Pearl #25 ~ Food Series: Drink Chicha, Avoid bad Chifa

These pictures are from my 2006 trip to Perú and fit into the newly created food series.  I didn't think they warranted their own separate pearls, but collectively they represent the many wonderful food moments that I experienced during that trip, including those that are not illustrated like eating a delicious Alpaca steak in Aguas Calientes and trying Anticucho (cow heart) on a whim one Sunday afternoon.  Delicious, but the heart is definitely a tougher muscle than others, and it resulted in a chewiness that I don't like nearly as much as the meat in my favorite Peruvian dish, lomo saltado.


And you can't really mention Peruvian cuisine without bringing up ceviche.  Lima is a great city for this dish of seafood marinated in lemon juice, which cooks it without need for any sort of heat mechanism.  In Perú, as with any place that has any sort of ecological diversity, you want to eat certain foods in certain regions.  Because Lima is right on the Pacific coast, it's a perfect spot for ceviche, though it's recommended that you limit your ceviche intake to the earlier meals of the day since the fish they use is caught that morning and later meals will no longer be fresh.

Another favorite of mine is pollo a la brasa, which I thought was an exclusive Peruvian dish for the longest time.  It wasn't until a couple of years after returning to the U.S. that it occurred to me that this is really just rotisserie chicken!

I take that back.  It's not just rotisserie chicken, it's Peruvian rotisserie chicken.  And it's everywhere.  Lima's streets are littered with these tiny little carry-out Pollo a la Brasa establishments with four spits of juicy chickens spinning succulently in the window.  It's cheap, too!  I loved to pick up a quarter chicken, which came with a salad and the obligatory mountain of french fries (with 4,000 potato varieties on hand, french fries are served with just about everything in this blessed land).  I can't remember the cost of such a feast, which I could easily stretch into 2 or 3 meals, but I'd be surprised if it was more than the equivalent of $2-3 U.S. Dollars.  My mom was convinced that I'd get a parasite from the salad, but I was fine.

That is, I was fine until I ate horrible Chinese food at a restaurant in Huascarán two-thirds of the way through my trip (this is probably documented in a future excerpt from Walking With Inkas).  Chinese restaurants, called "Chifas", are as prevalent in Perú as the french fries and ceviche, and I'd eaten at several by the time I visited Huascarán.  Now, I was already beginning to suffer some possible altitude sickness by the time I ate at this restaurant, but I'm convinced that the Chifa is what did me in.  I think this place could easily have been featured on TMJ4's Dirty Dining if it were a Milwaukee establishment.

I spent the better part of the night in my motel bathroom and the winding eight-hour bus ride back to Lima was pure torture.  The worst part, though, was that I lost my appetite for a week!  I couldn't even enjoy the food at the 4th of July celebration, which included tiny hot dogs and cheddar cheese imported from the U.S.!  Sure, I can get these things at home any old time, but they're hard to come by down there and it's the principle of the matter, anyway.  Oh well, as far as traveling illnesses go, this one was pretty mild, slightly worse than a similar 24-hour food poisoning incident I had after eating Chinese in Missoula, Montana.  What is it with the Chinese food?!  Drat, I just realized that my lunch today was at a Chinese buffet . . .

In any case, if there's anything else that should have made me sick (but didn't, yay!), it could have been the two other moments depicted in the pictures in this post.  Sure, that's chicha that I'm holding with the huge loaf of bread, which is a fermented corn drink.  Fermentation should kill anything hazardous, right?  But still, it was served in a glass cup, which had been used by who knows how many people before me?  Tasty, though.

And as amazingly delicious as the fresh squeezed orange juice was in the heart of the Sacred Valley (top picture), it was still a fresh fruit, which you're supposed to steer away from in foreign countries.  But oranges have peels, yes?  As I always say, I'm keeping my immune system healthy by exposing it to the world's hazards.  And if there's any country with food worth risking a stomach virus or two, it's Perú's!  Bon apetite!