Papa a la Huancaína ... Kinda

On my way back to Shrimp Town from City Where the Water Bends, I stopped by Whole Foods to stock up on "hippie foods," as I called them when I told my mom about the trip.  They had the most beautiful things in the produce section - rainbow chard and purple and white carrots.  I found a whole display of potatoes, among them these tiny blue potatoes that made me feel like I was in the Andes.  I remembered my trip to Ecuador and the itty bitty potatoes we saw while wandering among the market stalls.  Obviously, I bought them.

I thought the best thing to do with them would be to make an Andean dish.  When I spent a year volunteering after college, the volunteer program took us on two retreats at retreat center in the countryside.  There was a young man working there who had spent four or five years teaching in Peru. One day he decided to make us all a Peruvian meal, and he seemed to spend the whole day working on the sauce for the ají de gallina, mixing together the chicha morada, laying out lettuce leaves and hardboiled eggs on the plates for all of us.  The snow fell softly outside the window as we gathered around the table for spicy South American food;  I looked down at my plate to see extra hard-boiled eggs.  "I remembered that you're a vegetarian," the chef said proudly and sweetly.  He didn't know that I hadn't managed to get an egg down since an egg salad sandwich had made me throw up in the 5th grade, and I didn't tell him.  But that little Peruvian egg was the most delicious one I've ever eaten.  And that meal was so good - the company of the volunteers, the excitement at the deer we saw high-stepping through the snow outside, that spicy green sauce on the lettuce and the eggs.

I wanted to recreate that sauce for my tiny blue potatoes. I looked for Peruvian potato recipes; I couldn't decide between papa a la huancaína and ají verde - so I sort of made both.  I followed the recipe for papa a la hauncaína and threw in some green onions and cilantro, and a tiny bit of basil from my garden.  (I guess it's not authentically Peruvian anymore.)

When I made it I kept stopping to look at how beautiful the ingredients were.

When they were done, I put them on my plate with a tomato.

(Unauthentic again; see "hard-boiled egg trauma" above.)

 When I pushed on the potatoes with my fork, they popped open suddenly, like balloons bursting.
They were the color of purple construction paper inside.

What was one of the most memorable meals you've had?  Most beautiful?
What's the nicest meal someone's ever made for you?
What color was the last thing you ate?