I cooked chili from scratch, and it tasted like normal!!! Thanks to an internet recipe and an English to Spanish cookbook, I'm well on my way to actually cooking remotely well. "So what?" you might say. But HOLY COW! Relearning to cook has been a challenge to say the least. I am not a cook by nature, so all of my recipes from home are easy, throw stuff together, recipes. One day, as I told a friend my woes about spending over an hour in the kitchen every night, she said, "Hey! I can give you some of my mom's easy casserole recipes. There's this one that just has tater tots, ground beef, and cream of mushroom soup. To fix it here, I guess you could just peel and shred some potatoes and brown them, and then cook up a packet of powdered cream of mushroom soup...Oh, well, I guess it's not that easy to make here."
Yeah, pretty much everything has to be sliced, diced, pre-cooked, etc. I had no idea how much I relied on cans of stuff. Peru HAS most of these coveted items, but at a PREMIUM, and only at certain stores. So I'm relearning to cook with fresh foods, which are extremely affordable here. One woman in particular gets extra praise for giving me one of the best helps since I arrived. Carol Larson, a great friend here in Lima, gave me a cookbook put about by a group here in Lima. It's in both English and Spanish, and it's a compilation of American/Canadian dishes as well as Peruvian cuisine- it even has tex-mex recipes! Not only that, but it has special helps, like a list of substitutions for American foods that we don't have readily available here. I learned to use Aji Panca instead of Chili Powder (my Betty Crocker cookbook seems to have left that one out). I can get cans of diced tomatoes, sure. But it costs more that DOUBLE what it costs to just buy a few tomatoes and chop them up...novel, I know, but I was honestly nervous about trying this out. I'm ridiculous. Many experiments have ended in calling for delivery, so I truly thank the Lord for calling us to a huge city. Also, when in doubt, they have jarred spaghetti sauce, ground beef, and regular pasta noodles. YAY!
