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.

Coffee or bust

Ready for a coffee quiz?

Of the 88 million pounds of fair trade coffee imported to the US in 2008, which country sent the highest percentage?
a. Ethiopia
b. Peru
c. Colombia
d. Guatemala

Based on the prevailing theme of this blog, you might have correctly guessed... Peru! Fair trade coffee from Peru represented 25% of all fair trade coffee imported to the US in 2008. Colombia, Mexico, and Nicaragua each represented 10%.

Until Sam edited Think Fair Trade First a couple of years ago and I wrote scavenger hunt questions for the book launch party, I had no clue that Peru was a big coffee producer, let alone the largest supplier to the US of fair trade coffee. I suppose that represented how little I knew about Peru, period. Peru even exports its coffee to Colombia!

But even though coffee is a massive operation here, few Peruvians actually drink it... and if they do, they drink Nescafé. I’m not sure that counts as coffee, but I won’t quibble with their choice. Nescafé is big.

This corner is brought to you by Nescafé.

This building is apparently brought to you by Nescafé.

And while I have yet to patronize the giant Nescafé coffee cup mounted on a bicycle, wheeled around to serve Nescafé and sandwiches to the Miraflores masses, I think it is fabulous.

Once I knew about Peru’s coffee production, one of my travel goals was to visit a coffee farm or production site. I wanted to see the plants, learn more about the whole process, and of course, taste some coffee!

We ended up visiting the region of Chanchamayo, about 8 hours from Lima, known for its coffee: “We are not necessarily known for the quantity of coffee produced, but rather for the quality of our coffee,” said our guide and taxi driver Feliciano. 

La Florida was our next door neighbor. Although we couldn't visit, all of the various certifications and clients painted on their wall were enough to convince us to give their coffee a try when we saw it at the market.

The place we stayed at had sent us information about visiting various coffee haciendas, but when we tried to arrange a visit, we learned that they came with a 4-hour round trip drive. Fresh off of steep, twisty mountain roads descending into the jungle, which made our little boy very carsick (prompting the woman sitting behind me to get carsick too), we weren’t interested in more driving.

No problem, our host said. Two places nearby could explain the process and we could taste the coffee as part of a tour of various Chanchamayo sights and specialties. We were game. 

It was very cool to see coffee beans drying out at various places along the road. The ones shown here were the largest we saw; we also saw many tiny batches laid out next to homes. Sam mentioned that coffee is one of the only commodities that is grown by smaller farmers instead of on plantations.

The tour was a total bust. After our first stop to  “nearby” waterfalls took 2 hours to get to instead of 40 minutes as promised, after hearing that the tour was really supposed to last until late at night instead of early afternoon as our host had mentioned, after the driver started falling asleep while driving us to our lunch destination, we nixed the rest of the tour to get to the goal of the day: the coffee stops!

The first place, Chanchamayo Highland Coffee, bills itself as fair trade and pairs their fair trade ads with scantily clad women. Interesting marketing strategy: hopefully it works for them.

Clearly more bust than coffee. I think this is kind of funny: "Welcome to Fair Trade" is written at the top. "Call me" is at the bottom right. I'm not sure I want to know what kind of phone calls that phone number receives...

A young woman greeted us and proceeded to offer us countless samples of jams, juices, dried fruits, bland ice creams... and finally, one sample of lukewarm, sweetened coffee. Hmmm. Then she walked us over to the artesanía section and invited us to browse. Once we realized there was no tour, no talk, just buying, we asked our tour guide to take us to the next place.

There, at Green Gold, we got a better explanation and actually saw some coffee beans, but still, all was focused on purchasing their value-added products. We finally surrendered and bought some coffee.

Dried coffee beans, prior to being sorted and roasted

Roasting equipment

Roasted beans, slowly filling up a giant barrel

Simon showing off one of our samples, a chocolate-covered coffee bean. He approved of the complex, nuanced flavor... of the chocolate.

Oh well. At least we enjoyed amazing coffee each morning with our breakfast, overlooking the nearby hills and gorgeous blue skies.

Finger puppet quiz

I walked into the Manos Amigas warehouse one day and saw a couple of giant bags of finger puppets waiting to be shipped to Ten Thousand Villages. I wondered how many shops are supplied by this order, and for what period of time. It seemed like a ton of puppets! 


Two points if you can guess how many finger puppets are in the two bags in this top picture...

If you guessed over ten thousand finger puppets, then two points are yours!


The puppets are colorful, fun, and detailed. And yet, Christina said, the women who knit them do so quickly, in a matter of several minutes per puppet. Being the slowest knitter on the planet makes me marvel at the miracle of being able to produce something cool so quickly. 

The group that knits these puppets is called Manos Aymaras, and they are a collective of women that live in Puno, near the border of Bolivia, on a gorgeous lake at 12,500 feet of elevation. The women keep yarn looped around their necks and they knit while they walk, while they sell their family’s vegetables and wool at market, whenever they have a free moment. It’s apparently something they can do without thinking! And, a part of the story I love the most: their husbands do the detail work at home in the evenings.