Greetings and introduction

[themistocles]

Greetings. My name is Ricardo, I am joining this fine group from Buenos Aires (Argentina). While I'm not a professional cook, I enjoy fine dining and am motivated by not spending much money, so I took up cooking as a hobby.

I enjoy a wide variety of food styles, such as Taiwanese, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, New Englander, Peruvian, etc. My cooking is influenced by several cultures, and especially by what I have in my fridge at any given time. That's why most of my dishes do not follow a recipe verbatim. As an example, I submit a picture of the potatoes with ocopa arequipeña that I prepared for lunch today. It is typical Peruvian fare, which includes a rather hard to find spice (huacatay) that my Peruvian grocer managed to find for me. I also cooked a steak Balmoral, but it's rather unappealing in pictures so I didin't include it (it was tasty though).

 

Anyway, I hope I can contribute to this forum in a productive way and anxious to learn from this fine group of people.

[kayb]

Interesting looking dish. Can you elaborate on it?

 

And welcome.

[ElsieD]

Hi Ricardo and welcome to the forum!

[Kim Shook]

Welcome to eG, @themistocles!  Thanks for including the photo and your information about where you are in the world.  I'm in the US, so I'm always thrilled to see folks from outside my country - adds a lot of interest!  I'm looking forward to your contributions!

 

[TdeV]

Hello Ricardo. I went to investigate this dish and found some photos quite different from your dish - perhaps you could tell us more? The folks here are quite friendly. Welcome!

[themistocles]

On 5/4/2022 at 4:08 PM, TdeV said:

Hello Ricardo. I went to investigate this dish and found some photos quite different from your dish - perhaps you could tell us more? The folks here are quite friendly. Welcome!

First of all, I should point out that I'm not a professional cook and I'm quite lazy, so I would often cook with whatever ingredients I have available.

 

This dish is supposed to be made with regular, yellow potatoes, but I had a lot of these smaller, purple potatoes, so I used that. Also, I'm guessing the color of the sauce varies with the color of bell peppers used. Finally, I like my sauces to be sticky, otherwise I feel like I waste half of them because I can't lift them with my food.

 

Basically, the ocopa arequipeña is a sauce made with onion, garlic, bell peppers, cheese, condensed milk, crackers, peanuts and huacatay (a herb that smells like mint and basil).

 

First, sauté the onion, garlic and bell peppers with corn or sunflower oil. Once it's done, turn the stove off and add the rest of the ingredients. Mix everything together until it has the texture of a light sauce (you can add oil to make it thinner). The traditional presentation is on a platter covered with lettuce, hardboiled eggs and black olives.

 

If you are into Peruvian cuisine, you might notice that it is similar to Huancaína sauce, which it is, but the huacatay makes it quite distinct.