Any given Friday night in Durham you’ll find my family sitting in a booth at Elmo’s Diner. It’s been our most frequented eatery since high school. The manager and the better half of the staff know us by faces and order: Dad gets his Mexican omelet, grits and biscuit without butter or a cheeseburger without mayo, Mom gets her blueberry pancakes or an omelet with sausage and cheese, grits, and a biscuit (this time with butter), Mike gets his cheeseburger and fries, and me, well I get chicken and dumplings with skin-on mashed potatoes, a fruit cup, and a biscuit. I’ll admit, occasionally I’ll go for the cheeseburger or the blueberry pancakes, but nine times out of ten, it’s the chicken and dumplings.
Today my host mom went to Chiclayo with my host brother and left me in charge of cooking breakfast and lunch for my host dad, my other host brother, the teacher, the guy who helps around the house, and the guy who helps my host dad with the farm. I woke up at 6 and started peeling potatoes, a skill that I’ve got down pat after 2 years spent in the potato capital of the world; so much so that I can probably peel a potato blindfolded. It’s the darn yucca that I have problems with. It has this papery skin that you have to cut/lift off the tuber and then once free of paper you have to slice this hard as a rock thing in half. Well seeing as I was still half asleep, today I nearly sliced my finger in half. After a faint-y feeling (I saw a lot of blood) I decided to yell up the road to the host family that breakfast would be late…I needed to go to the health post and possibly get some stitches.
Of course, the doctor was not there, nor was my socio, the nurse, and the only person who was working had no clue how deep was too deep of a cut and needed stitches. So we cleaned it up, put gauze on it with some tape and I went back to the house to peel more yucca, this time I managed not to add any blood to the breakfast.
So after an interesting breakfast, and with a throbbing finger, I decided to take a break and clean my room. While folding my clothes I noticed that there was blood on my shirt from the finger-slicing incident and decided to change into my Elmo’s Diner shirt. It got me thinking about chicken and dumplings so I decided to take a look in the fridge to figure out my game plan for lunch. There was some celery, carrots, tomatoes, milk, half a cantaloupe, and spicy peppers. Celery, carrots, and milk! I was half way to chicken and dumplings. I went to the store and bought a kilo of chicken, a quarter kilo of flour and some baking powder and got to work.
I had everything for the chicken and dumplings but now I needed the skin-on mashed potatoes. Skin-on, now that would never fly in a Peruvian house—the skin, after all, would stick to the side of your intestine and KILL you of course! So I peel some more potatoes (yeah I eat a lot of potatoes) and got to making milk-less mashed potatoes (my host dad doesn’t like milk).
Chicken and Dumplings: Check
Skin-Off Mashed Potatoes: Check
I was missing the fruit cup and a biscuit. The biscuit was just not going to happen; I only make break with my neighbors in the night, but a fruit cup, that I could pull together. I sliced up the cantaloupe and threw in some apple. So my Elmo’s Diner lunch was almost complete. Well for me it was complete, but I had to bring it up to Peruvian standards: lunch isn’t a lunch if there isn’t rice. So I made Peruvian rice (aka with oil and garlic mixed in…eww) and waited on everyone to get back from the farm so we could eat.
My host dad walked in the door, washed his hands and face and did his usual inspection of the pots to see what is for lunch. This is a daily occurrence, not just when I cook. He lifted the lid on the soup and said “Jenny, you forgot to mix the semola with cold water before you added it to the soup, that’s why it’s all clumpy.” I then remembered that a dumpling is something that most Peruvians had probably never seen or heard of. I explained that it was a gringa soup and that it’s like a boiled bread in chicken soup. Don Jose stared at me for a good 30 seconds and repeated what I had said, but in the form of a question (“¿sopa gringita con panes?”). I nodded and told him he’d like it if he’d try it. He then proceeded to move on to the pot of mashed potatoes, me gave me a grave look and asked if there was milk in them. I assured him there was not, that I used chicken broth to make it thinner, I was given the “okay if you say so” nod as he looked in the rice. He grabbed a pinch and tasted it, and was pleased to find that I made it with oil and garlic, he’d have at least one thing that he was used too to eat today.
I served the plates and watched as the whole gang inspected their plates, pushing the dumplings around in their bowls of soup, starring up at the others to see who is going to be the brave one and try it first. My host brother mustered up the courage to take the first bite, paused to think a second, then said “hey, this is good,” and the rest of the table began to eat.
It may have been a Thursday afternoon, but that’s close enough to a Friday evening for Chicken and Dumplings, Skin-off mashed potatoes, and a fruit cup for me.
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