An American in Lima

A tower of Peruvian-made panettone entices shoppers at Wong supermarket, Miraflores (photo c. Barbara Drake 2008) Peruvians and  Brazilians love their locally-made panettone, an Italian-style Christmas cake that’s grown into a multimillion-dollar business for bakers in South America. Now the Italian Cake Industry group wants nonItalian manufacturers to conform to strict baking standards or stop calling [...]

[Read more →]

Frank Zappa once warned: Don’t eat the yellow snow. Vizcacha en escabeche (pickled vizcacha), a traditional dish of the Argentinean countryside where cute vizcachas run wild and free, as they should; photo courtesy La Cocina de Ile.com The same might be said about the vizcacha, a reclusive member of the South American bunny family that some food experts have recommended [...]

[Read more →]

It’s been more than a year since I had pizza at El Italiano, a classic pizzeria/trattoria in Lima’s rough-and-tumble La Victoria neighborhood. In that time I had forgotten that El Italiano makes better pizza than almost any other place in Lima, a city that should have lots of excellent pizza joints but for some reason [...]

[Read more →]

I was raving the other day about the chocolates and other treats made by nuns and sold at the church of the Nazarenes, in downtown Lima, where El Señor de los Milagros lives. I made myself so hungry writing that post, I had to go to the Nazarenes the next day and buy a stash [...]

[Read more →]

Mamainé will be cooking in La Molina this Sunday. If that news doesn’t make your mouth water, then you don’t know Chincha and you don’t know El Carmen and you certainly don’t know carapulcra con sopa seca. Mamainé is the Queen of Afro-Peruvian cuisine. Her restaurant in the El Carmen district of Chincha is the hub of local Afro-Peruvian [...]

[Read more →]

  A yummy seafood causa featured on a poster for the second annual gastronomic fair, held Sept. 24-27, in Lima BBC Online published an insightful overview yesterday of Peru’s booming food industries (“Food business taking off in Peru,” 9/25/09), to coincide with this weekend’s second annual gastronomic fair in Lima.  Dan Collyns reports on the growth of [...]

[Read more →]

An ear of fresh Peruvian choclo I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this week about obesity in the United States vs. weight and nutrition in Peru.  We’re currently exploring these topics in the conversation class I teach at UPC (see class blog, here), but really, they’ve been on my mind since I moved to Peru from Florida in [...]

[Read more →]

Appetizers ready in the kitchen of AlmaZen, opening night I haven’t seen much of my brother-in-law El Filósofo and his wife La Orgánica lately. That’s because they are busy until 1 in the morning every day with their new vegetarian restaurant AlmaZen, which opened two months ago in old Miraflores (see address below). What makes AlmaZen [...]

[Read more →]

The never-ending promotional hooplah that is Las Siete Maravillas Gastronómicas del Peru has been extended an additional month, from July 25 to August 23, announced the contest’s organizers last week. That means if you haven’t done so already, you can vote online for your seven favorite Peruvian dishes, from the list of 21 culinary semi-finalists: Adobo [...]

[Read more →]

Screw the locals, screw the poor, screw the backpackers, screw anyone who wants to eat healthy Peruvian food at decent prices.

[Read more →]

“I can attest it works,” Taste of Peru co-owner Julie Izquierdo says of the restaurant’s Sopa de Viagra. (Chris Sweda/Sun-Times) Yesterday’s post on the medicinal powers of chilcano de pescado led to my discovering a Peruvian restaurant in Chicago that’s serving up a traditional fish soup as a wonder aphrodesiac. Taste of Peru in Rogers Park is touting its [...]

[Read more →]

I need my Jewish chicken-noodle soup in the wintertime. I grew up on the U.S. East Coast, where delis and diners and Jewish moms cook up barrels of this fragrant, healing soup all year long. Then I moved to Miami where at gourmet delis like Epicure, you can buy big jars of delicious matzoh-ball soup [...]

[Read more →]

I used to think that France was the most food-obsessed nation on earth. Then I moved to Peru. Life halts twice a day in France for the gastronomic liturgies of le déjeuner and le dîner. Then the French people refold their napkins and return to the all-consuming business of being French: ie., being frighteningly exact about money, arguing about philosophy [...]

[Read more →]

The odd blend of flavors exploded on my tongue: Sweet strawberry and hot jalapeno. Yikes! Welcome to ice cream in the Land of the Inca, where jaded taste buds are courted by unusual and sometimes explosive flavor combinations. The ice cream that sent me running for ice water a few days ago was a neon-orange product [...]

[Read more →]