A Cooking Adventure

Katie and I have been in Peru for almost 4 weeks now, and until last night we hadn't cooked a thing. We eat cereal, toast, or fruit in the mornings, and then we eat out for every other meal. Part of it is that we want to try all the amazing Peruvian food, another part is that the food at restaurants is CHEAP, and as we found out last night when we did cook-it's difficult and expensive to cook the food we know how to make.

We decided our Friday night entertainment would be to make supper and watch a sitcom from the states (we have the season on dvd). We were debating between making spaghetti and nachos. Anthony and I had a major craving for nachos, so that became our quest. Katie and I walked to the store in pursuit of the ingredients.

We started with the chips. Check. Now what about seasonings? They definitely didn't have the Old El Paso packets that I'm used to buying. What to do? Well, we could just brown the hamburger with onions and salsa and that would give it flavor. Salsa. Check. Now for the hamburger. We couldn't find any ground beef, so we decided to go with chicken instead. Expensive, but check. On to the cheese. No shredded cheese packets in Peru. We went to the deli counter to look at the blocks of cheese. Nothing really resembled cheddar or anything close to it, but we went with the closest thing we could find. Cheese, check. But wait, do we have a cheese shredder at home? A quick call to Anthony, who was waiting for us at the apartment - no cheese shredder. We look around the store for a shredder. Nothing. Hmmm. No beef, no real Mexican seasoning, no shredded cheese - these were not going to be the nachos that Anthony and I were craving.

Plan B - spaghetti. Katie and I went and put everything back that we'd already picked up, while one of the clerks by the seasoning section laughed at us. He had seen us pondering over which seasonings and chips to get earlier, and now we were back changing our minds. Oh well. We bought spaghetti, a jar of spaghetti sauce, some garlic, and some butter. Much easier than the nachos. We also decided to treat ourselves to cookies (the pre-made mix that you just have to add eggs and butter to), and we checked out.

Honestly, spaghetti has never tasted so good to me before. After eating unfamiliar (yet delicious) food for 4 weeks, something familiar and simple was the best thing I'd had for a good week. And the cookies, well, we tried. The dough didn't really look like it does in the states. We're not sure why. And the oven is different - it burned the bottom of the cookies. Katie and I spent 10 minutes scraping off the bottom of the cookies so they were edible. Dunking them in milk helped, too. I think the big problem is the stove/oven both have to be lit using a match (it's gas), and the cookies were too close to the actual flame burning in the oven.

The whole thing was quite an experience and was even more entertainment than we thought it would be. Thank God for my coworkers here and home-cooked meals. Maybe we'll try Mac N' Cheese soon. What a delicacy.