Cuy

Last night we had a dinner party with Esperanza and her family, since I am leaving this Sunday to go to the Ecuadorian jungle to volunteer for a couple of weeks. Life in Cuenca is obviously too comfortable for me... Gregory is staying and continuing with Spanish classes, he's already at the preterite tense!! We will meet up in Baños, 8 hours north of here, practically mid-way between where i am going and where Cuenca is. I'm going to this place:
www.amazanga.org

So we organised a farewell dinner with Esperanza. She bought a live chicken at the market and made a chicken soup. I never went to see the live chicken or the killing, what I got to see was a unusual chicken for my standards, a chicken full of growing eggs in the belly like I used to see when I was about 5 yrs old. I have never seen eggs in chickens again until yesterday. It makes you wonder about the chickens we eat in Europe, all perfectly clean and disinfected, like the rest of the food. Here you go to the market and they sell EVERY single part of the animals, and they are not all the same either, they are actually real animals with all their different bits and pieces, feathers, insides, teeth, hairy legs...in fact you do not feel like eating the animals at all!!!

Anyways. The chicken soup was nice. The meat was actually a lot harder than we expected, maybe it was an old hen?? Or maybe real roaming chickens are as hard as rocks because they actually have muscles in their bodies? I had the leg and it was dark meat and bloody hard.

We offered to buy the second dish from a restaurant, the Ecuadorian delicacy par excellence: cuy, that is, Guinea pig. City Ecuadorians do not cook this animals themselves, because the preparation is somewhat lengthy and also the guinea pigs must be killed in a very specific way. They should not be scared before death or adrenaline will go everywhere and then they taste bad - well, not that they taste good in the first place... So they need to be killed quickly and then one eye is taken out so that they bleed from it... yaKKKK! Then of course you need to remove the fur, and only then you can roast them. So we went for ready cuy and took it home. Well, it was pretty disgusting, Gregory had some but I just could not touch it. It smellt and tasted of the same: a wild, musty acred taste of wild something between a very wild rabbit and a pig. The worst was when Esperanza took the head and stripped it completely clean!!!! I wanted to vomit!! I was so disgusted that I could not even eat the potatatos it came with. Well, I guess it all comes down to habit, the kids loved it too and were eating it like you eat chicken. And I saw Wilson grabbing the head at one point, but then he put it down, maybe he wanted to leave the best bit for Esperanza?? Gregory had the cheek to say to me that I am just the same with prawns, I too like to strip the head and I say it is the best part... Like tiger prawns and cuys are the same thing!

So here are some pics for everybody's enjoyment:

The real chicken with its eggs

Chopped up cuy in sight

Roasted cuy looking at you

YAKK!