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.

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!

Helado happiness

We had to schedule a trip outside of Peru to extend our tourist visas. We had been planning to take a couple of out-of-country trips later in the year, and simply go to the Peruvian immigration office downtown in the meantime to extend our visas for a couple of months, but through a long and complicated process, we found out that Peru no longer offers extensions to tourist visas if you want to stay longer. You either leave the country and return to get another 1-6 months, depending on the mood of the immigration officer, or you overstay your visa and pay a $1 fine per person, per day overstayed. 


We did both – once we realized we needed to leave Peru, we scheduled a trip to Argentina as soon as was practical and we overstayed several weeks until the trip date arrived. 

One of the things I was most excited about with Argentina was the ice cream. I read somewhere a phrase like, “Argentinians take their ice cream seriously and it’s some of the best in the world.” Count me in! 

We rented an apartment in Buenos Aires and we were pleasantly surprised that it had not one but two heladerías on the corner. Granted, one was closed for the month for vacation. But the other one was the best I had during our trip.

The ice cream in Buenos Aires was decadent. Contrary to any heladería I’ve been in, in any country in the world, the flavors are categorized by the chocolate options, the creams, the dulce de leche choices, and the sorbet-like fruit flavors. 

When we were in Cafayate, the heart of wine country, they trumpeted an additional flavor category on their signs: wine. Helado de malbec, torrontés, and cabernet were everywhere.

In many places throughout the country, heladerías even had little signs indicating which flavors were gluten-free. It certainly made it easier to figure out what to try out, and I was surprised by some that were not gluten-free (some of the fruit flavors, for example).

All the heladerías we visited were open until at least midnight, if not later, and many offered delivery, with a free magnet with their phone number (and sometimes their flavor options too). I loved knowing that if I had an ice cream emergency, help was only a phone call away. And, being a magnet freak, I love my new stash of Argentina helado magnets!

Peruvian bureaucracy is alive and well

Several weeks ago, my mom sent us a package. It was partly a care package and partly items that I had planned to bring (such as my favorite gluten free flour mix) but couldn’t fit in our luggage. After she went through some trouble to send it, she mentioned it should arrive in 6-10 days. That is, if it made it through the customs process. When she was packing it at the post office, she was given a list of forbidden items. She read it over and discovered that she wasn’t allowed to send food. Hmmm. She decided to chance it and send it anyway. Our waiting and salivating began… we were dreaming about the chocolate chip cookies we would make and the coffee we would drink after the package arrived.

 

Finally, a week and a half later, our upstairs neighbor Christina (who is also the office coordinator at Manos Amigas) knocked on our door. She handed us a document and said, "You've been sent a package, but the post office has decided to retain it."

She told us that you could either pay some money and fax your passport to the post office people, and they might deliver it, or you went in person to the post office and they most likely would give it to you.

Packages could be retained at different post offices, and ours somehow had been retained at the one farthest away from our neighborhood. It might take a couple of hours to get there, depending on the mode of transport used. A taxi would be quicker but would be pretty expensive. A bus that passes on our street might go there; she could check with the girls who work at Manos Amigas. They would know.

I should mention that at the time we had this conversation with Christina, I had yet to do two basic things: hail a taxi on the street and get on a regular city bus. We had heard countless stories (both while we were in the States as well as after arriving here) about the crime level in Lima and how dangerous taxis were in particular. One story that stuck in my head is about how the back seat doors are sometimes childproofed and so once you got in, you couldn’t get out until you were let out, after you’d been robbed and perhaps assaulted.

So, I was a little scared about hailing a taxi off the street. The señora had advised us to only take taxis that we’d called in advance, and for the limited number of times that we’d needed a taxi so far, that is what we’d done. (Except for the memorable time that she called a taxi for us going one way – it was 11 soles – and when I called to arrange the ride home, they told me it would cost 45 soles. “But I paid 11 soles this morning for the same ride!” I told the dispatcher. “There is a tariff on taxi rides from the oceanfront on Sunday afternoons,” she told me. Yeah, right. We took a very long walk back instead. And after the señora heard about that, she called up the taxi company and let them have it. It was nice to hear her sticking up for us. Actually, she was sticking up for tourists in Lima everywhere: “You think you’re going to get away with charging someone an exorbitant fee just because they have an accent? Why do you think people don’t come back to Lima? It’s because of you!”)

