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Despite the gradual rise in my Spanish level, conspicuous holes in my vocabulary remain. While I can fill my bag with the fresh and the green from the central market, in the eatery above the market the simmering pots and pans are filled with thing I have no name for.
In a purely gastronomical sense I have no need to know the names of these foods. I know enough to know they are meat-based, and that they are thus not for me.
Still, the longer I spend in Bolivia, the more the names of these forbidden foodstuffs begin to encroach into my vocabulary. One dish that has long lodged in my lexicon is Pique a lo Macho. Pique itself is a rather bland handful of French fries interspersed with hot dog meat and sold outside schools and on street corners all over the country. It becomes more interesting when it turns macho. Pique a lo Macho is a giant steaming mound of French fries, drowning in five types of meat (meat of sausage, meat of cow, meat of bird, meat of pig, and meat of other), eggs and a lot of chilli. It requires a big plate and a strong table to support it, and as such is not hit-and-run street food.
Since learning of this most unacceptable dish, I have longed to vegetarianise it. Just because I don’t eat meat doesn’t mean I don’t like big, greasy mounds of unhealthy food.
1. Get a lot of real big potaters and cut them with a real big knife into real big wedges. Boil the real big wedges for ten minutes, or until they’re soft (usually Big Phil won’t touch nothing soft, but in this case it’s necessary).
2. Boil some water and then soak some real big eggs in it. Set some water aside to soak some real big chunks of soy meat. Soak some real small chunks too until they’re good and sloppy.
3. Get a real big plate, a metal one (Big Phil likes metal). Put the real big potater wedges on the plate, coat in oil and salt, and bake until real hot and crispy.
4. While the real big potater wedges are baking, get a real big pan. Heat some oil in it until it’s real hot.
5. Dice a real big eggplant (everyone knows the biggest eggplants are in Bolivia) into real big cubes and put them in the real hot pan. Add a lot of salt.
6. Cut some onions into real big rings or half-rings. Dice a lot of real big cloves of garlic into real small pieces. Put them in the pan with the real big real hot eggplant.
7. Use your real big knife to cut up a real big head of broccoli. Cut up a real big red bell pepper/capsicum, and a real big green one too. Put them in the real big pan.
8. There aren’t many fresh mushrooms in Bolivia, and the tinned ones only come in real small tins. So open a tin or two of mushrooms, halve them, and put them in the real big pan, which should be real full.
9. Add the real big and real small soy meat. Peel and half the eggs and add them too.
10. Dice a couple of real hot locoto peppers. They’re hotter if you crush them a bit first. Crush them real good. Use different coloured peppers – Big Phil likes colourful food. Put them in the pan.
11. Add a lot of cilantro, cumin, vinegar, veggie stock, tomato paste, salsa ingles/Worcestershire sauce/HP sauce/BBQ sauce. Enough to coat all the real big veggies, without turning everything to slop (even though Big Phil likes slop, it isn’t the way for Pique a lo Macho).
12. Take the real big real hot potaters out of the oven. Pour the real big real spicy vegetable mix over the potaters. Add some grated cheese. Bake until cheese is melted.
13. Serve on the same real big plate, with real big bottles of mayonnaise, ketchup and hot sauce next to it.
14. Go at it with your real big hands. Use a real big fork if you’re dainty.
15. If it isn’t so spicy it hurts, then you did it wrong.
I turned 22 in Australia on Anzac Day, and though I have no specific recollections of this, I am sure one of the ways I celebrated was by eating Anzac biscuits.
I turned 23 in Spain on Anzac Day, and was shocked to find that I had to go to work, and that Spain did not have a day for commemorating the Australia New Zealand Army Corp. None the less I again celebrated with Anzac biscuits sent from Australia, which I could collect, like all my mail, only by visiting the kebab shop below my apartment and ordering a kebab.
I turned 24 in the US on Anzac Day, and although I was again shocked to find that no national holiday was called, I did not have to work because I had no work. I spent the day stomping through the Chicagoan rain and photographing the Ukrainian village, and although I had no address and could no receive Anzac biscuits, I did celebrate with the obscene deliciousness of deep-dish pizza.
