12 Plates

¡Estoy llena! ("I am full!")
This morning as I walked to the kitchen to make breakfast, our landlady invited Matthew and me to lunch at her house to celebrate Semana Santa (Holy Week). I graciously accepted, as it´s nice to be included in things here and I wasn´t exactly looking forward to going back to the restaurant that served tongue Wednesday.

After accepting the invitation, I bought Quaker (pronounced  "quacker" here) from her to attempt to master what so many other women here can make into a delicious brakfast. Yesterday was a bust, resulting in whitish water with floating cinnamon flakes. Not my best work, but today´s attempt resulted in nearly 4 cups of deliciousness to accompany the famous Oropesa bread and tea. I filled up on breakfast, took an icy shower, and tried to become presentable for whatever this lunch involved...I could hear lots of people downstairs and, as usual, didn´t know what we were getting into.

We arrived and started talking (or trying to speak in Spanish...) about the Holy Week traditions here and differences in the celebrations in Peru and the U.S. I told about missing the Temblores procession in Oropesa because we went to the one in Cusco, and also said I had never heard about the 12 Plate meal, in honor of the 12 apostles. I thought we had missed it last night while we were in Cusco, but little did I know that was what we were celebrating at lunch! How exciting!

Originally, I thought that a 12 plate meal meant a buffett-style dinner, with 12 different dishes. I knew about half were sweets/desserts, and the rest were salads, rice, and the like. I was horribly, horribly wrong. We were about to be served a 12-COURSE meal! I felt pretty good through the first five, but after dish number six, I was feeling nervous. Luckily, we didn´t go on and just left it at a six-course meal with the seventh (a cookie) to go.

Here´s the menu:
1. Cream of Corn Soup
2. Potato (?) Soup
3. Some sort of seafood soup, including crunchy fish eggs
4. Fried trout, salad, potato
5. Peaches in juice
6. Arroz con leche (sweet rice made with milk and cinnamon)
7. Empanada (cookie pictured above)

We washed everything down with Inka Kola. Apparently there was another "segundo" ("main dish" like number 4) planned, but everyone basically gave up. I went back upstairs and took a two hour nap to recover. Like Thanksgiving, but not really at all.

Photo added April 3