Thursday, November 12, 2015

Learning to cook in Peru



Yesterday we decided to try and make baked BBQ chicken and salad for dinner.  We’re still figuring out grocery shopping and cooking and whatnot here, I thought that would be an easy low key meal to put together.  We had found chicken, BBQ sauce, lettuce, and salad dressing at the grocery store, and our kitchen was stocked with pots and pans, so it seemed like it should have been clear sailing.  Here’s what happened.

First I washed all of the lettuce in a bowl of water with disinfectant drops (we’ll be doing this to most of our fresh fruits and vegetables here to avoid “Montezuma’s revenge”).  Then I laid out the lettuce leaves to dry while I began on the chicken.

That’s when we ran into a snag.  We’d learned to use our stove top, but lighting the burners with a match each time, but we hadn’t tried out the oven yet, and apparently the pilot needed to be lit.  We spent quite a while trying to figure out how to do this and failed miserably.  So… we adjusted our plans and decided to cook it on the stove top.

The next snag occurred when it came time to open the bottle of BBQ sauce.  I have never encountered a plastic bottle of any kind as difficult to open as that one.  Derek worked for some time on unscrewing the top, and in the end we took a pair of scissors to it and pried it off.

Opening the bottle of salad dressing was only slightly easier.  Apparently there’s something we don’t know about how people open plastic bottles here.

After all of this time, you’d think the chicken would be done cooking, but no.  It took much longer than I expected.  Maybe it’s an altitude thing?

The whole meal took WAY longer to make than we anticipated, and in the end it really didn’t taste very good either.  We opened a can of fruit and bag of chips to go with it and those turned out to be the best part of the meal.

And Montezuma had his revenge in the end too.

Oh well.  A few lessons learned I guess…

- Laura

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