Passport & Plate - La excelencia
Peru | Wednesday, March 4, 2015 | 4 photos
Ingredients
Main:
1 whole welsh onion (Japanese bunching onion)
7 green olives
1 tomato
5 or 6 White mushrooms (as in http://goo.gl/YO2i6b )
Sauce:
2 cloves of garlic
oregano
salt
4 lemons
1/4 Ají amarillo (yellow ají or yellow chilli pepper as in http://goo.gl/MOKlRE )
olive oil
How to prepare this recipeEstimated time: 10 minutes
1. Start with the sauce. Squeeze the 4 lemons and put the juice in a sauce bowl.
2. Crush the 2 cloves of garlic and then mince it a little. You'll want it crushed so its juice comes out and mixes with the sauce, but also minced so it gets well distributed in the whole salad. Add it to the sauce bowl and mix. Let it rest while you proceed with the rest of the salad
3. Chop the onion, mushroom, and tomato in small pieces. Some horizontal and vertical cuts for the last two should work. Put it all in the salad bowl with the olives and mix
4. Chop the ají amarillo in pieces the size of half your nail. Remember to take out the seeds and most of what's white in the interior of it, cause that's too spicy to eat. Put it in the sauce bowl and mix. Let it rest 2 minutes.
5. Add a weaning spoon or some more of salt and some oregano to the sauce.
6. Add olive oil to the sauce. It should not be less than half the lemon juice, nor more that it. The amount varies from one's taste and there is a version of this salad without any olive oil at all. If you do use the olive oil, mix the sauce until you can barely notice any distinction between the lemon and the oil.
Done. Serve the salad with the sauce and mix them.
The story behind this recipeDuring a family trip to Iquitos, a city in the Peruvian Amazonian jungle, I had a fairly interesting conversation with an uncle who have been living in the US for quite a long time. He explained me about called raw food that consisted in your typical vegan meals, but without anything boiled, fried, cooked, or similar. He had learnt it from some friends met at a church and tried it for 7 days. At the time of the trip, he had just left a month long raw food diet in order to eat freely his so missed Peruvian food.
After the trip, I tried the diet by mixing the kind of sauce that you use for ceviche, but with mushrooms -as it is a variant of the dish. As I have always enjoyed mixing traditional dishes or standard dishes with whatever I find in the kitchen, I proceed to switch the usual onion for the Japanese one and add some tomato. The result was quite good.
Through the following 6 days, I would add some ingredients such as avocado, green olive, broccoli, and many more. The only one which I did not enjoy so much was the broccoli version. After finished the diet, I would add tuna to the dish with great results. The avocado one did suit the salad maybe as the best option, but I wanted to keep it simple for the introduction of La excelencia to the world.