While we’d taken the Metropolitano bus, which runs on a dedicated street lane on a very specific route and was therefore easy to find and use, I hadn’t hailed a regular city bus yet. Buses don’t exactly have names or schedules. You flag one down and ask if it goes where you’re going. Everywhere I’d needed to go so far, I either walked or took the Metropolitano.

Back to the package dilemma. Christina said since the post office was so far away, perhaps it would be better to just go through the electronic process and hope that the post office would deliver it. But then she added that she had really pissed off the post office folks the last time she contested a retained package, so if she were the person emailing in our information, there was a decent chance we wouldn't receive it simply out of spite. 

We decided we would have an adventure and go get the package. There was gluten-free flour and coffee in there, after all! No way should we leave it to chance.

Christina thought that having Simon would be to our advantage: “If you can get him to cry too, that might be helpful.” After consulting my giant Lima map and figuring out how we might get there, I thought it might take an hour to get there, an hour back, and maybe a half hour at the post office. We’d be back in time for lunch and Simon could take a nap at our apartment. My nerves were a little fried after I read in my Lonely Planet book that they considered the post office’s neighborhood "one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Lima." Great!

The next day, we walked about 10 minutes to a bigger street, then we caught a bus to take us to the Metropolitano line that would take us across the city. We took that until we got to the street of the post office, then caught a mini bus and took it the rest of the way to the post office. That took an hour and a half.

Conveniently, as we walked up to the post office building, Simon fell asleep in the sling.

Simon asleep in the sling, not on the post office trip but during an artisan visit... you can see how  lovely a sleeping boy can be!

Then we went to not one, not two different windows/people to be processed, but FIVE.

First, the woman who took our paper and inspected my passport told me that I couldn't pick up the package because I wasn't Manos Amigas. Then she told me I needed two copies of my passport and then I'd be called to another window.

Sam had to leave the post office and find a copy place to make said copies. Twenty minutes later I was called up to the window; the official filled out some paperwork and the box is brought out. That was pretty easy, I thought. How great that we are about to get the box!

Not so fast. Two officials cut open the box and started inspecting all of the items in it, making a pile of loot on the table next to it. Sam and I were elbowing each other: look at all that Equal Exchange coffee!

I was quietly panicking that they were about to confiscate items in the box, which would have been excruciating after having a glimpse of all the chocolate, coffee, gluten-free treats, etc, just on the other side of a plate of glass. I was holding my doctor's order for a strict gluten-free diet in case I needed to plead my case to someone, and Sam was whispering quit fidgeting, just look normal.

They didn’t say much to us, just filled out a massive amount of paperwork, taped the box back up, and directed us to wait for official window #3. After another 15 minutes of waiting, I was called to another postal person, who typed a crazy amount of information into the computer for an eternity. Either that, or he just pretended to type while surfing the web!

Finally, he gave me still more paperwork and told me to go to line #4 for my box processing. Sam waited in this line while I sat holding Simon, miraculously still sleeping through the cacophony of this giant waiting room, replete with an intercom in frequent use, buzzers, crashing doors, wailing children, and a loud TV.

The official woman in line #4 stamped information on various sheets of paper multiple times, asked me to fill in passport information, typed still more information into the computer, and we signed for the box. Then we went to door #5 to actually retrieve our box. Finally. We quickly discussed: Should we open it up now and eat some chocolate? No, maybe they would realize their mistake and take it back. Let’s leave.

As we're leaving the post office complex, the security guard stopped us, inspected our paperwork, and carefully wrote something important in his log book. Simon woke up as we left, having slept through all hour and 15 minutes of our post office experience.

We hailed a taxi back to the bus station (and I immediately made sure I could open the doors from the backseat!). The bus was packed. We were exhausted. We got off at our stop and decided to walk until we found the bus to take us the rest of the way (a 30 minute walk). We never found the bus and just walked verrrrrry slowly until we passed a chicken place 8 blocks from our apartment and rewarded ourselves with lunch - at 3 pm - complete with pisco sours for us and chicha morada for Simon.

We got back to our place at 4, opened the box, and commenced rejoicing at all of our loot while devouring Trader Joes’ dried cherries and Swiss chocolate. 

