Un Disastre!

Where do I even begin? I haven´t written in almost a week so I have a lot to say, but first I have to start with the disastrous evening Hana, Lindsay, and I had tonight in our first attempt to cook for my family. Last night, a group of 7 of us got together at Hana´s house to cook dinner together because we´ve had just about enough white rice, potatoes, and chicken (and we´ve only been here for a week). We decided to make a big vegetable stir fry with soy meat and a fruit salad since our diets here have an abundance of white starches and are lacking in the fruit and vegetable department. The stoves here are really small and they don´t have a wide varity of pots and pans so we had to cook the vegetables in rounds and then add them all together in this big pot on the side. Despite the limited resources though, the meal was delicious!!! As if that wasn´t enough, Lindsay and I had taken charge of figuring out dessert because that is another essential part of our diet here in Peru that is lacking. We had little pieces of chocolate cake with ice cream and these incredible marshmellow bon bons/moon pies we discovered. The bon bons were definitely the icing on the cake and they will no doubt be our downfall while we´re here in Santa Eulalia because they are delicious and extremely cheap.

Anyway, we had vegetables left over from our dinner last night so Lindsay, Hana, and I decided we´d replicate last night´s dinner for my host family tonight. Well, somewhere along the line, we had this brilliant idea to try a new dish (even though it´s the cardinal sin to never try a new dish when you´re cooking for guests). My host family was so excited for us to cook for them because they told me they always love the food the gringos cook for them. So we went to the market and bought the ingredients for this great Thai dish we were going to make using eggplant, basil, and chili peppers. Well, to make a long story short, the dinner was a DISASTER. We ended up buying the spiciest pepper they have here in Peru and put not one, but two of them in our stir fry. We started getting suspicious when we started sneezing up a storm and our noses couldn´t stop running just from the aroma in the kitchen. But then Lindsay and Hana tried it and their mouths practically caught on fire. Hana described it as "extremely spicy, but bland". Oh boy. There were my host sister and grandma (abuelita) watching us cook, so excited to try what we were making, and we´re laughing hysterically because we have no idea how we´re going to salvage this disgusting dinner. We thought about asking if Dominoes delivered around here, but didn´t think that was very likely so we turned to plan B. We tried adding anything we could find to the dish. We added soy sauce, tons of ginger, sugar, and even tried adding a little cheese (because doesn´t cheese make everything taste better?). Still, it was unbearably spicy. We had cooked noodles to go along with it so we buttered those and wondered if we should just serve those as the meal. We also considered making them pb&j since we had broken into my stash of peanut butter earlier in the day. At that point, anything would have been better than what we had prepared. So I started to break it to my abuelita that we were normally really good cooks, but this dinner was disgusting. We told her we bought this pepper that was really spicy, but we didn´t realize how spicy it was and now the dinner is so bad that we didn´t want them to eat it. She started laughing and said that she wanted to try it. Well I think she almost passed out when she tried it and laughed a lot more. She was so diplomatic about it though and said it had a good flavor, it was just too hot. Yeah right. It was gross and we knew it, but all we could do was laugh. We did our best to explain that we normally cook really good food and next time we promise it will be really good, but I´m sure they were thinking, yeah right, there won´t be a next time.

After we finally realized we weren´t going to be able to salvage it, we decided to just sit down and eat. The three of us tried to eat some of it so it wouldn´t go to waste, but everyone else ate chicken noodle soup that my abuelita had made for lunch. She was probably saving it for us to have the rest of the week because there was a lot leftover, but instead, we ate it all tonight. Even Hana, Lindsay, and I had to eat it because we couldn´t handle the other stuff. We were sitting at the table crying and laughing at the same time at this disaster we had made of dinner. We passed the tissues around the table as we ate. That´s not to mention that my host mom told us about these two guys who ate the peppers like a fruit and just bit right into them. One of them immediately swelled up like a balloon and turned bright red....the other died! Needless to say, we stopped eating our dinner instantly. We kept joking that we hoped we´d wake up in the morning and wouldn´t have a heart attack in the meantime. They were so cute about it though and told us not to feel bad, but of course we did. My abuelita said one time she forgot about some vegetables that she was cooking and they all burned to a crisp, but we didn´t think that came anywhere close to the disaster we had made of the night. They kept teasing us about it, saying we now had a story to tell our grandchildren about the first night we tried to cook for our families in Peru.

As you can tell, it was horrible. It was definitely a bonding experience for all of us and I´m sure one we´ll never forget. We´ll also never forgot that you should never try a new dish on company or use two whole peppers when you have no idea what the flavor will be like. I think we burned more calories laughing than we consumed so we made up for it after dinner by sharing a granola bar I´d been saving for an emergency (this definitely qualified) and taking the long way home to Hana´s house so we could stop and buy chocolate bars and bon bons.

Oh what a night! We´re all praying that we wake up in the morning and aren´t incredibly sick.

I think I´ll save my other stories about last week for a different entry because this one deserves it´s own entry.

Now we´re trying to decide what to make for them the next time. We have to knock their socks off the next time to make up for this disaster. Any suggestions are more than welcome!