Papas a La Huancaina

To address the concerns out there that there's too many games, and not enough food to eat while you're playing, I have the solution! I'm back with another recipe my dad shared with our family growing up: Potatoes Huancayo-Style, or Papas a la Huancaina.

The heart of the recipe is the Huancaina sauce, a spicy-cheesy sauce enhanced with aji amarillo, a hot yellow pepper native to Peru. It's challenging to find whole, fresh peppers in the States, so my dad buys aji paste in a jar from a specialty store back in my hometown in upstate NY. Less graceful than the real thing, but it gets the job done!

I haven't seen them around the Bronx, but my guess is that specialty stores in Jackson Heights (there's a large South American population there) might have them! My dad told me you could replace the aji amarillo with another spicy pepper like serrano or jalapeno, but you should also add yellow bell pepper so it still looks yellow when it comes out.

Remember though: If you're not using aji amarillo, it's not really Papas a La Huancaina!!

Huancaina sauce is great because you can add it to lots of things, not just potatoes. My dad makes a similar recipe and adds shredded chicken to make it a meal on its own. And pretty much any thing that calls for (or just sounds good with) a cheese sauce will go great with the Huancaina sauce.

In this recipe, I'll be making it the traditional Peruvian way with boiled potatoes and hard-boiled eggs. This is a great side-dish, and you could even eat it as a quick lunch/snack.

You need a couple of ingredients to get started, and other than the pepper, they're all relatively easy to find.

• 1 cup of a cheese that will be easy to blend. The traditional recipe calls for queso blanco/fresco, but my dad likes the flavor of feta cheese better. You can probably experiment with other cheeses as well and decide what you like best.
• Potatoes - find the most flavorful potato you can find. I'm using Idaho, and I've heard good things about Yukon Gold. How many you get depends on how many you're feeding, obviously. They should be peeled and eyed.
  
• Aji Amarillo - assuming you don't have the whole peppers, 2-3 tablespoons of the paste will be enough.
  
• Eggs - you'll be hard-boiling these with the potatoes. As many as you need for the people you'll be feeding, a sliced egg will be enough for one serving
  
• Evaporated Milk (1 cup) - you can find this milk in cans in the baking section. It's really good for sauces (a hint, it's a key ingredient in Dulce de Leche!)
• Vegetable Oil (1/4 cup) - it calls for this type of oil, but you can probably use other oils just fine.
• Saltine Crackers - these will be used to thicken the sauce, my dad says this is a necessity!!
• Salt and Pepper to taste

Once you've acquired all these ingredients, it's just as easy as throwing them in a blender! Remember, you should be boiling the potatoes and eggs while doing this so they're ready to eat once you've made the sauce.



Start with the cheese, then add the yellow pepper and evaporated milk and start blending (puree). You'll need to break up the cheese to facilitate blending!

As you're blending, take off the cover and slowly add crackers and oil. I used about 7 crackers and a 1/4 cup of oil, but you can play around with the quantities. At this point you can test the sauce for thickness. It should be thick enough that it holds together, but it should still fall off the spoon. If it's dripping like water, add more crackers. If it's really thick, add more milk or water. It's really a matter of taste, and speaking of taste - feel free to add salt and pepper as well.

The traditional recipe also calls for olives for garnish, but I HATE olives, so we'll refrain for today. If you used the amount of ingredients of my recipe, you should have plenty of sauce when you're done. (You can refrigerate the sauce for later)

Cut your potatoes into slices, add sliced hard-boiled eggs on top, then spoon a generous amount of sauce on top. I'm going to add some parsley flakes and pepper on top for garnish.



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OBSERVATIONS

1) It's spicy!! I used 3 tablespoons of the aji amarillo, and I think next time I might use only two. I should note that aji grants an interesting spiciness: it's more smoky than hot. It tastes like it fizzles in your mouth a bit, but it's not an overwhelming heat - just enough to remind you're eating kick-ass Peruvian food! You should definitely have at least 1-2 tablespoons of pepper, or else you're just eating cheese! Save the cheese for the nachos.

2) Boiling potatoes and eggs at same time: I loosely used this video to guide me through the recipe, but next time I think I'll cook the eggs and potatoes separately, since they boil differently. You can boil the eggs and refrigerate them until they're ready to be eaten, and that's what I'll do next time. Anyone with more experience in boiling have any tips for me?

3) Thicker sauce = better sauce: Be generous with the saltine crackers! I think it would be very hard to make the sauce too thick, and even if you did, it's easy enough to add more milk/water. A thick sauce will stick to the potatoes and eggs - exactly what you want!

Let me know what you think, does this look like something you might want to try? Leave some comments for me, because the Pampered Boardgamer has been rather lonely as of late. Till next time!

Cavemen no play Angry Birds, Cavemen make birdies angry!!

I'm back from spring break! Today I feel like transporting you to ancient times where business meetings took place in huts, people chopped their own firewood, and people made babies - LOTS of babies! Welcome to the Stone Age!


Stone Age is a 1.5-2 hour board game for 2-4 players. Players control their own Stone Age tribe, who collect resources and food while building their civilization. The person who can construct the best buildings and develop the most glorious civilization will win!


