Gourmandizing? Just a taste.

Since I’m at a loss to write about the significant things going on as of late, including my friend Katie’s visit and my sitemate Rachel’s permanent departure from Santo Domingo, I will just write an entry about what a good food day I had today.

Those who know me know that, though I’m not a picky eater exactly and I do enjoy food immensely, I sort of suck at eating. I accept that there are things I am good at in life and things that I am not. Eating goes on the list with “any sport involving a ball” and “finding my way around a paper bag, let alone a major city.” I just can’t eat much at any given time, unless it’s dessert. And yet I’m usually hungry. If Alyssa ruled the world, there would be approximately eight mealtimes throughout a day.

This, as you might guess, has only been an impediment to me as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Latin America. It’s just expected that we can eat to please, and I simply can’t do it, no matter how fully I comprehend how much it means to people to have someone like their food, and that there’s no other way to express that you like the food other than to clear your plate. I have devoted my nearly two years of service to finding other ways to get people to like me, with mixed results.

So imagine my surprise when I’m sitting with my surrogate mom, Teo, outside our friend Sarela’s house, and I find my eating skills complimented. Some other campo-types were sitting on their stoops watching the donkeys go by, and after the initial “how’s your family (we’re afraid to ask why there’s a white girl sitting next to you)” conversation directed solely at Teo, one of the señoras asked Teo, “So, what does she eat?”

I find this question hilarious because it seems like the kind of thing you ask about someone’s exotic pet, not another human being, i.e. “I see you have an iguana, what does it eat?” At this point, to my great delight, Teo (who has fed me lunch virtually every day since I got here, and has therefore fed her dogs literally hundreds of pounds of my uneaten rice) responds proudly, “She eats everything!” (putting me on par with, say, a raccoon). “Everything?” the señora gasps. “Everything,” Teo answers definitively.

I point out all the ways this is blatantly untrue. I don’t eat liver, heart, or intestines of any animal. This is quickly acknowledged, with the admission that what I’ve said is true, intestines do have a weird texture. Teo maybe slips the point in that, while I eat everything, I don’t eat much of anything. This is also quickly acknowledged, because, the señora says, how else would I have such a hot body? Have I mentioned how great Peru has been for my self esteem? But then the señora begins gushing about how great it is that a girl my age from the U.S. would eat EVERYTHING and oh how it must be so great to have the privilege of feeding me ALL SORTS OF FOOD every day. I personally think the United States needs a lot more señoras like this, in select locations like freshman college dorms and the city of Los Angeles.

Anyway, back to all the rico stuff I ate today.

Breakfast: I woke up early and went for a somewhat unsuccessful run on the highway, came back to my room, and heard the announcement on the loudspeaker that someone had killed a pig this morning and one of the restaurants in town was selling “mote con chancho.” Mote probably has an English translation, given the great amount of corn in the U.S., but I have no clue what it is. Mote is (I think) really young, big kernels of corn boiled with ash to scrape off the harder shell, and then served cold. It doesn’t taste like much, but is a satisfying texture and a really good complement to salty things. Chancho is just the Peruvian word for pig, in this case, chunks of friend pork meat served on the bone. I had never gone out to this restaurant (a.k.a. someone’s house with some tables in the front room) because I used to worry a lot about food hygiene, but after a million IDODOs (Intestinal Disturbances of Dubious Origin) from things like Italian food in guidebook-recommended restaurants and a total lack of IDODOs from things like pig intestines in campo houses that lack running water, I decided that you just never know what will get you, so you might as well eat whatever you want. And mote con chancho just sounded good this morning. So I found the restaurant and was promptly served a plate of mote with about six chunks of greasy pork. Yum. And a good portion for me. But then, just as I was on about chunk number four, an old man who presumably lives at the house walked out of the kitchen with a plate of about four more chunks, grinning adorably, and wordlessly put the plate in front of me. Thank you, sir, don’t mind if I do…force-feed myself.

At this point I have found an easy transition to give a shout out to recently departed (from site, not from this earth) sitemate Rachel Levy. Rachel and I kept it real at this site together for a year and nine months, and I will not say whether or not the following poem was written during this time or long before, but however you take it, it is way more hilarious than anything I could ever write here.

“Meat,” by Rachel Levy

Meat,
Meat,
Meat.
Cow meat,
Track meat,
Red, brown, burnt meat,
Dark meat, white meat,
Those are just a few.
Lean meat,
Fat meat,
Ground, chunky, small meat,
Bacon meat, beef meat,
Jerky meat, too.
Sausage meat,
Pork meat,
Don’t forget pig meat.
Last of all, best of all,
I like fried chicken meat.