What an adventure! Now we’re hopping on buses like pros and I am even negotiating cab fares with taxi drivers! Who knows what the next package delivery might bring? (Just please include some Equal Exchange coffee and chocolate!)

We survived the señora

After an early post about our struggles with our host family, several good friends wrote with some supportive words. One phrase in particular stuck with me: “you will survive the señora!” That became a sort of mantra over our month in the homestay.

I should preface all these comments with the statement that Sam is not necessarily in agreement with all of them. We have different memories of what happened and how we felt about it. But since this is my blog, I get to put my perspective on it. He can blog about it if he so desires!

One month – I tend to believe I can do anything for a minimum of three months and most situations I think I could stick out for two years. So one month? We’re having difficulties? Piece of cake; at least it wasn’t three months. But I was surprised by how long that month was. After a week and a half, we considered moving out but I really liked the food and dreaded the thought of being in a hotel for several weeks. At two and a half weeks, we were pretty certain we could stick it out but the situation was slightly outrageous. At three weeks, I considered leaving school early and traveling for two weeks instead of one.

I’m glad we finished our month, but it wasn’t easy. And I’m left with conflicting feelings about the experience.

On the one hand, the family clearly loved Simon. The señora bought him a car, the type of toy he’s been coveting from every other little kid at the park and would play with at any opportunity, so he’d have something nice to play with at our apartment. She lavished him with her versions of love and affection. She was so proud of Simon and bragged about him and his good behavior to everyone who visited.

On the other hand, we had real power struggles over boundaries with Simon and food (both for me as well as Simon). I’ll give a couple of examples.

Most group meals bordered on the comical in their carnival aspect. Everyone watched, silently, how Simon ate his food and the señora would narrate as if she were doing play-by-play for a ballgame: “Look how he eats with his hands! How funny! He’s like a little monkey. Oh, now he’s going for the rice! He likes it! Have more. Have a bite, here. Eat it! Eat! Oh, he just wants his mama. Always his mama!” (Mimicking Simon) “Mami! Mami! Maybe your mama will let you have a little treat after dinner? Maybe she’ll let you have some special cake that is for the king of the house?”

She loved to hold him, but Simon didn't like to be held. While he warmed up to her somewhat, he would frequently cry out and protest when she picked him up and handled him. No amount of protest on his part could convince her that he did not want to be held by her. I eventually would take him back, but she would  usually start mimicking Simon's cries and, clearly annoyed, mutter, "Mami! Mami! Ya!" 

Yes, we stepped in to set boundaries. But that didn’t make us popular. The señora pouted when we asserted ourselves. At the same time that I wanted to extricate Simon from certain situations, I also wanted to let things unfold and not swoop in at the first sign of his being upset. I would give Simon little pep talks in our room: “You are doing a good job of letting the señora know when you don’t like what she is doing!” Those pep talks were probably about as much for me as they were for him.

One of my food struggles with the señora was over brown rice and quinoa. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m celiac and therefore cannot eat gluten. An unrelated issue is that I also am intolerant to white rice. So, I’m a fun dinner guest two times over.

When we first moved in, I was impressed with how often we had quinoa. While it’s native to the Andes, I had heard that it wasn’t frequently eaten here. As it’s a grain I can eat, and is extremely easy to cook, we ate lots of it back home. I asked at one dinner if they normally ate quinoa or if it was because of my dietary restrictions. Quinoa is a way of life for us, she told me. Excellent! So they normally eat this; it’s not just because of me. I was relieved.

Brown rice was trickier. I bought a bag of brown rice and made some once when I was sick; she showed me how to use the rice cooker. For the first two weeks, she would serve dinner with a plate of brown rice and a plate of white rice, so that each person could serve herself/himself accordingly. But then a second Japanese person moved into the house, and all the brown rice disappeared. All white rice, all the time. Instead of us being able to serve ourselves from the foods on the table, she gave us plated food. Everyone else (including Simon!) got full plates of food, including white rice. She gave me a dessert plate of whatever the vegetable option was. This was about a third of the food that everyone else had. I was perpetually hungry and would eat energy bars when I got back to our room. Finally, one morning I got up the courage to ask for brown rice; I was having a big internal debate over asking for more food, since I saw my request as being extremely impolite. But hunger – and the fact that we were paying a lot to live there and be fed there! – finally won out.

This is an abridged version of our exchange.

