More on Food in Lima
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007I stayed more days in Lima than the two posts here, but most of the hightlights of those days in Lima were the food. Twice Kitty and I ordered pollo a la brasa (rotisserie chicken) from Pardo’s Chicken. The skin was seasoned with salt, pepper, and other spices I couldn’t identify but made the chicken flavorful but not spicy. It was served with a garlic sauce and mayonnaise for dipping. One time I was able to get yucca fries with it.
My last full day in Lima I went to La Mar, a very famous ceviche restaurant in Miraflores. Ceviche is a kind of raw seafood dish with lime juice and onions. I ordered a bowl of it along with a pisco cocktail made from aguaymento, a fruit that looked like a yellow cherry tomato but tasted sweeter. For dessert I had suspiro limeno (Breath of Lima), which should be called Walk of the Diabetic. It was a bowl of manjar, a kind of carmelized sugar–much too sweet to be eaten alone.
I still had room that night for the dinner Elcina prepared for a reception at Kitty’s apartment. Jodi, Marcela, Jorge, and administrators of BNCs in and near Lima were there. For appetizers we had awesome guacamole (mashed avocado with spices) and tortilla chips, and fried yucca with huancaina sauce, a peanut sauce from the Huancayo region of Peru.
For dinner, we had aji al gallina, chicken in a creamy sauce, lomo asado (roast beef), sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, rice with vegetables, and rice without vegetables. It was all so delicious. Even the Peruvians raved about how good the food was. Since they had most certainly tried these dishes many times at home and in other places, their praise carried more weight in my opinion.
For dessert, we had alfajors from Wong supermarket. Alfajors (sounds unfortunately like alpha-whores) are shortbread cookies with a layer of manjar in between and powdered sugar sprinkled on top. They were sweet but not deadly.
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