En la Cocina

We had a nice dinner of roasted chicken, green beans, and rice tonight. Why is this blog-worthy? Well, aside from the fact that my immediate family probably still can't get over the fact that I now eat green beans willingly, our meal tonight was notable because the chicken was cooked like this:

Pollo in the horno

Yes, our landlord brought us a toaster oven, but unlike the spacious one they showed us in their own kitchen, we now have something that looks like it would barely fit toast. Nevertheless, we purchased a whole chicken and decided to try to roast it. Happily, it worked great! Taylor de-boned it first, which was crucial, but it turned out nicely cooked in just 1 hour. Now we have grand plans to roast vegetables and even bake pizza in our little oven. It will be interesting. Unfortunately our wine experiment did not turn out so well. We're trying to give the local wines a chance, and we actually had a very decent bottle of Peruvian wine our first weekend here. So we bought two more bottles during our last shopping trip, and we opened them both tonight, and they both tasted like grape juice. Hm, not what we were looking for. Tomorrow maybe we'll buy some ginger ale and mix it up for a refreshing summer beverage!

Speaking of alcohol, Taylor had a fun (hah) experience yesterday--he had a lunch meeting with someone he wanted to interview for his research, and he (the interview subject) proceeded to get him (Taylor) completely plastered. My guidebooks warn against going one-for-one with Peruvians, and it's true--they each had 2 pisco sours, half a bottle of wine, and 1 1/2 straight shots of pisco after the meal. Taylor called me at work at 5:00 pm, having just returned home from his 1:00 appointment, proclaiming "I'm the drunkest I think I've ever been in my life!" It was hilarious. (I took a funny picture of him on the couch, but blogger is being annoying and not letting me upload it right now.) But, being the superstar that he is, we still went swimming at 7:00 and he was completely functional today. Good thing today's lunch meeting was cancelled, though! Welcome to politics in Peru.

On Sunday we're going on our first excursion--we're going hiking outside of the city with Maiah and John. It will be nice to escape the smog and see what exists within an hour of crazy Lima.