Relleno picado -- a very Peruvian dish

Sonia has been teaching me to cook some new dishes lately, like guiso de calabacín (a delicious squash stew), estofado de pollo (a juicy chicken dish with large chunks of potato and a variety of other vegetables) and most recently, something called relleno picado (chopped blood sausage) that seems to combine a lot of the elements that are typical of Peruvian cuisine. The final product doesn´t look very interesting, so I´ve only captured a photo of the ingredients. But it doesn´t matter since you normally eat it as a sandwich filling.


The ingredients are:

• a blood sausage called relleno (which is hard to find here in Lima, but Sonia knows a lady from Chincha who brings it to a market near my apartment once a week). It´s wrapped in a real intestine like old fashioned sausages, and sometimes contains rice.
  
• a hot pepper called aji amarillo which is used in just about every Peruvian dish that is spicy


• an onion (Peruvians prefer red ones for almost everything)


• a couple cloves of garlic (essential for almost any Peruvian food -- even for plain white rice that you´re serving as a side dish)


• a bunch of spearmint leaves (also very common in Peruvian cooking)

You just chop everything finely and fry it together. It´s hard to describe the flavor. The mint is a nice complement to the other flavors. It´s really tasty!