For the love of food - Carolyn
Trip Start
Nov 26, 2010
1
10
15
Trip End
Jan 21, 2011
Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Thursday, December 23, 2010
We have been privileged to eat in a number of homes with families of our students and their friends and have found the Brazilian hospitality to be amazingly generous. The meal can last for hours and is a wonderful social affair with extended family and friends gathering to enjoy an abundance of great food, drinks and each other’s company. It seems to us that every meal is an occasion for hearty consumption of food and alcohol, enjoyed together with lots of chat (the Brazilians talk fast, loudly and very animatedly). Dinner is usually late, often even later than 9pm, and the kids are usually still up and part of it.
We have found that Brazilians eat their food with much more salt than we tend to, use less spice and the flavouring of food is often quite simple but freshly cooked and delicious. They also have a hugely sweet tooth (must be because they produce so much sugar!) and we sometimes find the desserts just too sweet for our tastes but great in small portions. The icecreams are amazing (gelato style with a huge array of fruit flavours) as is the fresh fruit salads full of tropical fruit. It is even customary to have cake for breakfast and we have been offered everything from plain sponge cake to rich chocolate swiss-roll , caramel cake, coconut cake, amongst others for breakfast.
One of my personal highlights has been the tropical fruits that we eat for breakfast or drink in lovely freshly made juices, many of the fruits I have never heard of before:
Seriguela small yellow fruit
Acai Deep purple berry
Acerola a red berry fruit
Caju yellow fruit of the cashew plant
Graviola big green fruit with spikes, maybe custard apple
Maracaju a huge yellow passionfruit about the size of a mango
Guarana a local softdrink made from a red berry
Caja a small yellow fruit made into juice
And of course all the lovely mangos, bananas, limes, pineapples, papaya, melons, guava, grape juice, and iced coconut water drunk straight from the green coconut. Kiwi fruit are also found quite commonly.
