Peruvian food and I have an interesting relationship. On the one hand, I really like a lot of it. My favorite food happens to be a Peruvian dish (ceviche), and there is a certain sense of nostalgia whenever I eat certain dishes. However, I don't really eat it all that often, and it occasionally leads to laughter at my expense.
There are reasons for this, of course. First of all, cooking Peruvian food usually requires quite a bit of prep work, so my parents got to the point where they'd cook other type of food more often. It's a simple matter of time; when you have to cook dinner every night, you naturally start to gravitate to dishes that won't take up most of the night. In fact, my mom got so much practice with cooking other types of food, that she can make a mean Chinese dinner. I also don't cook Peruvian food all that much (again, lots of prep), so it's more of a delicacy for me than anything else.
Secondly, and more importantly, I grew up with some of that food. I have a memory of how it tasted, and there's emotion tied to those smells and flavors. In short, I have an opinion on how the food is supposed to taste. Sure, I get that every chef is different and that there are slight variations on certain dishes. But that's just it: I can live with slight variations, but I don't really want drastic changes. In my mind, ceviche is supposed to be spicy. My dad, who doesn't really like spicy food, once proclaimed, "if it's not spicy, it's not ceviche" (and I nodded along). It doesn't taste right any more if you change it up that dramatically, you know?
Ultimately, this is what leads to the interesting relationship with Peruvian restaurants. I like going there for the food, but sometimes I end up thinking that it's some other animal entirely. I don't really recognize it as Peruvian food. It's a close substitute, but it doesn't taste like mom's cooking.
Funnily enough, the Mild Girlfriend has the same outlook towards Filipino food. She tends to think that a lot of the restaurants add too much seasoning to their food, so that it doesn't really taste like home cooking any more. In fact, the first time I had something at one of their family gatherings, I remarked that it wasn't like the stuff I'd had when going out before. That was a good thing.
Even more interestingly, we had dinner with a couple of other folks the other night. One of them was Indian, and the other was Taiwanese. Somehow we got to talking about ethnic food, and this "doesn't quite taste like home cooking" stance came out. The other two folks were in complete agreement, and one of them even recommended Indian food based on that stance. In fact, someone joked how the kitchen was possibly the best restaurant available. Heck, the thinking was that we'd invite ourselves over to someone's house whenever we knew home cooking was available.
That's when genius struck. If the kitchen is the best restaurant available and we all liked mom's cooking, why not intentionally try to make a day of mom's cooking? Why did we have to stop with one mom's cooking? Why not stop off at several houses? Thus, the idea was born: the mom's cooking tour. One of these days, the joke went, we'd go from house to house to sample all of the home cooking we could muster in a single day. It mattered not that the moms in question all lived something like 200 miles from each other. We were troopers, and this was a worthy cause.
So if you ever hear me say I did a lot of driving one weekend, just know that it may have been part of a mom tour.
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