflores. Its specialty appears to be ceviche and car repair shops.


The two are an interesting combination. Ceviche, raw fish in lime juice (I say "fish cooked in lime juice", Sam says "raw fish marinated in lime juice"), served with sweet potato and a cob of corn, is practically Peru's national dish. I read that there are 3,000 cevicherías in Lima alone, let alone the rest of the country.

You can get it at any price point throughout Peru. (You know how vendors get on the long-distance buses to sell you prepared food during the journey? When we were traveling from Máncora, a vendor got on to sell ceviche for several soles, a bargain. But I am too chicken to try raw fish from a vendor on a bus!)


The cevicherías in our neighborhood tend towards the high end of the price point possibilities. They are mostly all located on Avenida La Mar, which is near to - but not actually on - la mar (the ocean). Cevicherías are only open during the afternoon, 12-5ish, and they always seem to be packed. Our friends Tom and Andrea visited in December, giving us an excuse to finally go to one of the cevicherías near our apartment.

A review in the Washington Post describes Santa Cruz as run down. And it certainly has that feeling in areas. But the cevicherías have a different feel to them. Valet parking, security guards with walkie-talkies, beautifully dressed women with impossibly high heels getting out of SUVs - I'm not sure I possess the cool factor (let alone the money!) to go to the more expensive ones.

In contrast, the car repair shops lend a junky, shabby feeling to Santa Cruz. Guard dogs patrol, there are stripped cars on the streets, and the sketch factor is high.

Santa Cruz is a microcosm of Lima. And to say that Lima is a study in contrasts is an understatement. It certainly makes exploring interesting, however.