Alison: Can I make some brown rice so that I can eat rice when everyone else has rice?

The señora: No, the rice cooker has white rice in it. You can’t make brown rice.

A: Can I make it on the stove in another pot?

TS: No, I don’t know how to make it in a pot.

A: Oh, I know how to make it. I made it all the time back home.

TS: But it’s different here. It uses too much water. I don’t know the quantities to use because Lima is at a different altitude. The rice cooker does it in an hour but it will take too long on the stove. You’ll use too much gas. Maybe the maid could make quinoa, I don’t know.

A: Sure, quinoa would be fine. I just want something to eat when everyone else has rice.

TS: But we have to wash every single pot and pan and plate and utensil today because we are fumigating. The maid already has too much work. I don’t know that she can make quinoa too. You can buy rice to go at a restaurant.

A: Brown rice at a restaurant here? Where?

TS: All of them!

A: Would you prefer that I do that?

TS: Do whatever you want!

There is no brown rice readily available at restaurants, so getting it to go wasn’t truly an option. I gave up and figured I’d stock up on chocolate or raisins. That night, there was quinoa for me to eat. I thanked her for it, and she went on a diatribe about how the maid had to wash it for 30 minutes because quinoa is poisonous if you don’t wash it well.

This is why I started going to bed at 8:30 – I was exhausted from exchanges like these!

I appreciate that she was careful to serve me food I could have, and delicious to boot. I’m thankful that with a house full of people with different food preferences, she was able to accommodate us. But at the same time, we were paying her to do this.

We recently visited the señora so we could pick up several gifts she had given Simon but which we couldn’t take with us at the time. And it was a nice visit; she had made a special quinoa pudding for us to have as a snack (the irony of being served quinoa was not lost on me). We sat and visited while Simon played in the patio and babbled with the señora. She urged us to come have Sunday lunch with them on occasion, and invited us to come for Christmas.

I appreciate those offers and believe they are genuine. They made me wonder if things could have been as bad as they were. And then I open my journal and read about all the other occasions I haven’t described here, such as the time she told us we drank too much water and needed to buy it instead of having it at the house; the time I had to scrub a skillet several times over the course of a day to pacify her (even though the maid did the dishwashing); the time she told us we could no longer do laundry at the house because the maid was refusing to do any laundry and the señora didn’t know how to operate the washing machine, and then we found out everyone else’s laundry was still being done by the maid; etc.

At the end of the day, I suppose I’m glad we had that experience. Just like everything else, it was a time to learn and adjust and problem-solve as a family…. And the hardest part of that experience, the homestay, is over. Ya! 

Food and music for the soul

We’d heard that on Saturdays, a small market sets up outside a park about 10 minutes from our house. And what a cool market it was, full of organic produce, rich coffee, handcrafts, tamales sold by nuns, and even a bakery that had a number of gluten-free concoctions! 


There were perhaps 40 vendors and several hundred people stocking up for the week. I wanted to buy a piece of all of the gluten-free goodies, but that would have wiped out our food budget for the whole month – they were pricey. One slice of gluten-free lúcuma cake was 9 soles, which is about $3.50 or $4. 

In front of the gluten-free stand.... heaven!

But hey, I’m a celiac who rarely encounters treats I can actually eat at our own farmers’ market in Indy (since they always use white rice flour, which I also cannot eat, as a substitute for wheat flour). And here there was a chocolate cake jammed with fresh strawberries. Quinoa cake with tropical fruits. Empanadas filled with potatoes and other vegetables. And all of it gluten-free and white rice-free – wouldn’t it be practical, nay, wise, to spend a month’s budget on those treats?!? 

But the best was yet to come. We took our coffees and treats into the park and played with Simon. A group of people were practicing tai chi; another group was finishing a yoga session. 

Later, the tai chi folks busted out swords, too

A small crowd of families was gathering nearby, and we watched as some musicians set up shop and distributed instruments to the toddlers and little kids. For an hour, we enjoyed their music and the delight on the faces of the kids and the musicians. It felt wonderful to be included in such a joyful experience. 

Joyful sounds in Parque Reducto

I’m hoping this becomes a Saturday tradition for us, although when we move to our apartment in several weeks, it will be a trek to attend. Still, it’s something to look forward to… even if I’m not going to eat all the gluten-free delicacies!