I turned 25 in Korea on Anzac Day, and again found myself going to work, and being sung to by a half-hearted band of Korean students. Going to school did, however, allow me to collect my mail, which meant I could again celebrate with Anzac biscuits sent from Australia (where proper Anzac festivities were observed; i.e. no one went work, most people went to the pub, and forms of gambling usually prohibited were allowed).
I turned 26 in Bolivia on Anzac Day, and found myself with no reliable postal address, which meant that if I wanted to properly observe the Anzac traditions, I would need to make my own Anzac biscuits.
How to make Bolivian Anzac biscuits.
1. Visit market and supermarket in search of bicarb. soda and golden syrup. Realise you don’t know the Spanish word for bicarbonate, but assume it is similar. Realise that Bolivia isn’t really a syrup kind of country.
2. For the first time in four months, turn on the oven. As there is no thermostat, fiddle with the dial until the flames are not-big.
3. Search for suitable pots and pans in the mysterious caverns beneath the sink. Find an old and rusted serving platter and decide that this will do for a baking tray. Remove as much rust as possible.
4. In the big bowl that was beside the serving platter, mix one cracked mug of flour with one cracked mug of sugar with one cracked mug of oats with three quarters of a cracked mug of coconut.
5. Dissolve one teaspoon of the mystery powder from the supermarket in one tablespoon of boiling water. Find that it does more or less what bicarb. soda does, and feel satisfied.
6. Inspect your jar of old honey and find that its contents are no longer fluid. Decide that it will suffice. Melt as much honey as you can scrape from the jar with about 125 grams of butter (having realised you have no way of weighing things and thus will have to guess how much butter you have). Wrinkle your nose at the smell.
7. Mix the mystery-powder-in-water with the butter-and-now-liquid-honey, and then stir this into the dry mixture. Heed your mother’s words, that it will seem like the mixture is too dry, but that in fact it won’t be.
8. Find that the mixture is indeed quite dry, and squeeze the mixture into the hardest balls of dough possible to keep them together
9. Grease the no-longer-rusty serving platter with what butter remains, and lay out the hard dough balls, leaving room for them to expand as they cook.
10. Bake the first batch (as there is more mixture than tray space) in the oven of indeterminate temperature for 20 minutes. Feel paranoid and check on them every 5 minutes. Watch TV and at the 20 minute mark forget about the biscuits. When you check on them, decide that they are two pale and thus not cooked and leave them in the oven for longer.
11. Realise that without golden syrup the mix will of course look paler, and whisk batch 1 from the oven. Allow them to harden until they are as stone.
12. Repeat for batches 2 and 3 but do not be as distracted by TV, but still feel uncertain about the colour of the mix and the heat of the oven and leave them in for too long. Take them from the oven and allow them to harden, although not as drastically as the last batch.
13. Find that the first batch threatens the integrity of your teeth when you try and chew them. Soak them in milk or hot beverages. Decide that Anzac biscuits are still Anzac biscuits and devour all three batches in a few short days. Do not share them.
Pavlova is clearly not a South American dish, and thus does not really belong in a New World blog, but this recipe does provide some insight into my Christmas in Bolivia…
Another expat Christmas rolled around and as the other gringos made elaborate plans for elaborate dishes, I decided I needed to make a more decent contribution than the usual bachelor offer of “I’ll bring the booze”. My contribution needed to be quintessentially Australian or Australia-New Zealand-Antipodean, so as to avoid impinging on the contributions of others. So I decided to make Pavlova, the perfect light dessert for a hot southern hemisphere Christmas.
Bolivia however is one of the few landlocked countries of the southern hemisphere, and does not enjoy the same hot, dry Christmas as Australia. Bolivian Christmases are wet. They might even be cold. Bolivia is thus not so well suited to cream confections. Nor are Bolivian kitchens always equipped for such endeavours. For this reason I made two pavlovas for my Bolivian Christmas. Here is how I did so…
PAVLOVA #1
Ingredients:
four egg whites
1 cup of sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 tsps corn starch
Directions:
Find online recipe for pavlova and then once the internet connection fails spend hours waiting in vain for it to reconnect. When it does not, proceed by faltering memory with the recipe.
