Monthly Dinner Report - Peruvian Feast

Last weekend was the second of my monthly dinner parties.  The night was inspired by my trip to South America in 2009 where I visited Peru and Bolivia.  One of the things I remember most about the trip was the food safari's that a few of my travelling buddies and I undertook.  We took particular interest in the local bakeries where I was pleasantly surprised to find a high quality of pastries.  One of the delicious cookies that we found was called alfajores.  Each Alfajores contains two shortbread like cookies put together with dulce de leche in the middle.  Dulce de leche is a form of caramelised condensed milk.  The other pastry of choice was empanadas.  See my recent post on empanadas.  The final inspiration came from the meal I had in the little town of Puno which is right on lake Titicaca.  For dinner I had a fresh water trout with ceviche as an entree.  So for dinner I prepared ceviche and the empanadas as entrees, rainbow trout escabeche as the main and alfajores as the dessert.

I was really happy with how the food turned out.  Surprisingly the highlight for me was the fish.  I made the ceviche with sea perch, lime juice, chilli, garlic, salt, pepper, onion and coriander.  The rainbow trout was marinated in lime juice, salt and pepper then lightly battered.  I was most impressed with my judgement on how long to cook the trout for, 2 mins on either side and that was it.  The trout was garnished with a peruvian salsa and accompanied with potatoes and corn.  For info on the actual recipes click here.

The trickiest part to the dinner was going to be the alfajores.  Making the biscuits was relatively straight forward with the only odd ingredient being corn flour.  I'm assuming that because corn is so abundant in Peru it was favoured over wheat based flour.  Dulce de leche can be made in roughly three different ways. One of those ways is to put a can of condensed milk into the oven at low temperature for around 5 hours.  This may seem like the easiest way but if the temperature gets a little high then BANG you get condensed milk everywhere.  I opted for the "reduce on the stove" technique which requires continuous stirring for 45 mins.  I did manage to slightly burn the mixture but overall it came out pretty well.

All in all it was a very enjoyable meal with good company.  Now to decide on what to cook next month.