/ food
menú familiar o turistico
Arroz con leche (PEN$1) - rice pudding with a sweet blackberry sauce at a local restaurant in Cusco
I´ve already mentioned how tourists overrun the city of Cusco; much of southern and coastal Perú are also heavily touristed, though not to quite the same degree. In these enclaves of largely light-skinned foreigners, two very distinctive types of restaurants can be found: the local and the touristic.
Local restaurants, which tend to serve grilled meat (lomo saltado), rotisserie chicken (pollo a la brasa), soups and, for lunch, cevice, range in price from PEN$2.50 to PEN$8 (about US$.90 and $2.80, respectively) per person per meal; they´re generally cheapest in small towns. Meals are served menú style: a set price for a starter, generally soup; a main plate, usually meat with rice, potatoes or both; a small dessert, often jello; and sometimes a drink like fruit punch. Often the restaurants give you options for the first two courses, but sometimes they actually only serve one thing, especially the rotisserie chicken places.
The best meals I´ve had in Perú have been at these places, unsurprisingly. My first night, Kiwi Friend and I enjoyed a tasty chicken and rice soup called aguadito, salad, a quarter of a really well-cooked rotisserie chicken and fries for PEN$6.80 each in Arequipa, while only a few blocks away restaurants were charging PEN$20 for just the main course.
During our tour of the Colga Canyon, KF and I escaped the group stops at tourist buffets (PEN$20, not including a drink) and enjoyed one meal in Chivay for PEN$2.50. Homemade meat broth with a variety of potatoes and other vegetables, a rich beef and vegetable stew / chicken and rice (here there was an option, so we ordered differently), jello and a kool-aid-like drink.
Courses one, two and three with a drink
Not all these restaurants are good, of course. It´s hit or miss, and we´ve eaten a lot of untasty fried potatoes. Served with basically every meal, these large-cut fries are cooked less than they would be in the US and often have a mealy taste. At one meal, we were actually given whole potatoes deep fried, which sucked all of the flavor out of them.
I thought this Peruvian specialty deserved its own entry. I´ve been anticipating eating it for several months. In the time we were at the restaurant, Kiwi Friend and I saw at least five other people order the dish.
That´s cuy (pronounced coo-ye). Your eyes are not deceiving you. There´s a guinea pig on that plate, head, balls and all.
KF and I were a bit hesitant to delve into this not inexpensive dish. We were told that it was easiest and most delicious to eat the meat with our hands and tried to oblige. We started with a part that seemed like it would be easy to eat, the legs. The dish was juicy and tender and had basically no fat. The leg meat tasted like well-cooked chicken, but the middle had a different, almost shellfish-like flavor.
Surprisingly good. I´d definitely eat this again.
The sides, by the way, are whole fried potatoes and green bell pepper stuffed with ground meat, ricotta cheese and vegetables.
Delicious, common restaurant fare at a mere PEN$4 or $6 (US$1.40 and $2, respectively), pollo a la brasa - basically cooked rotisserie-style - is super moist and tender. The heat in la brasa (picture one) comes from a wood fire. Pollo with the common lightly fried papas fritas in picture two (often it is also accompanied by rice).
Brocheta or anticucho de corazon (picture three) - skewer of cow heart with a few small vegetables. The heart has the consistency of kidney - thin, soft and tender - but with a warm, tasty beef flavor.
Like it´s camelito relative llama, alpaca is tasty but very chewy. Generally grilled over wood fire, it tastes like a less fatty beef. I prefer the llama, which is a bit more flavorful.
a really popular soft drink with a pineapple-y, bubble gum flavor. like all soda in Perú, it is often served at room temperature…
going back for a moment…
Some days in Chile it seemed like everything in a package is made by Nestle. And some days it really was. From ice cream to crackers to yogurt, their brand rules the grocery store. Forget General Mills, common cereal brands like Cheerios are sold here under the Nestle, not General Mills brand.
Oh, and I almost forget - yeah, right - Nescafe, the overprocessed, instant hot beverage product mascarading as coffee.
Kiwi Friend reported from Jujuy…
There is so much laughter at the house, as we try to understand one another and I love the fact that they tell it how it is. The fat girl at the gym, “Gordita” – little fatty. Hilarious. In fact, anything that is remotely endearing attracts “ita” (meaning little) at the end. At the comedor, I am Blancita for obvious reasons. My favourite so far is Sandra requesting a “Cocita light.” [Diet coke.]
On Sunday it was the “dia de la Mardre,” mother’s day and it is a super big deal here. Naturally, were to have a big BBQ lunch. I accompanied Claudia to the butcher to buy the lomo. However, after much waiting amidst large meat hooks with various parts of various animals attached for some time, there was no lomo left. No problem, the butcher had a whole cow on stand-by. Claudia even got to choose which part of the cow she wanted, and I got to watch my lunch being carved straight off the (thankfully) headless cow.
Last week a large shopping mall opened in Jujuy, the first of it type in the province, (which is one of the poorest in Argentina). It is on my way home, so I popped in to have a look. Naturally it was packed full of school kids, but the best thing ever: watching people use the escalator! The first one in Jujuy. I saw this middle-aged lady almost fall off completely, an another lady was taking a photo of the escalator.
In the center and north of Chile, there´s tons of fresh fruit juice. Some places add water and sugar, but it´s also easy to find 100% juice - mango, strawberry - a mix of these two shown in picture one along with straight pineapple - orange, cherimoya and others.
