allthingseurope: Eelde, Netherlands (by frata60)
allthingseurope: Crete, Greece (by Louise Nordh)
91935
4
“Earth without ‘art’ is just ‘eh’.”
roadsandkingdoms: Dish #5 of 11 from the Year in Food Causa Limeña Canta Ranita, Lima, Peru We’ve been known to occasionally indulge in foodporn on these pages, giving centerfold coverage to dishes otherwise disconnected from social, historical, or cultural contexts that might give them a loftier sense of being in the edible universe. The most brazen smut peddling we did all year came from a tiny restaurant stall in the El Capullo Market in Lima, where a young cook constructs this monolithic masterpiece. The gorgeous heap before you is called causa, or sometimes causa limeña, in a nod to the dish’s popularity in the Peruvian capital. Unlike Peru’s most famous dish, ceviche, there is nothing vaguely light or refreshing about this tower of power. Causa comes in an impressive number of iterations served up at a vast ecosystem of high-end restaurants, market stalls, and surf shacks, but the thread that holds them all together is three-fold: mashed potatoes, avocado, and mayonnaise—a triple-cream explosion of monotextural extremity. Within those generous parameters, of course, there is plenty of room for personalization. Peruvian cooks treat causas the same way short-order cooks at Waffle House treat hash browns: scattered (with herbs, onions, chilies), smothered (in salsa de ají, key lime juice, mountain cheese), covered (in octopus tentacles, baby shrimp, shredded duck), and topped (with olives, hard-boiled eggs, raw peppers). We were shooting video when this tower came together. As Vicente Furgiuele, the fast-talking Peruvian-Argentine owner and cook at Canta Ranita in El Capullo market in Barranco, went about forming those yellow-fleshed potatoes into hockey pucks, spiking the mayo with lime juice, layering the snapper nuggets (coated in oyster sauce before frying—a nod to the deep Asian influence on Lima’s cuisine), building that causa ever higher, Nathan and I had to cover our mouths to stifle the tide of laughter evoked by this incredible display of excess. Of course, when beers were poured and forks placed before us, the plate was scraped to within an inch of its life. Moral or not, Roads & Kingdoms is down for the causa.
24
Good-bye, 2012… Hopefully 2013 will be a year of more #travel
allthingseurope: Vetto, Italy (by p.spaggiari)
allthingseurope: Chapelle de la Sorbonne, Paris (by miltonmic)
allthingseurope: Beachy Head, England (by sven483)
allthingseurope: České Švýcarsko National Park, Czech Republic (by filip.molcan)
allthingseurope: Balea Lake, Romania (by shaseoru)
allthingseurope: Moncontour, France (by peeverd)