Dinner from Peru (sort of...)

What's for dinner???


WELL...last night we tried something different! We asked Sandra and Coco for an AUTHENTIC Peruvian dish that we could make since we know very little about Peruvian cooking (other than what Anthony Bourdain showed us and we weren't too jazzed about eating pihrana!)

Sandra shared one of her favorites with us! Here is the picture of what it looked like last night and then her recipe is at the end of this post...


I even found a recipe online for "Piadina" (a grilled Peruvian flatbread) so I made that to go with the chicken dish!


"MMMMMM!!!! Can we have some???"


THANK YOU SANDRA!!!! Dinner was YUMMY and we have a TON of leftovers!!!!



PERUVIAN CHICKEN WITH RICE

Ingredients :
8 pieces of chicken
½ cup oil
1 medium size onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves minced
½ cup ají amarillo fresco / fresh yellow peruvian chili pepper, blended
1 cup cilantro, blended
2 red peppers, (1 chopped and the other in strips to decorate)
3 cups rice
1 cup peas
½ corn kernels
2 ½ cup boiling water
½ cup beer
Salt
Pepper



Preparation:

Season chicken pieces with salt and pepper and sauté in oil until golden. Remove chicken.
In the same pan, sauté garlic, onion, ají and cilantro.
Return chicken pieces to pan, add beer and continue cooking until chicken is tender. Remove pieces, keep them warm.
Add rice, peas, corn and peppers.
Pour water and cook at medium heat for 20 minutes more or until rice is done.
Serve rice with chicken pieces and garnish with pepper strips.

8 servings

*****
When you saute the chicken it doesnt need to be throughly cooked, it will cook later with the beer (less fat!)
Also, if you dont find the peruvian chili pepper, dont worry. It just wont be spicy. If you still want to look for it, I posted a recipe on my blog a while ago and it had the pic of the chili in there
http://pugnetwork.blogspot.com/2008/10/chili-cook-off.html

they sell them in ethnic stores, sometimes already prepared as a paste.


(Laura's notes......we could NOT find the aji amarillo pepper in ANY of the 3 ethnic grocery stores we tried. I subbed a small amount of chipotles in adobo sauce which gave everything a nice smokey flavor but probably completely changed the ethnicity of the dish!....I also used the ENTIRE beer (minus 3 big swigs) in place of some of the water and just personal habit/preference...we cut waaay back on the oil and just used a small drizzle of olive oil to get it all started)