Make your cake and eat it too.

Last night I held my first ever dinner party in La Paz…and also had my first experience using my kitchen for anything more than making hot water or toasting bread. Initially I had a really hard time figuring out what to cook, because not only am I unfamiliar with the common ingredients around here, but also my apartment here, in comparison to the one in Chicago, has only the bare bones of cookware. While I have everything I could possible want and need in Chicago (garlic press, food processor, lasagna trays), this place has a baking tray, a frying pan, a big soup pot, a smaller pot…and that’s about it. Even after I had finished cooking, I realized that I only had enough forks and plates for about 4 people, not to mention that we didn’t have enough cups, so I had to ask my friend Karim to bring over extra place settings…sigh.

Anyway, after perusing the commercial supermarket (called Hipermaxi, which caries a lot more foreign goods compared to the little stalls where most people buy their food), I decided that I would make carrot-ginger soup, polenta pie (with queso fresco and parmesan instead of mozarrella), and brownies. The adventure began when I realized that the supermarkets around here don’t sell measuring cups…so for all of the ingredients which required some sort of measurements, I was going to have to eyeball things. Luckily the proportions for the soup and the polenta aren’t so critical, but for baking, especially at high altitude, it’s kind of essential to get the right proportions. I ended up modifying the instructions which came on the back of the semi-sweet chocolate I bought, which had all of the measurements in grams: I threw in a bit more chocolate and butter than the recipe called for, an extra egg, roughly a mug-full of what I thought was flour (it was sitting in my pantry, and while it looked like flour, the end result was a lot chewier than I expected), some sugar, a large spoonful of vanilla, a couple pinchfulls of salt, and (this is the part that killed me) a small spoonful of baking powder. I was hoping that the extra egg and baking powder would compensate for the difference in altitude, but the end result was poofy and didn’t taste very much like chocolate.

I suppose that the lack of measuring cups was complicated by the fact that the oven actually had no indication of temperature. Lighting the stove or the oven here is actually quite an ordeal for me – I hate fire, and there is not pilot light, so in order to get it going you have to take a match or a lighter, turn on the gas, and hope that you don’t burn yourself. When I first got here I was incapable of using a lighter, so I immediately went out and bought one of the long gas-grill lighters that let’s you be a comfortable 9 inches away from the flame. When I was baking the polenta and the brownies, I had to reach inside the oven to light it, and then I had to keep an eye on the food every 5 minutes to make sure it was cooking at more or less the right temperature. When I was almost don’t cooking, actually, my long lighter crapped out on me, so in order to get the burnings going I had to resort to lighting a long piece of paper on fire from the flame already going at the bottom of the oven – fun for someone who hates fire.

All and all, I would give the food a 5/10 and the experience a 10/10. The soup was excellent, the bread I bought to go with it not so much, the polenta was good but needed more cheese, and the brownies, while everyone really seemed to like them, were pretty tasteless and weird. Compounded by altitude, measuring, and ingredients, it’s also hard to keep food here warm because there is not heating in the houses, so that certainly doesn’t help when you’re serving soup or something that is supposed to have melted cheese. While it stressed me out to cook (I made a point to make it different from the local cuisine) and have people over an apartment that is so much more bare and unattractive than my usually living space, it felt good to have a bunch of local Bolivia people hanging out in my living room, drinking soft drinks and wine, and eating my rather mediocre food.

Perhaps to highlight the strangeness of the night for me, there was a thunderstorm at about 10:30 at night, complete with lightening, pounding rain, and hail. While it rains a lot in the summer in Bolivia, in the winter (now) it’s very rare to have such a storm. It was short – it only lasted 30 minutes - but as I heard the hail pounding on the tin roof, instead of being all alone there were actually people sitting and laughing in my living room, and that made all the difference.