GROW Food Competition: Challenge Flavio Solórzano in Your Kitchen!

GROW has teamed up with international chef and worldwide promoter of Peruvian cuisine, Flavio Solórzano, for a very special competition to celebrate traditional Peruvian food and the important role of small-scale farmers. In October, Flavio donated to Oxfam a unique recipe he created, to celebrate the contribution that small scale farmers make every day in Peru.  And now, it’s your turn in the kitchen!

Flavio Solórzano

World-renowned chef Flavio Solózarno is a champion of Peruvian cuisine. As a member of the Peruvian Society of Gastronomy, he is involved with Peru’s annual food festival and one of the most important in Latin America, Mistura. Food is part of the cultural identity of Peru, and for centuries has been associated with fiesta and celebration. History plays its part, too and five centuries of fusion has created a unique mix of Andean, European, African and Asian tastes.

Through Mistura, Flavio has raised awareness of the important role small-scale farmers play in the food system. At this year’s festival in September, the Grand Market in Lima was a space to pay tribute to the work of small-scale production and Peru huge biodiversity.

The Challenge 

The global food system is broken. If small-scale farmers – and especially women, who often do most of the work – were given more power, more sustainable techniques and more investment, they could play a huge part in fixing it. After all, they put food on the plates of one in three people on earth, so they are pretty important. 

So, to celebrate small-scale farmers and Flavio’s involvement in raising awareness of their role, we want you to create a meal that brings together the foods that farmers produce every day. 

Your challenge is to create a meal to rival Flavio’s culinary creations. And his? He must recreate the winning meal from scratch, with only the ingredients from the list to go on. Don’t make it easy for him!

Flavio has picked five native Peruvian foods that are farmed by small-scale producers. All you have to do is choose one or more and get cooking.

1. Choose one or more of the following foods:

Lúcuma, physalis,cassava, potatoes or quinoa.

2. Cook something amazing! Pie, cake, soup - whatever it is, just make sure it contains something from the list.

3. Take a picture of your creation.

4. Upload it to the GROW Facebook wall (instructions in a pdf below) and tell us in the comment which ingredients you used.

The winning entry will be picked by Flavio, who will cook it – while filmed - and serve it in his restaurant, Señorio de Sulco in Lima, as an official GROW meal for a limited time!

So what are you waiting for? Ready to cook?

A final few words from Flavio:

"Greetings from Peru! I encourage you to take part in this competition, organized by the GROW campaign, to prepare wonderful dishes using lúcuma, physalis, potato, cassava and quinoa, five products that are at the hearth of Peruvian agriculture and that allow thousands of small scale farmers to get by. Looking forward to seeing your creation and please don’t forget to enjoy! "

The competition closes on 23^rd January 2012.

Instructions: uploading to Facebook [pdf]

Read more about Oxfam's GROW campaign.