So you have tons of turkey from the day before. Now what to do with it? Wrap it in a tortilla of course and slather it with heart disease. This is a really simple, extremely quick way to make a new meal out of that turkey. There are quite a few ways to go about this. An enchilada is basically a thin burrito that is slathered in some sort of sauce. You can buy already made enchilada sauce at any grocery store, or you can just use leftover gravy, as I did.

Though Peruvian food in New York City has seemed to suddenly have become a fascination among culinary minds with the opening of Gastón Acurio’s La Mar in September of 2011, there are dozens of Peruvian restaurants in the five boroughs. The sleeker, trendier ceviche centric restaurants are primarily in Manhattan, though in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and parts of New Jersey where the Peruvian immigrant community mostly resides options for pollo a la brasa, ceviche, and even chifa are plentiful. Here is a run down of New York’s best Peruvian restaurants.

Opened in mid-2009 in a hidden spot not far from the Larcomar shopping center in Miraflores, Central is one of the most exciting restaurants to hit Lima’s scene in some time. Thirty-one year old chef Virgilio Martinez is a Peruvian who worked in New York, Paris, Madrid, Colombia, and Southeast Asia for many years (& sometimes in the kitchens of Gaston Acurio) and returned to Lima to open his own restaurant. The global flair came with him in the kitchen: an English pastry chef, a Colombian sous-chef, a Mexican sommelier, and a Spanish mâitre d’.

The first review of Gaston Acurio’s La Mar in NYC are out. Here’s where they have got it right, and wrong.

Mexican food is a complex cuisine with so many regional variations that it would be crazy to try to sum it all up in a book. So instead, what Roberto Santibañez did in his latest book “Truly Mexican”, was to focus in what he believes lays the backbone of Mexican food: its sauces and salsas. These are, according to Santibañez, what different dishes share in common. He doesn’t strive to offer a comprehensive guide of all Mexican sauces either, what he intends to do is to teach us the fundamentals, the basic techniques that will allow us to understand and enjoy Mexican cuisine, and in doing so getting the necessary skills to master other recipes as well.

A complete guide to packing for a trip to Peru, including the Amazon, the Andes, and the desert coast.

Vater Otto might be the epicenter of the least Peruvian seeming city in Peru. The patrons at the one room, wood cabin looking pub on a corner of Oxapampa’s Tyrolean seeming main plaza appear Peruvian at first glance, but they’re friendlier. The bartender remembered me from the night before and greeted me by shaking my hand. A few bar stools were on the sidewalk beside an open window and passerby’s would lean in and say hello to a group of regulars in a corner near the bar. A few had blue eyes and blond hair and they spoke with a funny twang. They sang German drinking songs and clanked their glasses together. When one leaves they tell me goodnight. Another asks me where I’m from and that I should have come and chatted with them. They were cheerful and laid back, while the people in rest of Peru, in comparison, can seem so intense and formal.

Granada, Nicaragua isn’t how I remember it. Though nothing ever is really. Six years ago on my first visit there was a little bit of a scene. There were a couple of restored colonial hotels on the plaza. The Bearded Monkey was packed with backpackers who helped fill the couple of expat bars and local haunts. Some streets were best avoided though. There was a seedy aspect to the extent a knifing might occur if you took a wrong turn at night. At the city’s central market, I ordered tajadas con chancho and a juice and spent the next 36 hours in bed. Still I wanted to come back. Few places can really pull off the faded, tropical colonial atmosphere as well. Maybe Cartagena or Havana? I expected changes on my return, but I questioned if the city had retained its magic. It had.