Cherimoya (picture two), by the way, is a soft Chilean fruit with giant black seeds - seriously, I can´t think of another fruit with similarly sized seeds; they look like black almonds - that tastes kind of like a mushier, sweetened pear.
Juice is served at regular restaurants, of course, and can be found waiting for you in smoothie-like juice dispensers at juice bars (picture three), kiosks and street food stands.
One of the most delicious things you can find to eat in Chile is the avocados. There are avocados galore. The little black ones (hass), slightly larger and more watery green ones with longer necks, and giant green ones 6-8 inches long that look and taste like the smaller green ones. In picture one, the black and smaller green onesare displayed by a street vendor.
They appear on every salad and in tons of menu items, including on completos (picture three), a Chilean hot dog with lots of toppings - in addition to avocado, there are usually tomatoes, mayonnaise, cheese, whatever you want… They are commonly found on menus and can be bought from completo stands (more like an ice cream case than a hot dog stand) inside kiosks and other small stores.
On the other hand you have the not-so-delicious Chilean hot dogs and sausages, which usually have quite a similar consistency. Salchipapas, basically french fries covered in small hot dogs and/or sausages, are a common menu item (the remnants of a dish of salchipapas are in picture four).
Some Chilean streetfood …
1) sopapillas - fried bread made of flour and salt with pumpkin used for coloring
2) pieces of pork, hot dog and chorizo on a stick, cooked over small parillas on the street
3) mote con huesillos - dried peaches are rehydrated in water for hours; the peach-flavored water is then sweetened with sugar before the peaches and wheat are mixed in
4) empanada de pino - baked empanada with meat, hard-boiled eggs, onion and spices. similar to Argentine meat empanadas but with a wetter, almost gravy-like filling
5) the street cart is filled with nalca, Chilean rhubarb, which looks like sugar cane inside and out, but is bitter. In southern Chile, people buy several-inch long pieces of it with the skin removed and eat it raw.
6) salsa pebre (the red sauce also seen next to the sopapillos in the first photo) - a delicious hot sauce served with pretty much everything, made of tomatoes, onions, peppers and some other spices
farm to plate meets water to plate
Goodbye crazy amounts of beef (mostly). Hello sea creatures.
Small restaurant in the front of a house selling fresh fish and homemade empanadas on the beach in Concòn, near Valparaiso.
Fresh fish (pescado) and seafood (marisco) fill markets, menus and even empanadas on the coast of Chile. It´s common to see people fishing off piers and from the tops of cliffs. A common soup, Caldillo de Mariscos or Paila Marina, comes with a thin broth packed with clams (almejas), mussels, (choros) shrimp (camarones), cuttlefish (jibia), surf clams (machas) and piures, a red seafood with a mussel-like texture that I´ve never seen before.
A popular empanada is stuffed full of clams, mussels and other random shellfish, deep fried and sold on the street. Others contain shrimp or surf clams covered in cheese and, again, deep fried.
And fish itself is, of course, served every way possible: fried whole, grilled, baked …
still warm from the oven
Much of Valparaiso´s charm stems from all the little cafes and bars tucked away in different parts of the city. After a very long walk up and down hills yesterday, Thoughtful Travler - we share the same couchsurfing host - and I stopped for some fresh fruit juice at a cafe featuring natural food on a small plaza downtown. In addition to the shock of finding out the place was vegetarian, we were amazed to discover they actually serve brown bread. In two and a half months, I have seen non-white bread about four times - and at least three of those times the bread was simply a mix of white and whole wheat flours. This bread, on the other hand, was dark and flavorful with some seeds and spices.
Although the plethora of bakeries in Chile and Argentina means freshly baked bread is always available, TT and I are plenty sick of the white bread. Thus we decided to invest some time finding the bakery that supplied the bread to that cafe, which is on a street that isn´t on the map. Knowing generally where to go, TT and I walked into several dead ends and got some bewildered looks from locals before we finally navigated through the maze that is Valparaiso to the small pedestrian street where Panadería Feliz is located - Pasaje Galvez. Three turns on this tiny, residential path later, I noticed a small mural about bread making. We had arrived. No sign or name or actual shop - just someone´s home that they sell bread out of.
We purchased two large loafs, baguette style, from the baker: one with poppy seeds (a word neither TT nor I knew in Spanish, so we had to have a funny conversation about seeds and opiads with the baker) and an even more flavorful one with oregano.
Pasaje Galvez
The mural outside Panadería Feliz
TT, holding both loaves of bread, talks to the baker and his wife outside their house/bakery
Eating the baguettes with fresh avocado on a bench overlooking the water and the city
willy wonka´s factory town…
This has got to be the most logical and delicious way to make hot chocolate - and there’s not a better place to enjoy it than the self-proclaimed chocolate capital of Argentina. A submarino comes out as a glass of steaming hot milk with a side of one or two small, rich chocolate bars (sometimes they’re already in the bottom of the glass). Stir for a quick minute and it’s ready. ¡Qué rico!
There doesn’t seem to be any reason for this, but the main streets of Bariloche are filled with upscale, artisanal chocolate shops. One after the next sells bonbons, thin chocolate pieces with cookies or mint layers, alfajores and rich, creamy gelato (helado). At the Museo de Chocolate, the only reason that they are able to give for this chocolate explosion is the weather - I guess people were just bored and thought they´d get really good at making chocolate during the cold winter here…
submarino before and after, and the inside of a giant artisanal chocolate shop in Bariloche
On a main street in Bariloche (in the rain)
