Culinary Adventures

We are back from our first official field visit, which was very successful. I will post more about that later. For now, I wanted to catch you up on the interesting (and sometimes unexpected) culinary adventures I have gone on in the past week.
Adventure number 1: goat ear. It is very common for most restaurants to have set lunches. You come in, ask for the set lunch and typically get a big bowl of soup, a glass of horchata (a local specialty tea similar to hibiscus), and then a plate with rice, plantains, beans, and a type of meat. Some of the restaurants offer a choice or meats, while others only have one. I have eaten the fried trout, beef, and pork, so I thought that I would be adventurous and go for the goat. The piece of meat was not very big, and it was only after I could see the cartilage that I realized that I had in fact eaten goat ear meat. It tasted like most other red meats!  For dinner, I was looking for some soup to try and get over a cold I have been fighting. I ended up with chicken feet soup. This too tasted like chicken soup- the only difference is that you have to suck the little bit of meat off of the feet, you cannot really bite it off. Lunch the next day was another adventure- this time I got to experience pig skin. The taste was fine, but the texture was about all that I could handle (imagine eating raw bacon)- but I mixed it up with all of my rice and it went down just fine. While in Oña, taking a break from our research we grabbed lunch at a small two table restaurant. The soup this time had not only chicken feet, but chicken gizzard, and chicken throat. Both Veroníca and Rossana (our research partners) laughed when I called it chicken feet soup! While doing an interview with a cuy (guinea pig) farmer, I could not help but look at all of the chickens running about around my feet and hope that the ones I had just eaten were well cleaned! Cuy of course was the next item on my lunch menu. They too taste like any other red meat, but if you are really hungry be sure to order more than 1/4 of a cuy because they really do not have much meat! Today, Jaz and I went out to lunch with two professors from the University of Idaho that are flying out tomorrow. None of us are exactly positive as to what we were served, I am the only one that finished it, and am most certain that it was tripe!
We have been eating about a new fruit a day. I cannot remember the names of all of them, but will admit that some of them have some very interesting flavor. Still one more meal left in the day...the adventure continues!