Rachel, you will be sorely missed.

So back to my great food day. We’re now to mid-morning, when I always get hungry between the 8 a.m. breakfast and the Teo 2 p.m. lunch (most other people eat lunch around 1, but Teo does what she wants). A couple days ago, my friend Ingeniera Luz brought me a jar of grapefruit jelly she made. The grapefruits here aren’t as good as the ones in the U.S. (I think I say this objectively, not with the bias of someone whose grandpa sent a boxes of citrus fruits from Florida to Michigan in the dead of winter every year of her childhood). They’re more sour and less juicy, and the people here don’t really like them, but nothing can be called a grapefruit and not get my approval. The jelly is particularly sour, but I eat it on soda crackers and thoroughly enjoy it. And then I read some more “East of Eden” and pass out until very nearly lunch time. The electricity was out all day, which really eases the occurrence of naps.

Sometime between breakfast and lunch there is an earthquake and everyone laughs at me for running out of the adobe house in a timely fashion. Oh, silly gringa and her constant desires not to have a house fall on her.

And then it’s lunch, where I get the extremely pleasant surprise of MASHED POTATOES. Potatoes are native to Peru, and there are a ton of native potato species here. I think the number is around 4,000, but I also think the number gets bigger every time I hear it. What there is not a huge variety of, generally speaking, is how the potatoes are prepared. Boiled, sliced, put on the plate. Sigh. Sometimes it’s served in an extremely watery stew form with cilantro, which I have none of, because cilantro tastes like soap. But Teo and Teo alone, as far as I know, has mastered the art of the Peruvian mashed potato. I quickly tell her I don’t want any rice, just mashed potatoes, fried chicken (meat), cabbage and carrot salad, and lemonade. There are tangerines for dessert because it’s Sunday and we always get dessert on Sunday.

An hour or so after lunch I want a sweet snack, so I buy some (Nabisco-produced) chocolate-covered soda crackers, which blow my mind with their awesomeness, as usual. I’m all for the letter-writing campaign proposed by my friend Cynthia to get Nabisco to manufacture ChokoSodas stateside.

Sometime between lunch and dinner I go visit my friend Klepto Maria, who lived in my house when she was pregnant with her now 15-month old son, and steals. She is wearing a shirt that was, at one point, mine. Oh, silly gringa and her desires to dry her clothes on a clothesline. Sometimes people have the power not to surprise you. I still enjoy her company, though.

And then it’s around 5, and Teo and I go up to our friend Sarela’s house, where the aforementioned interaction about my eating skills takes place. When Sarela gets back, we eat “quesillo con miel.” Quesillo is (I think) an extremely fresh incarnation of cheese, eaten before cheese has really developed any strong flavor. It has the texture of cottage cheese, but without discernible curdles. Miel is the Spanish word for honey, but in this is case “miel de caña de azucar,” which I think is molasses. Some genius discovered at some point that these two foods are delicious together, and Teo and I gorge ourselves on this mixture and have to make a concerted effort to leave some for her daughter Maricarmen. I point out that we are eating an analogy for something that moves slowly. I am met with weird looks.

And then I pack for my trip to Lima tomorrow, and then it’s dinner time. This is the only non-Peruvian meal of the day, though I think it was made Peruvian by the fact that I bought all the ingredients here, made it last night in my very bare-bones kitchen, reheated it tonight, and shared it with Teo, who liked it quite a lot. It was eggplant in a homemade red sauce with pasta. Teo, as Rachel can attest, has the funny habit of asking if her food was good, even when it’s, one, something she herself didn’t make, or two, something she makes every day without variation, for example, her mom’s cheese or her white rice, respectively. Don’t think I didn’t enjoy turning it back on her. “Teo, did you like my eggplant? Huh? Wasn’t that good eggplant? Did you eat it all? Wasn’t it delicious?” An interesting fact about the fresh basil I used is that it is grown by the workers of the trash project in a small garden outside the storage room using the compost the project itself makes from the town’s organic waste. Now you know.

And now it’s ten o’clock and time to curl up with Mr. Steinbeck and pray for no fleas.

An aside: about a year and a half ago, a fellow UM alum named Greg sent me a really nice email about how he read this blog and identified with a lot of the things I wrote, and was curious about northern Peruvian cuisine. I never responded, which was sloppy and generally not how I roll, and I’ve felt bad whenever I’ve remembered since, so I hope he still reads this so I can say I’m sorry and doesn’t he wish he had some mote con chancho right now?