Culinary Bolivia

Three weeks have passed and so far we haven’t had any weird culinary experiences in Bolivia, until today. We've only had to witness the girls eating slimy chicken feet as snacks and other things like that, but so far we have been able to avoid everything too absurd for us. Before I left Finland I had my doubts about how it would work out being a vegetarian here, but I have to say it has been quite easy even if I sometimes have only rice for lunch or get the same food as others but “without" the meat.  The every-day struggle with the huge portions they eat here and the sweet sugar-water drinks with the food has also been a challenge for Julia and me.

A visualisation of the Chuño-making process, made by Julia

Anyhow, today we had our first “black Chuño”-experience. I didn’t know what it was while eating it, but I had a very hard time getting down what looked and tasted a bit like rotten potatoes. Afterwards I learned that Chuño is freeze-dried-trampled potatoes, traditionally made by the Quechua and Ayamara communities in Bolivia. The process takes five days and basicly consists of freezing the potatoes at night and drying them at day. Then after five days people trample them with their bare feet. Once they have gone through the process the potatoes can last for years. So practically they are potatoes gone bad. Below is a video we found on Youtube, about how they make chuños.

Bizarre Foods Chuños (Bolivia Nov 2007)

So far I’ve been able to shuffle in me all the food I’ve been given, but today I had to say that it just is impossible for me to eat a huge portion of chuños together with a few normal potatoes, flush it down with a glass of sugar-water with a dried swollen peach in it, and top it off with a gelatin-desert. Enough is enough. Here the people are used to a very different eating rhythm. A small breakfast before school, a huge lunch at around 1pm and then something between dinner and supper around 6pm, which usually is a slice of dry-cake or bread, with sweet hot tea, chocolate or coffee – and yes even the three-year-old drinks coffee. Practically everybody is high on sugar all the time here, including me whose sweet tooth is aching all the time.

After a culinary-interesting day Julia and I baked scones for supper. Sunday is a special day as we have Siw’s friends Jhonny, Maria and Wilma (and sometimes David too) here to help us out with activating the girls, and we hope to make it a tradition that on Sunday evenings have supper together with them, just us adults. Two weeks ago it was pancakes, today scones! The reason why we didn’t have supper together last week was because our awesome car broke down when Julia and I were returning home – so we got home three hours late! more about that later on... Off to a new interesting week, good night!