More Lunch Photos

At the risk of making this into a food blog, I wanted to share photos of the awesome food I've had. I've been trying to take photos of my food to share. However, I often forget and start eating immediately since it's so good, and then can't take a photo. Lunch is the big meal here, so all of my photos are from lunch.

Peruvian food is really yummy to begin with, and our cook Dina makes it even better. Every meal except for pasta is served with white rice, and most meals are accompanied by a fried egg. Here are some highlights from the last two weeks.



This dish is called Locro de Zapallo (zapallo means squash). It's basically a bright yellow thick squash puree with choclo, served with a fried egg over rice. It's one of the house favorites, so Dina makes it once a week. We just had it today, and since Dina only cooks one meal each day on our "weekend", I get to eat it again for dinner :)



The above photo is fish, even though it doesn't look like it. When Dina and Sara went to the market to buy same fish as last time, the guy told them that there was a different type of fish that's really good. It's such a dark color that it looked like beef, and actually tasted a bit like it too. We spent part of the meal trying to decide whether it tasted like beefy fish or fishy beef. But it was yummy all the same, though we all prefer the normal fish. Then choclo (one of my favorite vegetables so far) made an appearance, along with a tomato, lettuce, cucumber salad that was seasoned with a lot of lime and a little salt. It was absolutely amazing, and I ended up eating 4 servings of the veggies.



This meal was the first time I've seen non-white rice served for lunch. It was white rice, but covered with herbs and spinach (I think), served with a chunk of chicken and more veggies. Wonderful, again.



Then this pasta was absolutely amazing. Dina blended up spinach into a thick sauce, and added pine nuts and spices to make a spinach pesto. It was served with a fried egg, of course. For my dignity, I'm not going to say how many servings I had of this dish.

On another note, tomatoes here are wonderful. They fall just below creole tomatoes and light years above California tomatoes. As I type this, I'm eating a tomato sandwich, and I ate a tomato just like you would eat an apple as a snack earlier today. Other than that, the avocados are amazing, so we occasionally buy 5 or more of them and make a huge batch of guacamole for dinner.