Food, Food, Food...and more COMIDA!

Sunday morning, we got up early and enjoyed breakfast at our B&B.

Our first taste of Coca tea with breakfast...we became VERY familiar with this stuff in Cusco!

After breakfast, we left to meet up for a market tour and fruit tasting, then we had a cooking class!
We read lots of Trip Advisor reviews and decided to go with SkyKitchen. We did the Peruvian Classics meal, market tour and food tasting. The Market Tour was awesome, I'm definitely glad we added it on! We learned about so many Peruvian foods!

 The vendor SkyKitchen gets some of its products from.

Some unique Peruvian fruits.

The vendor SkyKitchen gets its fish from. Do you spy the shark under the fish?

A few of the varieties of potatoes available in Peru - there are thousands!

Some Peruvian peppers

 Our group

 Our guys!

Photobomb!!!

After the market tour, we took a cab to SkyKitchen and tasted SO many fruits (about 40)! Christian told us about each fruit, so there was a lot of info. Of course, we can't get most of them in the US, but it was still a great time!

SO many fruits!

Once we had tasted all the fruits and decided on our favorites, Christian explained all the foods we would be making that day and we got started. Here are the foods we made -


Causa

This is a fancy way of making mashed potatoes. They have a pepper paste in them that gives them a light yellow/orange color and SO much flavor! The pepper, Aji Amarillo is in a TON of Peruvian foods! We couldn't bring the pepper itself back, so we brought plenty of the paste! We layered the potatoes with chicken and avocados and topped it with mayonnaise (think a chicken salad and avocado sandwich with mashed potatoes instead of bread). YUM! We tried a few different versions of this dish at other points during our trip and I think this was a good representation of what it should taste like. Here is our first course.

Ceviche

I LOVE ceviche! I've had it in other places - Mexico, Spain, even the US. None of those places can even touch the Ceviche we had in Peru (although Mexico comes close). Makes sense since Peru is where ceviche was born.

Anyhow, ceviche is made with fresh fish that is "cured" or cooked in citrus juices. The fish doesn't actually cook - good ceviche should not sit in the citrus juices too long, or the fish will become too chewy (this is what had happened with the ceviche I've had in the US). We made our ceviche with with Mahi Mahi (which just happens to be my favorite fish!) that had been purchased at the market we visited. Christian showed us how to tell if a whole fish is fresh while we were on the tour too, so hopefully I'll get to use that new skill sometime! We used just lime juice because we learned in our class that lemons don't exist in Peru. We added Aji Amarillo (of course), red onions, cilantro, and a little bit of a hotter pepper. I tried ceviche 3 other times while we were in Peru and this was one of the best. Only one other ceviche came close and it was from a pricey (on Peruvian standards) restaurant and a small portion (that one was made with Red Snapper).

My ceviche - It was served with potatoes (like just about any Peruvian dish), Sweet Potatoes and giant Peruvian corn (sometimes, it's served toasted and it is delicious!)

Lomo Saltado

We learned that there is a HUGE Chinese influence on Peruvian food. Lomo Saltado is a beef stir fry using beef loin. Since cattle is not a huge thing in Peru, it is difficult to find tender meats from younger cattle, so tenderloin was purchased for our class. When I make this at home, I'll just by regular beef loin. This was so easy to make and very delicious!

Picarones

Next was dessert. I LOVE dessert, so I was quite excited about these. They are similar to donuts and they are very popular in Peru. The batter is made with Sweet potatoes, squash (a type we can't get in the US, but we can substitute Acorn Squash), flour and yeast. We made the batter early in the class and let it rise as we made and ate the other dishes. The batter is scooped and formed into donut shapes with your hands, then fried. There is a topping that is made with dissolved raw sugar (that ends up tasting similar to molasses) and drizzled on the picarones. They are sweet, but most of the sweetness actually comes from the topping. The picarones themselves are not very sweet, just a little. So, now I've found a dessert that Josh and I both like!!!

 Chef Yurac showing me how to make Picarones!

Josh's turned out better than mine.

YUM!

All of these dishes were absolutely amazing. The class was worth every penny and we had such a great time! After we ate everything, we drank an espresso and took some pictures on the rooftop terrace.



We had tickets to a the biggest food festival in South America, but we decided not to go. We took a walk around Miraflores instead...

First we went to Kennedy Park...

A group of students stopped us to interview us about tourism and our experience in Peru so far.

Somewhere, I'm part of a school project...pretty neat.