Pre-heat your tiny oven to a moderate temperature. As your oven has no thermostat or temperature gauge, set it to the only setting you have apart from ‘off’ and ’super-high’.
Separate egg yolks from white. Leave yolks in the fridge in case you ever need them. Mix tiny increments of sugar into egg-white, beating furiously with a fork. Continue doing so for two hours, scrutinising the mix to check whether it is ‘peaking’. Add an extra half cup of sugar (again, gradually), until it finally sort of peaks. Add vanilla, corn starch and lemon juice. When you taste the mixture it should hurt your teeth.
Line the only (very small) baking tray in your house with wax paper. Pour mixture into tray, spreading it as much as space will allow, without allowing mix to touch the edges. This will form a large quivering mound of white.
Remove your cold room mate from before the oven. Bake mound in the oven, exercising high paranoia for fear of burning it.
Between 33 and 38 minutes become distracted watching ‘The Office’. After 38 minutes check on mound and find the top browning. Turn the oven off and allow mound to cool in oven over night.
Wake up on Christmas Eve morning to find your mound has collapsed, is burnt on one side, brown on the outside and undercooked on the inside, and cannot be separated from the paper. Despair.
PAVLOVA #2
Ingredients: As above
Directions:
Having abandoned your first effort, relocate to your friends’ house to admit failure and offer to help them with their own Christmas concoctions.
Be convinced by friends to try again with better utensils, and a larger oven with a proper dial. The ingredients are, after all, very cheap.
Pre-heat the large oven to about 170 degrees (Celsius). Line a large, flat tray with no encroaching sides with crumpled wax paper.
Have your friend use an ancient Peruvian technique to remove the egg white from the yolks with none of the mess of your primitive, 9th grade cooking class methods. Beat eggs with an egg whisk, not a fork, until they are stiff. Sieve sugar into mix and beat well, your forearm bulging and burning. After less than an hour the mix will be peaking. Add corn starch, vanill and lemon juice. Taste the mixture and find it not instantly tooth-rotting.
Spread mix on tray, forming a neat, low, cake-shaped circle of white. Bake this in the oven for a full hour. Check occassionally on it to find it not burning or cracking or browning or collapsing. After the hour turn off oven and allow cake to cool until your other friend needs the oven to cook the monstrous turkey.
Whip cream in blender until it is thick. Pour into onto the base, smoothing it over so that it settles thick and sleek. Add strawberries and blackberries. Grate dark chocolate over the confection. Be very very pleased with yourself and also relieved. Be too full to eat it on Christmas Eve. Eat it a day later. Lose yourself admiring the cake in cross-section form. Take pictures. Write extensively about your success.
To survive and thrive at high altitude one of many pieces of advice is to eat small meals. This is in large part to avoid the unfortunate effects of H.A.G.S. (High Altitude Gas Syndrome). In my first days and weeks in Cochabamba I (and thus everyone else around me) suffered terribly from H.A.G.S. I wanted to get better, really I did, but it was just so hard to stick to proverbial advice while living in a agricultural city overflowing with fresh, organic produce. Especially once i discovered Vitaminicos.
The Vitaminico is a big, thick, heavy beverage sold at the ubiquitous juice stalls of Cochabamba. It is, i suppose, very healthy. But it is also very large; there are so many ingredients in it that it is impossible to make a small serving. Nevertheless it makes a perfect afternoon beverage, provided you can siesta it off afterwards.
For those not at high altitude and wishing to discover the delights of the Vitaminico for themselves, here is a rough recipe….
Ingredients:
banana
papaya
apple
pineapple
carrot
strawberries
coconut
oats
spinach
milk
one raw egg
Inca Bi-Cervecina (a heavily malted beer with low alcoholic content)
honey
Directions:
Where appropriate dice ingredients and add them all to a blender. Blend. Pour beverage into a tall glass. Hold it with two hands. Drink it slowly. Fall asleep.
