Quito - Anthony Bourdain Style
Yes - they really eat Guinea Pig in Ecuador
Yesterday was basically a travel day with a lot of waiting and traveling. We left our room on the ship at 8:AM took tenders from the ship to Baltra, a bus to the Baltra airport, a charter plane from Baltra to Quito, a bus from the airport to the hotel arriving about 5 PM. After dinner it was an early night to bed.
Today our travel agent, trip lead and friend, Tracy arranged for a food tour and cooking class near Quito. It truly felt like an episode of Anthony Bourdain. Marie, our guide and our van driver picked us up around 9 at the hotel. We started at the local market where people come to purchase flowers, fruits, vegetables and other things for their home or to just get a bite to eat. While at the market we got to taste some of the local fruits and prepared foods like flour empanadas and yuca.
Our next stop was an unusual ice cream shop that was situated between a dental office open to the outdoors and a dental lab. We had to be disinfected by a sprayer from the dental office before we could sit down outside, and that was not the most unusual aspect of the visit. The ice cream the owner brought out for us to try included some very unusual flavors - mushroom, beetle with a beetle on top, crab, grasshopper with a grasshopper on top and Guinea Pig. They were all sweetened and flavored with things like lime, cocoanut, peanuts and pineapple. You mostly couldn’t taste the ingredients we considered odd but it was different. Marie ate the beetle.
After our ice cream we traveled to a small town with small open-air diners that serve local foods. We got to try some tasty pork with a few different salads, beans and corn. Finally we got to try a plate of roasted Guinea Pig, yes it does taste a little like dark meat chicken but it’s greasy with very tough skin. For me it was definitely one and done. The sauce on the potatoes served with the Guinea Pig was outstanding.
Our last stop was to the open air kitchen at the beautiful home of our guide, Marie. She had us do the prep work for the potatoes, plantains, carrots, tomatoes, cabbage, shrimp. Some of the ingredients were boiled, like the shrimp, plantains an potatoes, the others were pan sautéed. While we prepared the food, Marie served us mojitos using mint and lemon verbena from her garden. We also got to try sugar cane liquor and finished off the 1/2 liter bottle.
We made empanadas from mashed plantains and stuffed them with a local cheese similar to farmers cheese and pan fried them.
We also made ceviche with the boiled shrimp and a sauce made from the water used to boil the shrimp, onions that looked like shallots, tomato, lime, cilantro and maybe a few other ingredients. A salad was pulled together with the sautéed cabbage and carrots, and boiled beets. We also pan fried Ecuadorian chorizo and potatoes mashed with achiote oil.
Marie also fried eggs which were added to each plate. We sat down and enjoyed the meal we prepared. What we thought might be a half day got us back to the hotel late afternoon. It did feel like an episode of Anthony Bourdain.
