Sometimes I order food just because it has a fun name. That’s my only explanation for this review. I was recently called to jury duty (my third summons, and my third time serving on a jury). I’ll go into more detail about that at the end of the French fry review, but first I’ll describe what I had for lunch during the experience.

Salchipapas

Salchipapas are a Peruvian street/fast food that is a combination of hot dogs (salchichas) and French fries (papas fritas). I like hot dogs, and I even worked at a hot dog restaurant for a while slinging Chicago dogs and SoCal chili dogs. Nothing about this combination troubled me, but my only hesitation was “how good could it be?”. When you’re dealing with two ingredients, and one of them is a hot dog, you have to believe that there’s a relatively low ceiling to what can be achieved.

Pollos a la Brasa San Fernando specializes in Peruvian roast chicken, and as part of that they provide a variety of sauces to compliment that chicken, fries, salad, or rice that most people are ordering. Those sauces did the heavy lifting with the Salchipapas and turned the dish into something pretty fun to eat on a soggy Friday in May out of the back of my car in a District Court parking lot. Speaking of soggy, I asked them to leave the potatoes in the fryer a bit longer than usual (bien fritas). I wanted to make sure that they were able to hold their texture long enough for me to enjoy them with a heavy dose of sauce.

Back to the sauces…in addition to the standard mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup, they offer jalapeno, garlic, and pepper based sauces that are more traditional to Peru. The jalapeno sauce was a mild to medium heat with a hit of cilantro, but still creamy. The garlic sauce had a bit of a punch to it, and the pepper sauce (aji roja?) was a touch more spicy than the green sauce but packed a lot of flavor. I added the sauce myself, to taste, and dug in with a fork to get the right balance of potato, hot dog, and sauce.

The chicken hot dogs had a great texture. By the looks of it, they were thrown in the deep fryer and achieved a blistered crust. I’m pretty sure they’re a chicken based hot dog, and the chunks were cut to a perfect size to ration out with the French fries. The fries themselves were fine. Nothing to write home about, but here they are on my blog. They taste a lot like school cafeteria fries and never quite get that crispy crust that I prefer on my 3/8″ fries, even with the extra time in the fryer. However, when you smother them in the those three sauces, you make up for any flaws in fry texture. The sauces are amazing, and the fries are a more than adequate vehicle to deliver green, red, and white sauce to your face. The salty hot dog chunks played their part as well, and overall it was a fun dish that I probably won’t ever order again from this restaurant. Not because I didn’t like it, but because their roasted chicken is really really good! Seriously, if you’re in the Lynnwood area and want some great roasted chicken, stop by and get a quarter/half chicken combo. You can either get it with fries or rice (just ask), and you can accent it with as much of the Peruvian sauces as you want.

Jury Duty

Stop reading if you have no interest in the American judicial system. I just want to discuss my experience as a juror on a relatively small case. It’s only been a couple years since my last jury duty assignment, but that trial lasted about a month and returned a guilty verdict on a homicide charge. I wrote about that on a different blog here.

This summons was for District court, not Superior court, and the jury only needed 6 people (not 12). We listened to a case about a violation of a protection order (restraining order) back in 2018, but there were some very significant limitations. There was only one exhibit submitted for evidence (the restraining order), and one witness (the victim). The victim had a lot of trouble remembering details about the specific day in question, and the defendant chose to not take the stand. Ultimately, it was one person’s word against the absence of another person’s word, and there was enough ambiguity in the story presented by the witness/victim that we could not overcome reasonable doubt and returned a verdict of Not Guilty.

Here’s my issue with the experience. There was a police report filed for that specific day, but the victim did not remember any details about the police visiting the residence. Seeing that police report would have provided enough evidence for us to to convict, but it couldn’t be admitted because the responding officer was no longer with this police department and had moved across the state. The government won’t pay for the travel costs to bring that officer back, and the without their testimony the police report couldn’t be admitted. It’s 2023, and I can’t understand why this officer couldn’t just participate in the trial via Zoom or some other method. It would have taken 30 minutes out of their day, would have cost the court/public almost nothing, and would have given the prosecution a critical piece of evidence to help their case. We’re willing to force dozens of citizens to sacrifice many hours (if not days) of work in order to participate in a jury, but we can’t modernize our approach to these proceedings to make them efficient and effective? I’m not saying that the defendant should have been found guilty, but I’m confident that the prosecutor was not given enough resources to have a have a real chance at winning this case. They have the tools to do this (cameras, tv’s, wifi, etc.), so there could be some other restraint that I don’t know about. Maybe this is a more common problem now due to a backlog in the court system after COVID interruptions (the incident happened 4.5 years ago), but I still think we can do better.

I’ll get off my soapbox.