Went to lunch today with my sisters and my dad.   At his choosing we went to the Casa de España restaurant one block from San Felipe.   It was a favorite of our grandmothers, and I guess my dad was in the mood for some sangria and paella valenciana.

Then we spent a lazy afternoon napping, and with the ladies getting their nails done at one of the salons in San Felipe.   Later tonight we'll be heading out to Barranco and to the La Noche nightclub.

In Lima

Well, it's my third day in Lima and am having a good time so far.  But, of course, that was to be expected.

On my arrival, we headed straight to San Bartolo for an early dinner at Jose's restaurant, Bocana.  The drinks and food were deserving of the rave reviews they had been getting from the rest of the family.   They were actually scheduled to close after lunch on that day and shut down for the winter, but since they knew that a number of the family were coming, several of whom had not had the opportunity to try it, including myself straight from the airport, they kept the place open a few extra hours.

Yesterday we ate lunch at my aunt Betty's ... I'm gonna have to get her spaghetti sauce recipe from her ... and then I headed to the Centro, to Quilca street, to buy  used books, and I walked away with quite a load of stuff that's nigh to impossible to find in the US. 

In the evening I met my dad at Jose Carlos Mariategui Site Museum for a talk on the disagreements between Julio Antonio Mella, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, and Mariategui in and around 1928.   It was a rather interesting talk but the Q&A session turned  into a shouting match at the end as a former congressman for APRA, the party founded by Haya de la Torre and currently in government, demanded the floor to refute to the refutation of an earlier longwinded dissertation delivered by him, which had brought the rest of the audience to its feet protesting that beside monopolizing the floor, the guy wasn't even posing a question but simply attacking the speaker.   All quite fun!

Countdown..

I'm just a few days away from heading to Lima for my cousin Mariana's wedding.

I'm told that the plan for when I get to Lima is to head straight from the airport to my cousin Jose's restaurant in San Bartolo, Bocana.     I've never been there and that will be on the last day before it shuts down for the winter, so getting a chance to try it makes me very happy.

Got my DNI!

This weekend Liz and I went to the Peruvian consulate in San Francisco to pick my DNI.  The DNI, Documento Nacional de Identidad, is the basic Peruvian ID card.  Having it will make many transactions easier and, in some instances -e.g. purchasing air travel within Peru- cheaper.

Normally, it takes about 3 months for the RENIEC, the government dependency in charge of these matters, to send a DNI to a consulate once the  request is made, but in this instance, they did it in about half the time.

Lima Sandwiches

Whether they call it a sanguich, a sanguche, a sanduche, a sanduich, or a sandwich, Limenos love bread and love to put things in bread, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or anytime.  Here is a selection of their creations, with pictures I've taken over the years:


Sandwich de chicharrón

This is a classic, and Lima's quintessential breakfast sandwich.   Slices of chicharron -boiled and browned pork (think Mexican carnitas without the Coca Cola) are joined in a crusty french roll by salsa criolla (thin-sliced red onions, in lime juice, with a bit of aji), and a slice or two of fried sweet potato.  It can't be beat.

Sandwich de salchicha huachana

Another breakfast classic, salchicha huachana -a style of mild sausage somewhat reminiscent of Mexican-style chorizo, spiced with aji panca, black pepper, cumin, and a few other spices, originally from the town of Huacho- stuffed into bread, either with egg, or -as in the photo above- on its own, makes for a nice start to the day.

Choripan

Choripan is a conflation of the words chorizo (sausage) and pan (bread).  One of the most popular chorizos in Lima is what is called chorizo parrillero, a sausage meant for grilling.   In the evenings, as workers start heading home as the night's chill starts to set in, shops and entrepreneurs throughout the city pull out carts equipped with propane grills, and commuters line up to purchase warm choripan sandwiches on the way to their bus stops.

Butifarra

A butifarra is perhaps the definitive, old-school Lima sandwich.    Sold at eateries and from carts all over the city, it -like so many other Peruvian sandwiches- is deceptively simple: slices of jamon del pais (a typical style of ham), with salsa criolla, and -sometimes- a lettuce leaf.  That's it.  Everything rides on the quality of  the jamon and the bread.

Triple

This is another, albeit modern, classic sandwich, consisting of layers of avocado, fresh tomato slices, sliced hard-cooked egg, and a bit of mayonnaise, in between three pieces of white bread with the crusts removed.  Hence, it's triple name: three fillings in three slices of bread. Simplicity itself, and great for a light lunch!

Sandwich de lechón glaceado

At Bodega Nishida, on the third block of Burgos street, in San Isidro, they serve a unique and delicious sandwich of glazed pork (lechon glaceado).  The pork is slowly cooked with cognac, pisco, red wine, honey, sugar, and aji colorado. Well worth searching out if you are in the neighborhood of the old Clinica Italiana.

Hamburguesa a lo pobre

A recent invention, this sandwich is part of the menu at the Peruvian burger chain, Bembos.   Bembos' signature is its selection of burgers with "national flavors".   They thus have a "Hawaiian" burger (with pineapple), a "German" one (with Sauerkraut), and so on.  The most interesting are the "Peruvian flavor" burgers, in which various criollo dishes are emulated.  In this case, it's the classic hole-in-the-wall dish bistec a lo pobre.   Bistec a lo pobre -literally 'poorman's-style beef steak'- is a value meal in itself, consisting of a thin-pounded steak, topped with a fried egg, and accompanied by  french fried potatoes, fried plantain, tomatoes, onions, and white rice.  In this instance, Bembos has combined those elements (sans the rice) into a tasty meal one can hold in one hand, and offered a fun and interesting diversion from the world of run-of-the-mill burgers.

Happy Dance

Summer vacation trip to Peru has also been scheduled!