Mushrooms Stuffed With Cheese Are a Guest Favorite Appetizer
When I wrote our 3-year anniversary blog yesterday, I forgot to add a section on food and the joy of cooking, which has been a major theme in our lives since we arrived in Cuenca.
Mercados. From the start, I have shopped for fresh fruits and vegetables from the mercado located closest to our apartment, 12 de Agosto, about 4 blocks walking from our apartment. Fresh food is everywhere, and the lack of processed foods (ready-made) compelled me to learn how to use fresh produce. I learned that some vendors had better produce than others, most (but not all) charged the same to gringos and locals, and there are now 3-4 vendors that I buy from regularly, who offer me “yappas” (their term for adding a little extra) as a thank you. The vendors selling the large, scrumptious, strawberries are always a joy to see. When we were in Colombia, we went on an exotic fruits tour at a local mercado, giving us a chance to taste various exotic fruits we didn’t have the nerve to try on our own. After the tour, I even made maracuya ice cream.
Homemade Maracuya Ice Cream
Cooking. Evelyn cooked for the first 30 years of our marriage, with me barely able to boil water. During an extended unemployment period after the internet stock bust in 1999, it seemed only fair that I should try to learn to cook, since Evelyn was then the only one bringing home a salary. With some encouragement from Pauline (Evelyn’s sister) who presented me with my first “4-ingredient cookbook“, I discovered that I actually could cook, and, in fact, like to cook. We decided that, since Evelyn cooked for the first 30 years of our marriage, I would cook for the next 30. I am halfway through that period…
Adjusting to high altitude cooking. Some of the earliest frustration was adjusting times for cooking and baking, whether it was boiling water for pasta, or baking a pie crust. I joined a Facebook group called Food and Cooking in Ecuador, where there are a number of gourmet cooks who are willing to share. Now, whenever I have a cooking question, there is always someone online who can answer the question, helping with issues of what ingredients to substitute, or changes to make due to the 8500′ altitude here. I now periodically add a particularly good recipe I have developed, to my blog, already adjusted for this elevation. There are currently 22 listed there.
Finding expat foods. When we first came to Cuenca, we found that the bacon flavor that we loved in California did not exist. In fact, the bacon found at Supermaxi and the local supermarkets was bland. We had a similar withdrawal for other favorite food items that we were accustomed to getting in the US, such as English muffins, spicy sausage, spicy cheese, etc. In the past 3 years, many expats have started up new business enterprises producing many of the foods us expats crave, and it’s only rarely we find ourselves unable to obtain a favorite food or ingredient now.
Cooking schools. I make a point of trying to make at least one new meal each week. Some of these new recipes are found on various internet cooling blogs that I read. Others come from the cooking classes I now frequently attend. I have gone to a dozen or so such classes here in Cuenca, and have learned how to cook Ecuadorian dishes such a locro de papa (a thick potato soup) and seco de chivo (goat stew). Other classes have taught me how to make various American, Italian and Peruvian meals. However it’s always the little hints or secrets that are not in any cookbooks that I really appreciate. When we were in Istanbul recently, we both took a Turkish cooking class, where we learned (among other dishes), Manti (ravioli in Greek yogurt, often eaten for breakfast). We also learned to use a “Turkish pinch” for spices — three fingers picking up as much spice as they can hold. Since that is maybe 4 times as much spice as the “American pinch” (thumb and forefinger grabbing spice), we began to realize why many of the spices in my earlier meals were barely noticeable.
Exploring new restaurants. When we first visited Cuenca in 2012, there were only a handful of great restaurants, mostly Ecuadorean cuisines. TripAdvisor showed something like 50 restaurants in town. Since then, the diversity of the types of cuisine available has grown astronomically, and TripAdvisor currently shows 362 restaurants. The cuisines now include great seafood, sushi, Thai, Italian, Indian, Russian, fusion, and even comfort foods such as hamburgers, fried chicken and American-style pizzas. The annual turn-over of restaurants has been staggering, as the start up costs to open a new enterprise are low (under $1K in some cases). We still regularly have “almuerzos” for lunch, which run from $2.00 to $4.00 for a 5-course meal. We also go out to dinner a couple times a week to experience new restaurants in town (and to help keep the better ones in business). In fact, we are heading out to Prickly Pear, another new restaurant a couple blocks from us, as soon as I finish writing this.
PS: We just returned from dinner. We have always realized there were a lot of restaurants in our neighborhood, but decided to actually count tonight. Our destination was four blocks away. Enroute, along that four block stretch, we counted 41 separate restaurants! One of these days, we will make a 4-block grid and try to actually count the total number of restaurants in that range. I am betting there will be more than 150 within 4 blocks of us…!