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09/22/2008
Day 15 – Monday, September 22, 2008. Another frog project with Peruvian frogs and Puerto Rican meal with Peruvian ingredients
Today I talked with Alejandro Sánchez Tavanov, from the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia. He is a physiological mycologist by training, meaning he is used to extracting chemicals from all sorts of mushrooms and fungi. There are more than an estimated 1.5 million species of fungi in Perú alone, a number that truly makes the ~450 species of Peruvian amphibians look like nothing.
Alejandro also works for a local NGO, Inkaterra. This group is well established in Machu Pichu, Cuzco Amazónico and the Amazon lowlands. Inkaterra wants to build a tourist-oriented frog breeding program with educational documents, exhibits, free ranging frogs in a walk-through frog breeding greenhouse and a behind-the-scenes operations where guests can peek inside biosecure frog breeding facilities. This presents an excellent opportunity for us at the Philadelphia Zoo to help them not only in the species selection process, but also in field research and in the creation of a book about the common frogs of Cuzco and the Peruvian Amazon and the plight of anurans worldwide.
I felt a little homesick today, so I decided to try my best at cooking Puerto Rican food with a completely different set of ingredients. It is harder to find the right cooking elements here than it is in Philly! I wanted to make arroz con habichuelas, gandules guisados, churrasco, mofongo and guineitos fritos (translation: rice and beans, pigeon pea stew, churrasco steak, fried green plantain balls and fried ripe baby bananas). I took over the kitchen at Mabe’s house and went to the supermarket. Not to my surprise, I could find only half of the ingredients. I had a lengthy discussion with the guy at the meat counter about the right cut for the Puerto Rican churrasco steak, not the Peruvian one. I had to use lentils instead of pigeon peas, white beans instead of red beans, the green plantains were too ripe and the baby bananas were too green...
At the end, since no one at Mabe’s house had tried food from Puerto Rico, it didn’t matter much if I deviated a little bit from my mom’s recipes, as long as she doesn’t find out of course. So I did my best, the food was good and everyone, including me, enjoyed a good ‘Puerto Rican’ meal.
Disclaimer: To all and any Peruvian friend that might read my frog blog, I hereby state and recognize that Perú has an excellent food heritage; one of the best from the South American continent if not the best. However, I do miss my arroz con gandules!
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