I’ve already written a post about the typical South American lunch, but I wanted to give a special mention to Ecuador. Not for its variety, but for it’s…let’s call it regularity. Every meal included rice. Every. Single. One. Well, except if you ordered your food in liquid form (soup or stew or something like that).

Despite the large range of food available in the country, in the mountains it would almost always consist of chicken or beef (sometimes fish if you were lucky) fried or baked with beans or lentils on the side. Fried plantains were often included - I couldn’t get enough of those. A soup was served first - usually something brothy with corn and potatoes.

I am a man of habit. I can eat the same thing day in day out for days on end. This, however, even started to get to me (except for the plantains). Luckily, Quito has a large range of foreign food (and chain restaurants, if you’re feeling homesick) - Indian, Chinese, vegetarian (that really is foreign here) - to help break up the monotony. Can’t beat the price, however - we never paid more than $2 for one of these meals, and they were sometimes big enough for us to share one between us.

This one was particularly huge.

New country means new fruit. Right on the ecuator, this meant some strange new fruits were ours to discover.

These little mandarins were the smallest oranges I’ve ever seen in my life. That’s an American dime next to it for scale (they use American money here). They were super-sweet, like all the sweetness of a regular mandarin had been squeezed into this tiny little package. There were pips inside. The slices were smaller than my thumb.

Next up, the uvilla (or uchuva, as it’s called in Colombia). Some research on the Internet brought up the name cape gooseberries. They kind of tasted like a mix between a tomato and a cherry. Like a savoury cherry, I guess. I loved these a lot - we bought a bag and I ended up eating most of them.

Speaking of gooseberries, we found these other ones on the street - bought them on the street, that is. I found out a name for them after some intense research by a friend, though I forget it now. I’ll try and find it soon. They turned out to be the tartest fruits ever in a land of tart fruits. I ended up eating most of these as well - Chris is not a tart fruit person.

As soon as we entered the country, we picked up a couple we had been waiting for - the zapote and the narajilla. The zapote was a mealy fruit that is almost tuber-like in its consistency - really, it’s like an extra-sweet sweet potato. No juice. Not bad.

The other, smaller fruit was one I had been anticipating for some time since reading about it. The narajilla looks kind of strange - a bright orange skin (inedible) surrounding a tart (again!) green flesh. Not the best eating fruit, but it makes great juices. Christine also believes that this tasted like vomit and avoided it like…well, vomit. I had it almost every day with breakfast or lunch.

Plums raised their ugly head again. While we were in Mindo, the wee cloud forest town, a woman in a doorway sold us a bag of a crunchy green tart fruit that she called plums. While ‘crunchy’ and ‘plum’ do not go together in my vocabulary, she didn’t have another name and we couldn’t find one, so Ecuador plum it is. They had salt to go with them if you desired. I didn’t.

Last up is another type of passionfruit - apparently there are quite a few types of these things - locally called taxo. The tartest passionfruit we tried (maybe the equator makes things extra tart, I don’t know), the seeds were also the biggest and crunchiest. Again, this fruit is not commonly eaten; instead, it is used in ice cream and juices. I like the bright orange colour.

Oh, and who can forget bananas? Not here you can’t!

What food trip involving Christine could miss out on sweets and treats? In fact the first picture is a dessert from her Spanish/gourmet time with her Peruvian host family. It’s half rice with milk and spices - sort of a creamy rice pudding - and half mazamora. Mazamora is a pudding-like substance made with purple corn (is there anything it can’t do?). It can be different consistencies, depending on what you do with it. I’ve had it as a pudding and also as a jello-like bowl of lavender. They call it clasico because the colours of the two biggest futból clubs in Peru are purple and white - hence, the Classic.

We found candied coconut while walking through the market in Ayacucho. I don’t know the exact process, but it was delicately carmelized and a perfect snack.

On the empanada front (sort of), we found something called empanadas de Semana Santa (Holy Week empanadas) in a few bakeries, which didn’t really resemble empanadas so much as Pop Tarts. There was nothing inside, they were simply baked biscuit-like objects with a chocolate spread on the top. Mediocre.

I’ll finish the sweets with a mystery drink and snack we found in the north of Peru. The drink is called champu and is actually made with corn. It’s sweet and thick and pretty tasty. It’s usually found sold with fried cheesy pastries which are also tasty. There weren’t a lot of special sweet things in Peru, but that made ones we did find that much better.

Not all snacks were sweet, however. I came to LOVE the toasted corn available in every market and often served as a side or appetizer in restaurants. Salty, crunchy, and, if they’re freshly-made, containing a hint of warmth. As we headed north, they were sometimes joined by fried plantains, which I also came to love very, very much.

