Food!
Gina. Huanchaco, Peru.
Since we´re now on the coast we decided that today would be a good day to try ceviche, a Peruvian dish that´s basically raw fish in lime juice and the lime juice supposedly kills all any bacteria or other bad things and ´cooks´the fish. We walked around this afternoon (after we got to our hostel and slept until one! Bus trips are exhausting) and checked out the prices on a couple of places our guide book recommended. We found one that looked good and decided to go back there for dinner.
After watching some tv and reading and being generally lazy we got hungry and went back out around 6:30 for our much anticipated dinner. But then everything was closed. All three restaurants that were crawling with people at lunch time were dark and locked up with no sign that they´d be opening again any time tonight. Feeling a little bummed and a little confused, we wondered around looking for something that was a) open, b) not too expensive, and c) not divey. I´m weary of raw fish at the best of times, but a divey restaurant at a beach town in Peru on the off season just sounds a little too sketchy for raw fish, no matter how much lime juice it´s soaking in.
We finally settled on a pretty little restaurant that apparently had a bar upstairs. We were the only ones eating, but since it was the only nice restaurant still open this late we decided that people in Huanchaco either don´t eat out at night or don´t eat out at night on Sundays. Steve ordered the crab stew and I ordered rice with mixed seafood (Steve also ordered a cherry lemonade for us to share that was very pink and very cute). When the food came Steve´s dish was basically 5 crabs cut up with some juices in a bowl! It was incredible. They even threw in all of the bodies (hollowed out, thankfully) for good measure. It was just a giant pile of bone with good stuff hidden away somewhere–a treaure hunt for dinner! I don´t think Steve´s ever eaten whole crabs, so I had to give him some lessons on how to get the meet out of the claws and legs. But it was a struggle since everything was covered in sauce and we didn´t have one of those claw breaker thingies or even a wooden mallet! But he was a trooper and managed to suck or break most of the meat out without shooting any onto my white shirt (which I just had washed, so I´m very clean).
My dish was a little calmer with a big plate of yellow rice and shrimp, shellfish, and even little octopus legs. I wanted to take a silly picture with the octupus legs hanging out of my mouth and an innocent look on my face, but Steve was too covered in juice to use my camera and the waiter took away my plate when we weren´t paying attenion. Oh well, maybe next time.
All-in-all the food was pretty good and not too expensive. We´ve noticed that things in Peru are basically priced the same as things in the states, but just in soles instead of dollars. I forget sometimes just how much of a deal we´re actually getting. Dinner came to 38 soles, total, which is about 12 US dollars. And our hostels have been basically all around 30 soles, or 10 US dollars. It´s nuts how cheap things are, but I don´t do the conversion anymore in my head. I´ve just figured out about what things should cost in soles. So we´re doing really well with sticking to our $36 a day budget. Some days we go a little over, but then some days we have a kitchen and are able to make our own food and then we´re way under.
We splurged in Arequipa and had a really nice dinner out which cost about 90 soles, or $30. It was delicious. A restuarant called Zig Zag where they gave us giant paper bibs. Steve was a little opposed to the bib at first (I thought they were really fun), but once our food came–giant pieces of meat, ostrich for Steve and llama for me, sizzling and spitting on black bricks–we were glad to have them. That was really a fantastic meal, and my first pisco sour, the Peruvian national drink. The pisco sour was okay. It got better as I drank it, so I think it was pretty strong (or I´m even more of a light weight now after the bout of sickness). But Steve´s ostrich was the best meat I´ve ever tasted. It was literally just a big hunk of ostrich meat and it was good. I didn´t realize ostrich was red meat (or that llama was white meat, for that matter). It was a good meal, and I´d highly recommend Zig Zag to anyone wanting a delicious dining experience that was also a little fun. (Oh, and supposedly they have a staircase built or designed by Gustave Eiffel, the dude who did the Eiffel tower and the Statue of Liberty.)
Considering that some of our food has been less than elegant or expensive, these two splurges were much needed and well worth it. Some of our other food highlights have been strawberry jam in a squeeze bag (all other condiments and even pasta sauce also come in squeeze tubes which I guess is a cool idea since they´re easy to pack and transport), chicken soup with a chicken leg and a gizzardy thing (which I ate…weird texture–it reminded me of cat food which grossed me out a bit), a billion eggs (eggs are super good here, though. They have a different taste somehow. I don´t know if it´s because they´re really fresh or because they´re brown… but they´re very good and have really orange yolks), and lots of bread. We still haven´t tried cuy (guinea pig), but I think I´m saving that for Ecuador. We´ve seen a little bald frozen cuy with head and feet and all in the freezer section of the grocery store, though. That was a bit strange. It looked like a little frozen, hairless rat. Anything else interesting we´ve eaten has been well disguised as chicken or beef or something else. Which is just fine by me. I took pictures of our Zig Zag meal and our seafood tonight, so I´ll upload them when I get the chance.
Tags: Peru, Zig Zag Arequipa
montarsig
Glad you guys are enjoying some good meals along the way – and that your tummy is better! As for the eggs – usually big orange yolks are a sign that the chickens live on pasture, eating bugs and grass and such like they are made to – instead of living like most of our egg layers (yes even the so called free range ones) in small cages and coops and eating mostly corn. You can get pasture eggs here but will pay about $7 a dozen so enjoy them while they are cheap!
Wow! We´re paying about $1.50 for 15! I think I´ll have a new appreciation for all of our egg meals now.