My First Shot at Vegan Peruvian Cuisine

Since I have had Viva Vegan, I haven't really stepped outside of food I already loved (beans, rice, enchiladas, tacos.....). But, I really wanted to try some different types of food that I hadn't eaten before, so I decided to work on some Peruvian-inspired dishes.

The local Mexican grocery was really, really helpful in this regard: super cheap aji panca and aji amarillo:) I can't say enough about this place, if only they made vegan pastries (the fresh pastries always look delicious, but I know they are completely full of milk, eggs, butter and probably lard, so I stay away)!

Anyways, I have been ridiculously busy prepping for my weekly five courses I teach, along with working on PhD applications in my spare time, so cooking during the week generally amounts to a large batch of rice and beans that I can eat at room temperature or warmed up all week. I had gotten caught up on things pretty well last week, so I decided to take Saturday afternoon and make a full-fledged Peruvian-inspired vegan meal. And it was delicious!!!

The salad was improvised: green lima beans instead of limas blancas (couldn't find any) and grape tomatoes. But, the aji panca was good--it added flavor but not really spice. The salad ended up fresh and delicious.

And, this was my first time making empanada dough, and it was a huge success:) The empanadas are stuffed w/VV's recipe for olive, raisin and shredded seitan empanadas, with a little aji panca for some more Peruvian flavor. I finished it with pan-fried sweet plantains (a couple are a little overcooked--note to self: do not walk away to check the score on the football game and leave your plantains in the pan!). I loved everything about this dinner. I have another plantain, and will probably fry it up sometime this week as a delicious snack:)

I also tried another recipe from the book, for lomo saltado (I used this smoked tofu I picked up instead of seitan). So, I picked up this smoked tofu from a local store, opened it and thought it smelled like a Slim Jim or something atrocious like that, so I figured putting it in the spicy marinade for this dish would work well. And it did! I think I have more veggies in here than I should (I used up a pepper that was about to go bad and some soon-to-be-icky mushrooms), but this was really good! I had never tried aji amarillo before, and I really, really like the spicy flavor it has. I will definitely be using this a lot in the future.

If I had known that french fries would be so good in a stir-fry, I would have been whipping stuff like this up a long time ago!

In the last week, I also attempted a blueberry pie for my wonderful boyfriend. This did not turn out so well. It was my first time w/pie dough, and it ended up a little dry, while the filling ended up a little runny. It tasted pretty good; however, it looked horrible.....so no pictures. I, as the proprietress of this blog, reserve the right to not show any photos of food I made that was not good.

I have the feeling I won't be making anything spectacular this week. I am thinking, yep, that's right, plain old rice and beans.