Tallarines Verdes

1 bag Spinach

3 slices Soft Cheese
Salt
Spaghetti
Vegetable oil

Cook the spaghetti in water with bay leaves.

Boil the spinach in water

Blend the spinach with vegetable oil

Add 2-3 slices of cheese  and a teaspoon of salt, continue to blend. 

Add a small bit of oil into a big pan

Add in the mixture into the pan and stir continuously until hot, then remove from the heat

Add 1 tbsp salt to the mixture and mix well.

Add the spaghetti to the mixture and mix in well until the spaghetti is fully covered.

Serve

Eat like a true Peruvian  and have this as a side to Lomo Saltado, or just have it as a main!

Lomo Saltado

Lomo Saltado

Olive oil
2 red onions
3-4 Tomatoes
Beef chunks/strips
Garlic, Grated
4 large potatoes
White Vinegar
Siyau (peruvian soy sauce)

Marinate the beef chunks/strips with grated garlic and olive oil and leave in the fridge (bring out before continuing to bring the beef back to room temperature.)

Warm oil in a pan

Put chopped potatoes into a pan and cook until golden and ‘crunch crunch’ as Luisa told us (Place onto dry kitchen roll to remove some of the oil)

Begin the rice (see below)  

Put the meat into a pan, to brown and then fully cook (cover with lid)

Add Siyau to the meat and recover.

Add a splash of white vinegar, onion and tomato to the beef and recover.

Add finely chopped coriander 

Lomo Saltado Rice

1 ½ cups Rice
2 cloves of Garlic
1 tbspSalt
20 Peas in Pods

Remove the peas from their pods and wash clean.

Place grated garlic and salt in a pan with oil and heat up.

Add the peas to the oil mixture.

Add water and bring to the boil and leave to simmer for a few minutes.

Add the rice until fully cooked. 

Serve both together

Coco Dulce

2 Coconuts
1 ½ cups Milk
Sweetner
4 sticks Cinnamon
1 cup of water

Peel 2 coconuts

Pierce 3 holes in the coconuts and drain out the water. (You can drink this! It’s best served cold)

Hit with a rolling pin to crack into several pieces.

Scrape the coconut out of the shell.

 Wash the coconut

Blend the coconut with water.

Place the blended coconut in fabric to squeeze out the milk, through a sieve too.

You can place this milk in a pan and heat up until it turns into an oil like substance which is great for your skin/hair!

Put the cow’s milk into a pan and add 5 teaspoons of granulated sweetener and heat up.

Add some sticks of cinnamon to the milk and continue to heat up.

Add the blended and drained coconut to the milk and continue to stir until the coconut soaks up all the milk. 

The coconut before in the milk

The finished sweet treat

Catacaos

This weekend we visited the market town of Catacaos, it is such a beautiful town with lots of things to buy from fine jewellery, to pottery, wooden utensils, weaved baskets, hammocks, stuffed animals, leather goods and so much more.  

Street  after street has more artesian goods.

We also visited the food market, which included streets selling vegetables, fruits and grains, an indoor strip of fishmongers and then a hall of butchers.

As Catacaos is known for its crafted goods we were lucky to find a little workshop of gentlemen who were creating metal goods; the kindly showed us some of their methods.

My favourite method was when he took a small piece of metal and began putting it through an Italian machine with grooves in. This machine made the piece of metal elongate and become a perfect cylinder. 

He then used the other side of the machine, a laminator, which flattened the metal and also elongated it. It took many goes of passing it through the machine for it to reach a thin piece of metal. However he then heated it with a gas blow torch attached to a foot pump, by heating up the metal it made it become much more flexible and when it was put through the laminator is became incredibly thin and long – a material that was now much more suitable for jewellery creating.