Cusco and its beautiful food.

I've been really excited for the Peru portion of our trip for lots of reasons.  My love for my dear friend Jinny and her family have made me feel connected to Peru in some way...it just means a lot to me to see this place. The food is also very inspiring.  We had high expectations for the food and we have only found them to be surpassed.  We have been really excited for the beaches of northern Peru, too.  I'm not surprised that I love it here.

Our time in Peru started in Cusco, the sacred capital city of the powerful Inca.  It's a beautiful city, nestled in a deep green valley.  The juxtaposition of Spanish and Incan architecture makes for amazing city walks.  It's a very culinary city and Nate and I saw numerous beautiful restaurants we would love to work at. Sleek dining rooms with tasteful incorporation of Incan art and incredible pottery. Elegant modern menus with intriguing Peruvian ingredients totally foreign to us. We couldn't afford to eat in those fine dining restaurants but we could tell we could tell the cooks are very accomplished by the complexity of the menus.

Don't misunderstand me - we didn't mind not partaking in the fancy stuff one bit - the food in the casual family restaurants and markets was excellent.  Aside from a professional intrigue in the calibre of restaurants, the rewarding experiences meeting local people and chatting in markets is far more interesting and fun than being served by a coolly professional waiter. It was just impressive to see the high end.

Cusco's vast main mercado, the San Pedro market, is in a typical cavernous warehouse, but the sunlight slanted through the eaves casting the most beautiful ribbons of sunlight across the lanes of produce and food.  Nate and I always seek out the mercados in every city immediately, they all have their own personality and I always feel giddy when we explore them.  On that first day in Cusco, it was immediately apparent that the food in Peru was at a completely different level than we'd experienced so far on the trip.  A pleasant addition to the usual vendors was a long row of chocolate and coffee vendors, grinding coffee beans to order and selling sweets made with coffee. The chocolate was dazzling, blocks of different grades of rough baking chocolate, bars of every imaginable variety of eating chocolate, cocoa in every state from whole beans, to rough nibs to silky mounds of fine cocoa powder sold in bulk. This section of the market smelled incredible. 

There were the usual rows of stalls serving food, and we had the most incredible bowls of soup.  We were a little bit chilly (Cusco was quite cold) and a row of women were all serving variations of the same chicken soup, for just under $2. Their hands glossy with chicken fat, the women beckoned cheerfully,  and we plopped ourselves down for some soup with little persuasion.  The caldo de pollo was basically just chicken noodle soup, but the perfection of every component in it was what elevated it to something worth rhapsodizing about. In huge bowls she dumped a big mound of basic cooked spaghetti, a generous mound of spears of perfectly cooked yellow and orange carrots, fine slivers of raw red onion, and a perfectly braised whole chicken leg. Over it all she ladelled steaming chicken broth from her giant simmering cauldron, and topped it all off with a generous handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley.  This was perfection, largely because of the incredible flavour of her beautiful golden broth with no small amount of glistening beads of chicken fat. Around us people just dug in to their soup and pulled apart their chicken legs with their fingers and made little mounds of bones, and add pickled chilis to taste.  It really was perfect soup.

Herbal medicine was a big part of this market and there was a lane of vendors with mounds of fresh and dried herbs and a scale. The herbalists would confer and assemble paper packets of scaled out mixed herbs to prepare as a decoction in much the same manner as a Chinese herbalist.  Unsurprisingly, a food being heavily marketed in north America as one of the "new" superfoods, maca, is everwhere, as it's been a part of the diet here for thousands of years.  It quite expensive to buy in Canada, I know as I've been taking it for a few years now. It's inexpensive and abundant here.

A Cusco street snack we really got hooked on were hard boiled quail eggs. Women push little carts with a simmering pot of water and you get six eggs for 1 neuvo sole, which is about 30 cents. They're served peeled and still warm with a shake of salt and a squirt of this really delicious, tangy mint-based hot sauce.

Worth mentioning was the huge Inca museum where we spent a whole afternoon browsing the artifacts, textiles and mummies. Photos were prohibited and many guards were policing that rule, so we don't have any photos of the cool stuff we saw.

The streets of Cusco are bizarrely dichotomous. On one side of town you have a concentration of the main places tourists want to see, and therefore most of the hotels and hostels are over there.  The intact historical buildings are all close together.  Around the main city square there are several huge colonial buildings and a very beautiful cathedral, but there is also a Starbucks, KFC and a McDonalds.

Luckily our hostel was a solid twenty minute walk away from there through the Cusco of present day Peruvians, a wholly different place.  The hostel was fantastic, but we also loved that it was located far from Tourist Central, so we really got to see a different side of life. The sidewalks are cluttered with vendors.  The unemployment rate is terribly high in Peru so people are very industrious, selling stuff freelance. On the sidewalk you can buy anything from beautiful homemade cakes, fruit and vegetables and all manners of household stuff.  Our hostel had a great kitchen to cook in and we made some fantastic food while we were there...including a really cozy sit down family style dinner with some people we met.  Cusco had epic rainstorms almost every day we were there and the air temperature was cold, so it was nice to be in a place where we could make comfort food out of the beautiful ingredients at hand.  There was a complication with the boxes we sent home via Bolivia post so we ended up staying longer than planned. Rather than continue on when the possibility existed that we would need to head back to La Paz to sort out our boxes we hung out in Cusco until it was resolved. Luckily we didn't end up needing to go back and after a week we continued on to Lima.  It also had the most comfortable beds of this whole trip so we were in a good place, there are certainly worse places to be stranded.

The baking of Peru has proven to be a total delight, they make beautiful bread here. They love to use a really high shine egg wash on everything, it all just glows, and baked darker brown than the anemic-looking blond breads of Argentina.  You don't see many loaves, everything is in portions, all manners of rolls perfect for big crunchy sandwiches.  The sweets are incredible too, and often contain dulce de leche and coconut.  They bake a lot with apples and there are all kinds of flaky pastries with apple fillings and cakes with big wedges of apple baked into them.  The churros of Cusco are totally distinct to any we've seen anywhere else and we ate far too many of them. Imagine a buttery yeasted dough similar to brioche, rolled into an elongated croissant shape, filled with a stripe of dulce de leche and deep fried to order. They're outrageous, they pull apart like a croissant, get rolled in raw sugar and have a crunchy outside. So good.

We didn't go near any of the cevicherias in Cusco, as the ocean was far too distant for us to trust the fish, raw or cooked. Now that we're on the coast line we can't get enough of it, but I'll get to that soon.