Lastly, though not entirely odd, are street-side quail eggs. We only saw these in the north of Peru, but they were pretty popular. And tasty! A bag was only a couple of pesos, and, lightly salted, they made a perfect late-afternoon snack.

The only problem with all of these delicious snacks were that they were available between the enormous meals we were always eating. Tragically, this left us with very little stomach rooms for delicious snacks. Travesty!

There is a lot of meat in the Andes. I mean A LOT. Almost every dish has some meat in it. I would guess that being vegetarian might get repetitive if one is forced to choose off of a typical menu. That said, there are some good non-meat dishes to be found.

First off, a delicious creamy quinoa soup. I’d been looking for one of these and I’m glad we found one. Potatoes, greens, quinoa, pepper - a great way to fill a belly and warm up on a chilly Andean afternoon.

Being the birthplace of potatoes, these tubers feature highly in both meat and non-meat dishes. Two of my favourite dishes are centered around potatoes. I’ve already talked about one - papas rellenas, or stuffed potatoes. I want to include another picture here just to show how very ubiquitous they are. These potatoes were bought on the street for our lunch one day and cost us about 50 cents. And they were delicious.

The other dish is papas huancainas. There isn’t really a translation for this dish (Huancayan potatoes?), that’s just their name. We were pretty close to Huancaya in the south (it’s up in the mountains near Ayacucho), so we had them as close as could to their origin. Another creamy sauce made with the yellow ají pepper covering potatoes, it’s simple and usually served as an appetizer.

Stuffed avocados were a delicious surprise that we may continue to make. Really, all it is is chicken salad (or shrimp salad on the coast, yum yum) on half of a peeled, slightly underripe avocado (a very ripe one would be too soft and gooey). Another great appetizer or light lunch.

Lastly, the simple Peruvian breakfast we found at a market in Ayacucho was meat-free. Carb-heavy for a long day, it was filling and hot and definitely different - rice, fries, and an egg. While we ate, we talked with the other people around the table about how breakfast is different in North America. Buy food, get culture. That’s what we’re here to do!

Now, to start off, most of these dishes can be found throughout the country. We tried many of them in the south, but that’s because we arrived there first. That said, many towns and cities have their specialty - when we asked our Peruvian grocers in Buenos Aires what we should try and where, they simply told us to ask in every town what the special dish was and order it. Fair enough. And so, without further ado, dishes that are centered around meat.

I ordered cau cau once and found out it’s roughly equivalent to mondongo in Argentina - stomach meat. Rubbery, spongy, and chewy. I think this upset my stomach later in the day. Apparently Peru was rather rough on my tummy. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t think I’ll order it again. What we do for research…

Chicharrón means deep-fried meat. Usually, chicharrones are made from pork, but I also saw them made with fish and beef. No chicken, to my memory. They weren’t the healthiest thing to order, nor the most complex, but I liked them. People sometimes ate them for breakfast - I did once. In this picture, they’re served with qapchi, a cream sauce made with huacatay (a green-tasting herb from Peru), cheese, milk, crackers, and spices.

Puca picante was supposed to be the specialty of Ayacucho, the medium-sized town we spent a day in between Cuzco and the north, but I have to say it was a little bland and disappointing. It looks great with all that redness, but nothing comes of it. Picante usually means not, but in Peru I believe it also means cooked in a thick sauce or something like that.

Rocoto relleno, or stuffed pepper, while being a vegetable, is completely stuffed with meat, so I’m putting it in here. The slightly spicy local ají amarillos (yellow peppers - not capsicums, these are a Peruvian item) are de-seeded and stuffed with a mixture of ground beef, egg, onions, garlic, raisins, carrots, peas, potatoes, and sometimes other items as well. They are then blanched a few times to soften their texture and their spice, then baked with a bit of cheese or soufflé on top. Two can be an entire meal. (The peppers are in the back - in the front are two kinds of cooked & friend potatoes. Two kinds of potatoes at lunch! I love Peru!)

Ají de gallina has long been a favourite of ours ever since we discovered it at our favourite Peruvian restaurant in Buenos Aires. Literally coming out to something like ’sauce of hen’, it’s pulled chicken in a delicious sauce of milk, crackers, cheese, and hot peppers. I’m including a recipe below that Christine got from her host family in Cuzco. It’s one of our favourite dishes and surprisingly simple.

