Market Day.

Upon arriving “home” to Tarma, I am quickly jumping back into the routine of meetings, planning, and cooking rotation. Since I’ve gotten out of almost two weeks of cooking, it is my turn to start out the week. Because I still haven’t learn how to cook any typical Peruvian dishes, I’ve been forcing my teammates to eat good North American cooking, and have cooked things like Chili, Tacos, Baked Pastas and Pizza. So tomorrow’s menu is going to be a breaded baked chicken, ranch-style potatoes and green beans with an apple crisp for dessert. Because of our lack of refrigerator and pantry space in the kitchen we tend to buy our groceries the night before or the day that we cook. And because Sunday is one of the two biggest market days of the week, I went out to buy my groceries today. The market experience continues to fascinate me. Think about quadrupling the size of Lincoln’s Farmer’s market, and then imagine that Hy-Vee and Super Saver don’t exist and you have to go buy all of your food at the market. That’s what it’s like here. I started out at the fruit stand and bought 1 kg of apples for $1. Then I moved on and bought a half kg of green beans and 1 kg of the Peruvian yellow potato, both totaling $1.20. I bought butter and parmesan cheese at the imports store for $2, and finally went to one of the many chicken stands and purchased six chicken breasts for $4. Just to give you a little perspective on the economic difference here – a full meal with dessert for 4 people cost me $8.20 to make. Sometime I’m going to go and take pictures of the chicken stand for you all. Or better yet, I’m going to take a video of the butcher cutting the whole chicken apart and filleting the meat! It is definitely a change from getting the frozen boneless and skinless chicken breasts that I grew up on. And over all, this way of buying chicken is neither good nor bad . . . it’s just different!