Here's how the each player board looks. Everyone starts the game with 5 workers and 12 food. There are also slots for buildings and tools, and information about the civilization cards. Every round you'll be sending off your workers to different places to collect resources and build your civilization. At the end of each turn, you'll have to feed each of your cavemen 1 food. If you don't have enough food, you lose 10 points, so be careful!

All the action is on the main game board you see above. Here you can send your workers to work the fields, collect resources, develop civilization, and construct buildings.

Players have three different options at the board's center. The first is putting one worker on the fields, which grants players 1 food production per turn. Normally you'll have to hunt to gain more food to keep your cavemen McHappy, but if you have lots of food production (it goes up to 10), you might not even have to worry about hunting anymore!

You can also put a worker on the tool hut, allowing you to gain a tool which you can use to augment a dice roll by the number listed on the tool. This can really help out when you roll poorly, or make good dice rolls even better! You can have up to three tools, and each tool can be improved up to a value of 4.

Finally, you can make more workers by sending two of your workers to the "Love Shack". You must use two workers to produce one extra worker. If you're not sure why you need two workers to make a baby, Marvin Gaye described it perfectly in this song. An extra worker can help you do more things during your turn, but also needs to be fed an extra food.


There are five different resources (food/wood/bricks/stones/gold) all represented by easy-to-identify tokens. Players will roll a number of dice equal to the workers they sent off. There are a limited number of spots available for each resource (with the exception of the hunting grounds, where an unlimited number of workers can hunt for food). For example, the forests only have 7 spots, and if they're all full, a player will have to choose something else. Going from wood-brick-stone-gold, resources become harder to acquire.



Each worker sent to the forest counts as one die, so in this example I would roll 4 dice. Let's say I rolled a total 15. Wood has a value of 3, so I would divide 15 by 3 and come out with 5 wood. In this case, I would take 5 wood tokens and add them to my board.


Gold, on the other hand, has a value of six. So if I put four workers on gold and rolled a 15, I would divide 15 by 6, rounding down. In that case, I would receive only two gold.

But what's the point of all these resources? They're all used to construct buildings which are a primary (but not the only) source of points in the game.

Just like the resources, each building has a spot where a worker can be placed. Each building has a unique cost in resources, and you can only add the building to your player board if you pay the exact resource cost.

The first building on the right tells you that it costs 1 wood and 2 stones, and will give you 13 points. Some buildings (such as the second) have special costs. The second building says you can pay using any of the four resources (food is never used to build), but you must use two and only two different resources. The point value depends on the value of the resources you use. For example, if I used 2 wood and 2 stones, I would add up their value (3 +3 +5 +5) and get 16 points. I could also use 2 bricks and 2 gold, which would get me 20 points instead (4 +4 + 6 + 6).

The game ends when any one of the building tile stacks are depleted.

Another option for the workers lies in the civilization cards: an alternate way of getting points at the end of the game, and a source of food, resources and other goodies.


Each civilization card has its own slot for a worker, and depending on the card's position, each can cost 1-4 of any combination of resources. The top symbol on the card tells you a bonus that you immediately get upon buying the card, while the bottom symbol mentions a bonus that players get at the end of the game.

For example, the first card on the left costs a combination of 4 resources. A player buying the card will immediately get 3 points, and it also has a culture symbol on the bottom. Describing it is a little challenging, but all you need to know is that the more unique culture symbols you have, the more points they're worth at the end of the game.

The game also ends if there are no more civilization cards left in the deck.

At the end of the game, players count up points from their buildings and civilization cards. Extra resources are also worth a point. The player with the most wins!

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THOUGHTS

Style/Theme: In my opinion, this is one of the most beautiful games in my collection. The game will catch your friends' eyes, and the resource tokens are fun to hold and collect. The leather dice cup is also a nice touch (however, it's a bit stinky out of the box). The Stone Age theme is well implemented, and several people in my game group make it better by declaring their moves in "caveman speak"

Ease of Learning/Play: Distributing workers and rolling for resources is pretty straight-forward. A source of confusion may come from the symbols, and most players undervalue the civilization cards the first time they play. That being said, once players figure everything out, they'll be rolling dice and collecting buildings like a pro.

Some Luck: Like most dice games, unlucky rolls can hurt sometimes. However, tools and civilization cards can mitigate unlucky rolls, and most of the time, a player who makes judicious choices about where to place their cavemen is going to win 99% of the time.

Indirect Conflict: This is not Risk, and this is certainly not Monopoly. Although it's possible (and often in players' best interest) to block others out of resources, there's no direct conflict between players such as stealing buildings or fighting with other tribes. Because of this, Stone Age is a light family game, although there are many interesting strategy decisions you can make and its possible to interrupt what other players are trying to do.


If you're looking for a relatively short game with slightly less luck than your average dice game, and one of the prettiest board games ever released, Stone Age is the perfect game to add to your collection!

Let me know what you think about my overview and your thoughts about the game. You can read more about Stone Age at Boardgamegeek.com, and as always, if you're a Fordham student, message me and I'd be happy to introduce the game to you personally.

Until next time, "Uggh Uggh Board Games Uggh Uggh Are Fun Uggh Uggh"