Seco de cordero follows closely on the heels of ají de gallina as a favourite. Stewed goat is probably the best translation. Usually done in a beer sauce, this dish can be heavenly when done right; that is, when a good sauce is made and the goat stewed until it’s almost falling off the bone. I had a very simple, very delectable version of this at Pachapapa in Cuzco - possibly the best I’ve ever had, actually. Goes to show you don’t need to have a lot to make a dish fantastic. That said, it’s often served with beans, rice, and an onion salad, as shown here, which I don’t mind one bit.

My last Peruvian dinner was a simple fish in sauce, but it reflected so much of what I love about the food here. It doesn’t have to be complicated to be tasty - a good sauce, a side of rice and beans, a too-small glass of chicha morada. So yay Peru! It’s no wonder Peruvian is starting to be seen as the new hot cuisine.

Well, I not all of these were enjoyed by the Incas and their predecessors, but you get the idea.

Two beverages that cannot be missed while in Peru are Inca Kola and the pisco sour. The first is a bubble-gum sweet, radioactive-yellow tinted pop sold everywhere. It is very popular, outselling Coca Cola by…I’m not sure. A lot. I liked it a lot and drank it when I could. No caffeine!

The pisco sour is the signature alcoholic drink of Peru. Pisco is rather like grappa, the Italian liquor made from grapes. Kind of like a Peruvian grape brandy, I’ve heard it described. It’s also made in Chile, but the Peruvians are fiercely protective of it, citing national pride. There’s a lot of that down here. Either way, it’s a pretty strong, pretty tasty drink that, again, you can buy in every bar in Peru. It’s topped with beaten egg whites.

Other drinks reach further back. Chicha is an old, old drink made from corn. The alcoholic version was made by communally chewing corn (that’s right, sharing spit), then letting the remains sit and ferment until you had booze. We tried some, and though it wasn’t too alcoholic-tasting, it was definitely fermented. I rather enjoyed it. You can buy chicha in almost every town in Peru, you just have to keep an eye out for a pink/red flag (most commonly a plastic bag tied to a stick) hung outside of a home. That means CHICHA HERE.

Even better was chicha morada, a non-alcoholic drink made from purple corn. This was probably our favourite drink, consumed at every possible opportunity. Of course, it was best when homemade, but you could buy it in a two-litre bottle as well. It was often made with bits of pineapple or apple in it, giving it a slight fruity taste. Oh, man, I’m drooling just thinking about it! You can find a recipe from Cocinando con Carmen at the end.

Coca tea is another ancient drink, one often used to help with altitude sickness. It’s much weaker than chewing the coca leaves themselves, but still delivers some of the benefits. After every meal, this is one of the options you receive - the other two are anise tea and chamomile. I enjoyed my coca tea with a touch of sugar.

I don’t know if the Incas drank quinoa juice, but lots of people do now. It’s a popular breakfast food/drink, as a matter of fact. Hot, filling, and tasty, it’s usually sold on the street. A quick recipe for it from Cocinando con Carmen can be found at the end of the article.

Lastly, the drink that’s wrinkled the most noses - essence of frog. I tried this in a market in southern Peru, where the guy selling it to me told us that 10-15 people come by every day to get their healthy frog juice. He was one of many, many sellers in town. It’s not just frog, there’s also carob extract, half of a banana, carrot and beet juice, a raw quail egg, water, honey, and maca (a kind of powdered root). It didn’t taste too bad, kind of sinister juice. Chris likened it to juice made with pond water. I don’t know if there’s a direct connection, but I was rather ill that night. We’ll never know. Oh, and just so it’s clear, the frog was alive right before I ordered the drink - it’s killed and skinned on the spot.

Mmmm, thirst-quenchers.

Chicha Morada

3 L water
1/2 kg purple corn
1 tsp whole cloves
2 cinnamon sticks
1 pineapple
Brown sugar and lemon juice to taste

1. Cook the purple corn, cloves, cinnamon, and pineapple skin in the water for 10-15 minutes.

2. Strain and let cool. Add the sugar and lemon juice if you wish, then add the pineapple, chopped into small cubes. Cubed apple can also be added.

Quinoa juice with apple

1/2 c cleaned quinoa
1/2 kg apples, cut into quarters
2 cinnamon sticks
1/2 tbsp cloves
sugar to taste
1/2 c brown sugar for colour

1. Put 2 litres of water, quinoa, apple, cinnamon, and cloves in a pan. Bring it to a boil and let it simmer. When the apple is cooked, remove it and blend/smash it, put it through a sieve and return liquid to the pan. You can skip the sieve if you like. Drink is finished when quinoa is rather soft and mushy.

2. To give the drink some colour, heat the sugar in a pan. When it caramelizes, add it to the pan. Add extra sugar to taste until desired sweetness is reached.

