This weekend, Josh and I traveled to the market with our Spanish teacher, Lucero, and purchased all of the ingredients needed to prepare plato paceño, the regional dish of La Paz.
At first, Josh and I were both a little overwhelmed when we tried plato paceño for the first time. There was so much food on our plates! Where would we put the lima bean casings? Were we supposed to eat each of the ingredients separately? How would we cut the meat? And the corn? But as we dived in, we quickly realized that the best way to eat plato paceño is by hand, not by fork and knife. By using your hands, you avoid pushing the ingredients off of the plate. Plus, this makes it easy to spoon a little bit of the llajua (Bolivian hot sauce) straight onto each bite. This is extremely helpful, since most of the ingredients taste a bit dry on their own. Once we got the hang of eating this way, we started to have a lot of fun eating our plato paceño!
The first step in preparing plato paceño is to wash the potatoes. Each plate being served requires two potatoes. Leaving the skin on, the potatoes are then placed into a pot of boiling water with a pinch of salt. The potatoes are boiled until they are fork-tender, for approximately 20-25 minutes.
Secondly, each plate will need a handful of lima beans, left inside of their casings, and one ear of corn. Wash the lima beans, and peel off the corn husks.
