Let the cooking begin

We began by extracting the juice from the mollar passion fruit and used it to make a pisco sour.  It was the first cocktail I've had in years and it was absolutely delicious!  We moved on to preparing our quinoa tamales.  We made a paste with cooked white quinoa, finely diced red onions, crushed garlic, and yellow chilli paste, and used it to line some softened corn husks.  We added a layer of grated cheese and then another layer of the paste.  We wrapped these into tight parcels to be baked in the oven.

The next job was to make causa limena, a tasty Peruvian starter made with a layer of shredded chicken in mayonnaise sandwiched between layers of yellow mashed potato flavoured with golden aji sauce.  We made these in specially designed moulds and decorated them with fanned avocado, a wedge of hard-boiled egg, a purple corn juice tuile, crunchy black quinoa, some micro herbs, and an edible flower.  We garnished the plates with circles of spicy mayonnaise and black olive mayonnaise.  Alvero is the son of an artist.  Plating is his favourite thing.  He encouraged us to take special care over how our dishes looked.  They did look good, but I won't be using tweezers to plate our dinners at home!  They tasted delicious, though!

We ate our causa limena accompanied by our second cocktail of the evening.  This one was a chicha punch made with chicha morada juice and pisco.  It was just as good as the first one!Read more