Bordering the ocean, one cannot talk about the food of Peru without mentioning the seafood. In a similar vein, one cannot mention the seafood with talking about ceviche (sometimes spelled cebiche in the country - I don’t know if this is on purpose or a misspelling, as the v and b are the same sound in Spanish).

Ceviche is the crown jewel of the Peruvian coast. It can be made with almost any type of seafood. The strange/interesting/delightful part is how it is made. It’s prepared with a spicy solution made with lots of lime juice. The lime juice reacts with fish to make it edible and not raw anymore. Whatever it does, it’s good. It’s important to note that this solution only works with fish. If you’re making clam (on the left) or shrimp ceviche, you have to cook them beforehand - lime juice doesn’t cut it.

Regions have their own variations - while most places include onion, you often get ceviche with a little bit of seaweed up in the Trujillo area. Suffice to say, you can’t come to Peru and not try this. They even have ceviche stands out in the street - you can choose what you want, they toss in a cup, instant ceviche goodness!

Now, this isn’t to say that that’s it for seafood in Peru. There are a few other terrific seafood dishes definitely worth at least a mention. To start off with a regional delicacy, we had been told that the crab in the Trujillo region in the north was particularly great, and it was. We sample cangrejo reventado (burst crab) by the ocean at a nice eatery one night, also being treated to a delicious mint lemonade (which you can see in the picture). The crab was terrific, lots of crab meat in addition to the meat it was bursting with. One plateful was definitely enough for the both of us.

Chupe means, I believe, some kind of soup or stew. At least, chupe de langostinas delivers a soupy stew of shrimp. It is wonderfully delicious, and to be quite honest, I didn’t want to let Christine have a taste. At all. It was that good. I don’t know what went into it, but I sure wish I did. One of my favourite seafood dishes, as a matter of fact.

Lastly, seafood can also just feature in dishes up here. This last piece is tacu-tacu, an Afro-Peruvian way of preparing rice. As you can see, it is garnished/covered with all the seafood found in the area - shrimp, scallops, clams, squid, octopus. Yum. The tacu-tacu itself is kind of buried under all of that delectable seafood.

Seafood is celebrated in many ways in this country, especially along the coast. I made it a point to try and eat something from the ocean at least once a day, as we were heading up into the mountains and away from the coast again soon. Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…

Later…

Here’s a recipe for ceviche from Cocinando con Carmen, the booklet sold by SAE Cuzco.

Ceviche

2 kg white fish

4 onions

20 limes

1 garlic bulb

MSG (monosodium glutamate)

1 small can of evaporated milk

1 stick of celery

1 ginger root

1 head of lettuce

1/4 kg of corn (this is a special, large-kernel corn found in Peru that is toasted for the side)

1/2 kg sweet potato

salt & cumin

1. Clean the fish and remove all the bones, the head, and the scales and cut into small cubes. Juice the lines into a bowl. Peel the garlic and wash the celery.

2. Put garlic, celery, and ginger into a blender for 3 minutes. Stop, add a few drops of water, then blend for 2 minutes more.

3. Boil the sweet potatoes for 45 minutes

4. Toast the corn kernels in oil in a covered pan, stirring constantly for 10 to 12 minutes.

5. Wash the lettuce and put into a bowl.

6. Chop the onion into strips and wash them 5 times in cold water.

7. Put the fish into a container with the lime juice. Put the blended ingredients through a sieve and add the liquid to the container. Marinate for 10-15 minutes, adding salt, cumin, and MSG to taste.

8. Pour one quarter of the milk into the container.

9. Peel and slice the sweet potato, add it to the container, and serve. Makes 8 portions.

Look like Chinese food? It is. There is a rather large Chinese population in Peru and the food they make is rather tasty and nice alternative to the meat and potatoes that are common eats here. There are dishes that are like American Chinese food, like sweet-and-sour dishes, fried rice (called chaufa, thanks for the correction, Dan), noodles, wontons, and so forth. There are a couple of dishes that mix the two cultures, the most famous one being lomo saltado - stir-fried beef with onions and peppers. They’re all delicious in my opinion.

One thing you can always be sure of finding in any town is chifa - we decided to have it twice in one day in a tiny town while we made our ways between towns. Just keep an eye out for the odd Chinese character or the ever-obvious CHIFA sign hanging over a door.

We discovered a lot of new fruit in Peru. Visiting markets, seeing people eat it on the street, even keeping our eyes peeled in the mountains, there were many new treats to be had, some unique to this country, some not.

