There are a handful of things that feel strange after leaving Peru yesterday.
1. Drinking from a water fountain
2. Throwing toilet paper in the toilet
3. Having hot water come from a tap
4. Turning on the heat
5. Seeing a mango on my kitchen counter
6. Worrying about unwashed fruit and how to wash it
In Peru you don’t drink the water, but in the Montreal airport I went out of my way to stop, bend and sip from the cold water fountain. And it was free. What a miracle. I also didn’t have to pay to use the bathroom, which was both clean and came fully equipped with toilet paper.
You do not throw toilet paper in the toilet in Peru. The sewage system was not designed for it. Surely this would be a good idea in North America too as it would reduce the stress on the system as well as clogs, but I now weigh the pros and cons of where I discard my toilet paper each time I use a washroom. Maybe that was more than you needed to know, but it’s a big difference between here and most of South America.
On the airplane to Toronto there was hot water. There was a little tab to press down for hot and a little tab for cold. After washing hands, dishes and sometimes my body in cold, cool or room temperature water known to have not exactly low levels of e.coli and other parasites for almost two months, this felt like absolute luxury. I do not bite my nails in Peru. That would be unwise. I worry mostly about the cutting boards and utensils that never really get that clean in Peru.
In Lima you don’t need indoor heating. You just close the window if you’re somehow cold, or throw a sheet on your bed, or maybe a thin comforter in winter when it “really” cools off…Even in cities that actually get cold, like Huaraz, a city 3000 metres above sea level, you just throw more and more thick blankets on your bed. Heating would be expensive. The only way to warm up there is with a hot shower, and before those existed I guess your body just had to get used to the lower temperature as it does the reduced oxygen levels. Last night when I arrived in my home in Montreal, however, I tured the heat back on in my room, and within 30 minutes it was warm enough to sleep comfortably.
In Peru I’ve been on a mango-a-day (or more) diet for some time. There are the huge juicy ones that you’re really only supposed to use for juice because they’re just about past their prime, but instead you just suck the flesh and liquid out of a small opening you make at the top of the egg-shaped fruit. It’s kind of like bubble tea in how the small chunks of fibre-less, sweet, golden flesh pop up into your mouth through the opening. Then there are the smaller, green Limenan mangoes that have a petrol-like flavour close to the skins. They’re more fibrous and less dessert-sweet. And then there are the red and green fibrous ones that are large that we most often find in Canada. They’re not that sweet. They’ve very fibrous. They never ripen properly since they’re picked so far in advance, and looking at one my roommate had in the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter I thought that it would have made more sense if I’d brough a big bag of them from Lima myself, rather than allowing a big boat followed by a truck (or just a truck) to travel lethargically from Costa Rica, Mexico or Brazil (or maybe Peru) to my home in Canada. I feel sorry for my roommate. He has no idea how that mango is supposed to taste…
He will not, however, have to worry about his system for washing the fruit. He will not know that it probably fell on the floor in one or several dirty markets or warehouses where workers have poor sanitary conditions (remember the water for washing your hands is generally full of all sorts of delicious things such as the e. coli. mentioned above. Not to mention the abundance of cockroaches, insects, and pesticides that are illegal in Europe and North America but are used freely in Peru. Perhaps these fruit are not the ones imported, but the fruit that are are far from organic. So you need to wash them well. I do not brush my teeth with Peruvian tap water. So cleaning fruit in Peru that meant sanitizing them in filtered water treated with purification drops for 30 minutes. I did this in batches after I returned from the markets. 10 drops from bottle A plus 10 drops from bottle B left to react with each other for 5 minutes before pouring it into a litre of water and adding the uncut fruit, trying somehow to fully cover them in the water so all the skins would be clean. Organic fruit from the Bioferia I would just rinse in a big bowl of clean water without the drops, but then the water gets dirty and you’re rinsing more fruit in dirty water, because refilling the bowl with filtered water is expensive. Here I can turn on the taps and rinse the fruit well. It will not be as good a method as my drops, but it is much less ridiculous.
For all these perks of being back in Canada, I miss what I can’t have here – flavouful papaya, mangoes, figs, lucuma, pecans, walnuts, brazil nuts, huacatay black mint and caihua. Caihua almost look like Asian bitter melons, which almost look like oddly angular zucchini mixed with long, lime gree chili peppers. You cut them open and scoop out the seeds and a little fuzz (again, like peppers), steam them briefly, and then stuff them (yup, peppers). They don’t have much flavour (like zucchini), but they’re healthy, light and inexpensive. Huacatay is nothing like regular mint. You can smell it a mile away and it’s used along with a jungle tomato and yellow chili pepper to make a sweet-and-sour creamy sauce for potatoes or chicken.
I used it for stuffed caihua and decorated the plate with my favourite mini cherries from Piura called capuli (also dirt cheap at the organic market. Half a kilo cost maybe two soles – less than one dollar).
Stuffed Caihua
4 caihua (or substitute poblano chili peppers or zucchini)
1/2 bunch huacatay, black mint or regular mint, stems only (leaves reserved for sauce below)
1 1/2 cup water (1 3/4 cups if using brown rice)
1 cup uncooked white or brown rice
1 cup organic or low sodium and MSG-free vegetable broth
1/2 tsp salt, optional (depending on sodium content of the vegetable broth)
Huacatay Sauce
1/2 bunch huacatay, black mint or regular mint, leaves only, chopped just enough to make them blend
2 red jungle tomalitoes (or tomatillos, or regular tomatoes, blanched and excess liquid drained). The jungle tomatoes are less juicy and acidic than regular tomatoes, so you get more usable flesh per tomato. You don’t need to drain it after chopping or remove the seeds like in an Italian tomato sauce with juicy romas.
1 aji amarillo yellow chili pepper (or other fleshy, mild chili pepper), seeded and de-stemmed
1/3 cup brazil nuts soaked in clean water for 25 minutes, then drained (reserve water in case you need it to make the sauce blend)
2 tbsp olive oil (or other oil)
juice of 1 lime, to taste
1/4 tsp salt
Capuli or sweet cherries to garnish
Directions
Cut caihua in half lengthwise and remove seeds and fuzz. Blend the huacatay stems with the water. Rinse rice several times to remove starch and combine in large pot with blended stems and water, stock and optional salt. Bring to a boil, add jungle tomatoes and place caihua on top. Reduce heat to medium low and simmer 15 minutes for white rice, and up to 25 for brown. Remove jungle tomatoes after 3 minutes (the skins should break) and caihua after 10 minutes of steaming. You can also steam or blance them separately, but why do that? The caihua need the high heat steam from the beginning of the rice cooking period to cook through, though, so don’t add them ten minutes before the rice is done and expect them to be soft enough.
Either rinse the jungle tomatoes in cold water after removing from the rice pot (if you have clean, cold water – I didn’t), or allow it to cool a few minutes before peeling. Combine in blender with all the huacatay sauce ingredients. Blend until smooth. Rinse capuli or cherries in clean water (you did the same for the huacatay, lime and yellow chili pepper, presumably, since they’re not cooked). Stuff rice mixture into the 8 caihua “boats” and spoon huacatay sauce over top. Garnish with capuli and maybe some olive oil if you feel like it. I also served it with deliciously crunchy, slimy okra with ginger, garlic and gluten-free soy sauce, since I saw them at the market and they looked a million times better than I ever see them in North America.
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