Alright. It’s 1:40 pm in Mineiros. Classes are over for the day and I have three hours until I have to go back to school to take (and hopefully PASS) a math test. I’m sitting in my living room blasting Little Joy, curled up with a pot of delicious Brazilian coffee and Deko, my host family’s chihuahua. It’s time to catch up on the three weeks of blogging I’ve blown off.
Let the blogging marathon commence with a topic everyone in Chicago seems to be very interested in: Food.
Brazilians have a very different eating schedule than we do in the United States. Breakfast is eaten together as a family very early in the morning because the Brazilian work day starts at 7 ’o’clock. Lunch is a family meal. Everyone comes home from work and school to eat together before going back to their own activities. And dinner, unless you eat out, is a very casual ordeal where every man essentially fends for himself.
Breakfast is mostly snacking, where various forms of carbs are placed on the table mixed with the occasional protein. There is always, always coffee, brewed very strongly with sugar. We eat lemon or pineapple breakfast cake, sweet bread, cinnamon biscuits, or pão de queso (which everyone seems to have their own style of making) with goiaba jelly. When my host mom wakes up early enough, she makes little ham and cheese sandwiches in her George Foreman or scrambles eggs and chops up tomatoes to go on top. When you are eating outside the home for breakfast there is usually fresh fruit like manga, banana, abacaxi, and morango (mango, banana, pineapple, and strawberry, respectively). That, along with the occasional sausage, pretty much sums up breakfast.
When most people tell me they eat the same food every single day I usually assume they’re exaggerating because, usually, they are. When people tell you that Brazilians eat rice and beans everyday however, they are telling you the absolute dead truth. I don’t think a day has gone by I haven’t been offered rice and beans. This is especially true for lunch, where the general meal formula is rice, beans, one or two types of meat, a cooked veggie, a raw veggie, fresh pineapple or orange juice, and Guaranaaaaa! My method of eating has sort of evolved into piling a little rice and beans onto my plate, then heaping a ton of whatever fresh vegetable we have on top along with hot sauce and this cornmeal/seasoning/texturizing food called farofa, mixing it together and diggin’ in. The meat is usually cooked with broth and these roots that taste and look like potatoes but AREN’T and is almost all ways chicken (frango) or beef (carne de vaca or carne for short). When you eat out for lunch, you don’t actually order anything but a drink. When you arrive you’re handed a sheet of paper. You grab a plate, and serve yourself buffet style. Next, you go to the man who’s barbecuing and indicate the 2923954874 different types of meat you want to have for lunch and he will take them off the grill and but them onto your plate. When you’re done serving yourself, you weigh your plate and a woman marks the number of kilos of food you have on your paper then asks you what you want to drink and marks your answer down. Now, I have discovered that the way you tell the quality of an establishment is by their variety of beverages. If they only offer goiaba, mango, and grape, it means that they only served canned juice and you’re allowed to think badly of the restaurant. A good restaurant will offer at least 9 types of suco (fresh fruit juice), all 3 famous brands of Brazilian beer, Coke, Coke Zero, and most importantly Guarana (a soda made from berries only found in the Amazon and the most important/addictive drink in Brazil).
The food has definitely taken some getting used to. The hardest part is that we eat the same thing essentially every single day! Meat, meat, meat, rice and beans. However, I think I’ve finally found my food-niche in the millions of fruits that grow here. I’ve been here a month and not even made a dent in the all types of fruits I have yet to try, not to mention learn to pronounce….
That’s all for now on the food front, but heads up because I have sooo many more things to write about.
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