We start with the soursop, a relative of the custard apple. It’s the same general idea - soft white flesh with a black stone in the middle, though a little less custardy in the middle than the custard apple. The taste was sharper and tarter. I found a farm growing these on my hike to Choquequirao. They were ripening while we were there, so there was a couple of occasions where one would just fall from the tree and splatter on the ground below.

In a market in Cuzco, we found the pepino, the grenadilla, and the lúcuma. The pepino, which can now be found in the United States in some grocery stores, is yellow with purple streaks. It has the consistency of a cantaloupe and tastes like a mix between a cantaloupe and a cucumber. It’s cooling and rather nice. Incidentally, pepino means cucumber in most other countries. Here, pepinillo means cucumber. You know, to avoid confusion.

The grenadilla is a type of passionfruit and is one of Chris’s favourites. It tastes similar to other kinds of passionfruit, though - and this was key for her - much less tart. The crunchy seeds are still there. The flesh that you eat is grey, which is a little off-putting, but they are quite tasty. Many people tear a corner off and use them as a cup, eating the innards with a little spoon.

We were alerted to the lúcuma by Dan when I read of his experiences here a couple of years ago. It’s a fruit that we didn’t see anywhere else on the continent - I believe it’s only eaten in Peru, mostly in juices and ice cream. It’s kind of mealy with an orange flesh and it tastes just like maple syrup. With a slight touch of fruitiness. Strange and interesting.

The noni (or ñoni, I can’t remember) is a weird, ugly fruit that we started encountering here in Peru. You don’t eat it - it’s way too hard. Rather, it is usually made into a juice or into a powder (which can later be used for teas or other drinks). It’s supposedly one of the healthy, solve-any-health problem fruits one hears about. There are some benefits to it - when used to make a juice, it has 10x your daily recommended Vitamin C dosage - though I think more research is needed. These are originally from Asia and Hawai’i, and now that I know that, I remember seeing them in Thailand. Strange where you meet fruit these days!

Heading out of the mountains and up towards Ecuador, we encountered the yacón, the tomate de arbol, the camu camu and the persimmon. The persimmon (yellowish-orange fruit at the top left), known as kaki here, is definitely not unique to here, but neither of us had had one before, so it was new to us. Nice and sweet and simple. The camu camu (small reddish fruit at the bottom) was called a plum by the local woman who sold it to us, though we later found that plum seems to be a common word for otherwise unidentifiable fruit (we saw many different ‘plums’ later on). They had a yellow flesh and were quite sweet and juicy with a stone in the middle.

The tomate de arbol (on the ride side, a dusky red) started here and continued right up into Colombia. It’s not usually eaten as a fruit, as the skin is inedible. It’s like leather, I tried it. The inside has the consistency of a tomato and tastes like a mix between tomato and a kiwi. Kind of. I grew to love the juice, though Chris thought it tasted like vomit and avoided it like the plague.

The yacón was another surprise. We found this in a market in Trujillo in the north. I can’t remember if we saw it much more beyond that, however. A sweet, crisp tuber, it’s mostly water an indigestible sugars, but it’s tasty and refreshing. It looks like a potato with a finger when you buy it (the finger has been cut off in this picture), then you peel it and it looks like an Asian pear (or apple pear, as I used to call them as a kid). They’re cool and crunchy and tasty and one of my favourites.

Of course, there was lots of regular fruit in Peru. We had fruit juice as much as possible, as everything was fresh and delicious. Stay tuned for more fruit!

One of the most talked-about dishes to try in Peru, cuy (guinea pig) can be found in almost any restaurant in town. Having been eaten for thousands of years, there are no hang-ups about these cute little buggers as pets, as they never were here. They actually make perfect sense on a farm; they eat table scraps, they don’t run away, and they’re small enough to eat everything in one sitting (no need for a refrigerator). The biggest problem that non-South-Americans have with them is that they still look like animals in this picture. Usually, just the meat is used.

How is it, you ask? How do you eat it? Well, it’s definitely a finger food, as all the bones are still inside. There is a surprising amount of meat, and it tastes pretty wild. I’ve been told it’s like quail or rabbit or a mix, though I haven’t had either. I liked it a lot.

The day after we arrived in Cuzco, we found a cuy festival going on. Tent after tent preparing cuy in all sorts of ways. We had, unfortunately, just had a huge English breakfast for Easter Sunday, so we had to share a single one done the classic way - roasted - but it was neat to see all the variations on this animal - stewed, fried, in various sauces, casserole, and many more that I can’t remember or translate.

We have a recipe for this, but I don’t think we’ll be preparing it any time soon. If we ever live on a farm, however, we’ll be sure to have little cuyes running all around, waiting to become a delicious meal.