FBT - food edition

Our week of FBT (field-based training) in the sierra town of Otuzco, La Libertad was amazing for many reasons, lots of delicious food being one of them. Thus, I have decided to dedicate this post purely to the gastronomía side of FBT.

Let's start with breakfast. Each morning the six of us walked a few blocks from our hostel towards two key Otuzco establishments: the egg sandwich lady, and the yogurt/cheese lady. Luckily for us, these two shops were located almost across the street from one another, making it very simple for some hungry Peace Corps volunteers to mix-and-match our exact breakfast desires. Below you can see Heidi and Jackie enjoying our first day of yogurt (you can tell it's our first day because of the 3 liters of yogurt on the table... our eyes were a little bigger than our stomachs that day due to our extreme excitement over how delicious it was). All yogurt in Peru is of the liquid/drinkable variety, so we would buy 2 liters each day and share the peach and strawberry flavors around via the comically minuscule shot-sized plastic cups the yogurt lady provided us. The particular breakfast pictured below also included cheese sandwiches (with fresh cheese from the same dairy shop), and some muffins and egg sandwiches from the egg lady. With breakfasts like these, which, by the way, totaled around $2/person, we had no problem starting our days off right.

Otuzco's other key culinary establishment is the papas rellenas lady. Every day around 3:00, she sets up her street-side cart and starts cooking up wonderfully hot and greasy papas, which you buy for approximately 3 cents (USD) each and top with some spicy and flavorful ají. The difficult thing here is to resist eating ridiculously large quantities of these papas, which is extremely hard to do because they are so deliciously addictive. Luckily for our waistlines, our teaching schedule during the week prevented us from passing by during the papas lady's selling hours, so her treats remained beginning- and end-of-week indulgences.

One night at dinner at a run-of-the-mill Otuzcan restaurant, a small miracle occurred. In Spanish, outside of Mexico, the word tortilla almost always means omelet, and almost never means an actual tortilla. Thus, when I ordered the "tortilla con carne" from the dinner menu, I was expecting an omelet with some beef in it. Instead, I received the Mexican-ish platter pictured below: an actual tortilla/burrito, GUACAMOLE (not a Peruvian thing at all, particularly in the mountains and when avocados aren't in season), and a cute little Aztec pyramid of rice. A very pleasant surprise that left my fellow volunteers wishing they'd gone for the tortilla as well.

Our fifth day in Otuzco was the final day of the start-your-own-business workshop we'd been teaching at the technical college, so each group of five students was out in the plaza selling their products and competing to try and earn the biggest profit. My favorite by far was the apple pie group. I don't know how they did it, but somehow this enterprising group managed to bake an apple pie equal to any American version I've tasted. Naturally, I ate three slices, and I think between all us volunteers we probably bought out half their stock :)

To celebrate a successful week of teaching, we spent our last morning in Otuzco hiking up one of the neighboring hills. Here we encountered a very imposing Tomás the turkey, and decided he could make an excellent Peruvian Thanksgiving feast.

Our hike also included a picnic, centered around more fresh cheese sandwiches, courtesy of our favorite cheese lady. Delicious snacks plus being outdoors in the beautiful mountains made for a great farewell to Otuzco.

Back in the regional capital of Trujillo, Saturday's breakfast of course could not compare to those of the egg/yogurt lady. However, this meal did not lack for laughs, since when I ordered a mug of hot milk I instead received this huge beer stein. I am 100% sure that the restaurant had normal mugs, since I pointed to my friends' average-sized coffee mugs when I asked for my mug of milk, so it remains another Peruvian mystery why the owner decided a normal mug simply would not suffice for me.

For the last afternoon of FBT, we got to meet up with one of the youth volunteer groups who had been doing their trainings in the same region, and spend the day together in the beach town of Huanchaco. Culinary highlights included: strawberry/milk/ice drinks called batidos, and all-natural, manjar flavored ice cream cones from a man who's had his beachfront ice cream shack for 32 years. Yum!