Today was a long day of going through my grandma’s things and deciding which relative was going to take what, and cleaning out a lot of stuff accumulated over the years. It was cool to see some of the stuff she saved – apparently she got on a kick of recording phone calls in the late 70′s, so she had some cassette tapes of my dad calling home from college. After the clean up, we went to the memorial service and then went out to eat at a Peruvian restaurant here in Cincinnati.
This was pretty authentic (what Peruvian restaurant isn’t). Luckily, the descriptions were in English, and there were numbers by each of the individual menu items to order from, so they didn’t have to try to decipher my horrible attempt at reading Spanish. One disappointment was that Cuy was not on the menu. I figure they are missing out on a lucrative tie-in with the new “G-Force” movie
Luke and I got an Inca Kola to start (of course). Luke ordered half of a fried chicken. It was in the menu as “half fried chicken”, and I tried to convince him that it was actually half of a chicken and then deep fried. He didn’t believe me, until it came out.
Lynn got a potato dish with a black mint cheese sauce. Looked pretty interesting, and apparently didn’t taste “minty”, but I didn’t try any. There were also a couple of plantain appetizers being passed around that were good. One tasted like regular french fries, and the other was more sweet with a cinnamon sauce on it.
Julie recommended the “#19″ that she remembered from her time in Peru, and a number of people got that. It was the “aji de gallina” – shredded chicken and bread, rice, and potato with pepper cheese sauce. Just as good as she remembered in Peru.
I got the “#77″, which was apparently a Peruvian paella. I honestly felt like I was eating all the characters from Finding Nemo and Little Mermaid. There were so many different types of seafood in this dish it was hard to keep track. It was also a dish that fought back as I tried to eat it. Crammed into the rice on top was an entire small crab, and as I tried to break it apart, I impaled my finger on one of the sharp spines on it’s claw. The pain was well worth it when I finally got the meat out of it. There were also tiny octopii, squid, an oyster, a clam, shrimp, and maybe other stuff as well. All mixed with rice, peas and beans. It was really good, but there was way too much.
Overall, it was a successful trip, and much better than the first idea – Perkins.
