Going Shopping

In Pittsburgh, we cook almost every night, but in our first week in Peru it was hard to imagine cooking dinner that was more worthwhile than going out to a restaurant. Then we visited Arequipa’s main market. Now we aim to cook at least once a week.

After trying alpaca steaks at restaurants around town, we wanted to try cooking it ourselves but first we needed to find the raw meat. Overwhelmed in the beef section, we confused one of the butchers by asking for alpaca and were kindly sent in the right direction. Leaving the beef behind, we pass the aisle of chicken livers, feet, breasts, beaks and you get the point. We pass the pork aisle with its giant loins waiting to be sliced. We walk very quickly by the aisles of innards, especially creeped out by the staring heads. Finally, we reach an aisle with one manned stall and a small hand-written sign that says “carne de alpaca”. Raw meat sits on the counter but happily when we requests 2 filets, the lady reaches behind to fetch fresh meat from her fridge and slices it for us.

But meat is just one section of this market. Adam encourages us to get our veggies as far from the meat as possible – about 20 feet. We aren’t hard-pressed to find limes, tomatoes, onions and garlic – temporarily bypassing the Peruvian favorites of rocoto (very spicy “bell peppers”), choclo (giant mutant corn) and zapallo (an estranged relative of pumpkin) and oodles of other basic veggies. You might think potatoes would be grouped with these ordinary vegetables but in Peru, potatoes are a food group and deserve their own area of the market. They come in every color of the rainbow (but don’t buy the green ones), ranging in size from golf balls to baseballs, and flavor-sealed by dirt.

We find a reason to be glad of Spanish colonialism when we stumble on the aisles of cheese and olives. To help us decide between the vast array of options, the vendors proffer samples perched on toothpicks. An afternoon snack later, we walk away with some more goodies.

Lacking a mortar and pestle, we rely on the colorful array presented by one of the sauce magicians. We tell him we have 2 steaks. He fills up and hands us a little plastic baggie filled with some type of sauce. See? Magic.

Wishing we had brought a shopping bag, we balance all of our purchases for the 15-minute walk home and promptly put our alpaca meat in the fridge. Grocery shopping may be just as fun as cooking in Arequipa.