Country 21 - Bolivia

Bolivia is in central South America. It is bordered by Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile and Peru and one third of the country is in the Andes mountain range. It is a landlocked country.
Before it was colonised by the Spanish it was part of the Inca Empire and it now has a multi-ethnic population although there is a lot of segregation among the different cultures.
In the last 50 years the population had tripled with 60% of the people being under 25. Over half of the people originate from Indigenous tribes but there are also Africans, Japanese and Lebanese, people from other South American countries and Europeans from Germany, France, Italy and Portugal.
The country recognises 36 different languages although Spanish is the official language.
The food of Bolivia is influenced by Spanish cuisine as well as that from Germany, Italy, Basque, Russia and Poland.

It seems to have been ages since we visited a country. Sometimes the food and recipes we explore just don't inspire us to cook them! That is why we kept putting off Bolivian night! We spent ages looking at various recipes but nothing really made us want to cook it! In the end we returned to the Global Table Adventure website (our initial inspiration for this journey) and decided to use a couple of the recipes she made.

We made La Sopa de Mani (Bolivian Peanut Soup) and Llajua (Bolivian Hot Sauce).

Gary did the cooking while I lolled around ready my book and wondering if Dry January was such a good idea after all?!!!!! 😁  

The first thing to make was the hot sauce. It's meant to be the Bolivian version of ketchup - just a bit spicier! They eat it with everything. It's just tomatoes, chillies, basil, cilantro (coriander), salt and olive oil. 

It's meant to be a bit more liquid than this I think but this is how ours turned out and it smelt delicious! (I love the smell of coriander leaves!) 

The soup or stew contains, garlic, onion, oregano, cumin, beef, beef broth, potatoes, peanuts, rice, milk and green peas. Yummy! 

Grinding up some peanuts. Considering 'peanut' is in the name of the soup there weren't that many in it!

Nearly ready! The recipe said it should be stewed for one and a half hours - we figured the potatoes would have disappeared into the broth if cooked for this long so we didn't add them until a bit later. We also added a bit of stock cube as it tasted pretty bland.

The finished meal - the soup with a large blob of hot sauce on the side. I mixed the hot sauce into the soup to add flavour.

Verdict?  Well it was ok. We ate it but it won't be on our list to cook again. It was as bland as we expected it to be - it needed the hot sauce! Even though we added the potatoes and peanuts later than the recipe said they had both gone mushy which meant there wasn't much texture to the dish. We did manage to have two servings each and I think Gary quite enjoyed it but it really did nothing for me! 

The next country is Bosnia and Herzegovina - now I wonder what they eat!