Now for the main reason we wanted to check out Kennedy Park...

The cats...they are everywhere!!!

Literally! There are hundreds of them.

 Then we saw this hostel! Yay Flying Dog! Haha. Of course, Josh looked into this one as well, but the place we were staying had much better ratings.

We kept walking and made our way to the coast.

 We could BARELY see little islands off the coast because it was so foggy.

 This sculpture is called "Cholo". Apparently, mass weddings are performed here on Valentine's Day.

 My fave!

 Just making our way around

 Josh told Dave he looks like he belongs in a Bourne movie here. I agree.

Pretty sweet nighttime shot Josh took!

We ended up having Chaufa (Chinese with a Peruvian influence) for dinner on Sunday night. Josh and I shared Chicken Wonton soup and Fried rice. It was SO much food.

These prices are in soles. Our chicken fried rice was less than $5 USD and the portion was massive. I miss Peru.

Yes, that is Chicken Wonton soup with chicken thighs floating in it. Delish!

We made a couple other stops on the way back to our room, but nothing too exciting. We finally had the opportunity to sleep in for a bit on Monday morning, so we were all quite excited to take advantage of that before making our way to Cusco!

Finally in Lima

Rather than landing in Lima late Friday night like we had planned...we got there in the wee hours of Saturday morning. We stayed in a guesthouse and our hostess was the sweetest! She was much more pleasant than I would have been at 3:00 in the morning! We got settled as quickly as possible. 

Our first night, we stayed in the historic center of Lima. We had one primary reason for staying here, but I'll get to that in a bit.

We got up and enjoyed our free breakfast (Josh did a great job of finding us places to stay and everywhere had free breakfast!). Once we paid for our room and made arrangements to keep our bags there while we explored, we made our way out to take a look around. 

There are many beautiful historic buildings in this area! 

We were anxious to try some Pisco Sours, so we went to a place Josh found in our guidebook. It was a hotel cocktail bar/restaurant. 

 The hotel was absolutely gorgeous!

 We each ordered a different Pisco Sour so we could try different ones. Looks are very deceiving! That tall, pretty one? Yea, it was everyone's least favorite. We had a Classic, a carbonated one, the Machu Picchu (the tall, pretty one) and a coca pisco sour. We all agreed that the classic was best.

 So pretty!

THIS was our main reason for staying in this area of Lima. San Francisco Church! There are lots of old churches and cathedrals with catacombs underneath them, but you just hear about them. You never get to see them (at least we haven't been able to). This one is very different! We got to go down into the cellar and see the skeletons of thousands of people. It was a really unique experience and I'm glad we got to do it! Unfortunately, we weren't able to take any pictures inside, but here's one I found online...

Isn't that crazy!

Dave took this picture. There were hundreds...maybe even thousands of pigeons flying over us. Talk about scary!

 We saw all these cops march by. Pretty cool.

Taking pictures of the police.

Our first ceviche. Very tasty, but the best was yet to come!

 We saw this parade on the way back to our room.

 Some people stopped and posed, others took pictures of us taking pictures.

We got back to our room and the hostess of the guest house called a big cab for us. There were 4 of us with 4 full sized suitcases and carryons, so we needed a van. The first van she called got stuck in horrible traffic and said they couldn't make it, so she ended up calling 2 cars for us. She was so sweet! We FINALLY made it to our next stop...Borranco.

Here, we stayed at D'Osma Bed and Breakfast, which we highly recommend! They had great free breakfast (amazing scrambled eggs!), the staff is great and the location is wonderful. We stopped at a place nearby for Happy Hour. Turns out, they didn't have the Happy Hour specials, but we got an appetizer and a Pisco Sour to share anyway, then we made our way out to dinner. We found a brewery, so of course we went there for dinner! They had all the beers you would expect to find in an American brewpub (which is not the norm here...at least not yet, the craft brew scene is growing in Peru too!).

Peruvian Wings. The wings were quite tasty, but the dipping sauce was amazing! I have no clue what all is in it, but I'm determined to replicate it somehow. All I know is that the base was cream cheese, which is amazing to me since I hate Bleu Cheese and Ranch...let the experimentation begin!

 Here are the beer selections. 

 We split a beer and a sampler, split a pizza with Dave and each bought a shirt and we only spent about $50 USD. In the states, the shirts alone would cost us that much!

Hubby being silly

We walked around for a bit then we went back to our room to crash since we had an early morning for our cooking class.