Of Street Vendors...

There is something adventurous about eating food from a street vendor.  It is one step wilder than a picnic and not quite at the level of drinking from a cattle pond (we had a friend who did this).

In Brazil, you could find everything from drinks to snacks to sweets sold by a hopeful person with a cart.  One of the most popular drinks was sugar cane juice.  I never tried any since drinking unfiltered water is an invitation to get sick, but I heard the taste described as grass-flavored, mildly sweet water.

For snack foods, one of the most popular was corn.  Now, Brazil does not have sweet corn like we were accustomed to eating.  The corn is tough and not very good tasting.  Eating an ear—even drenched in butter and salt—was exercise for the jaws and disappointment for the taste buds.

Because of our dislike of the corn there, we never tried it from a street vendor.  After boiling it, they would roast the corn over an open fire, leaving it toasted and streaked with charcoal.  Since it had already been tougher than shoe leather, I couldn't imagine what kind of exercise it would be for the jaws after the roasting. 

Our absolute favorite street vendor was the churro man. 

Every week at the feira (a vegetable street market) we would meander through the stalls checking out the fruits and vegetables.  My mother had a feira cart, basically a metal basket on wheels with a handle to pull it.

After making our purchases, we would head to the entrance of the feira, and on occasion we would stop at the churro cart.

The man would shoot the batter into the hot oil, wait for it to fry, and then flip them out into a bath of cinnamon and sugar.

The final stage was to stick a long metal tube through the middle of the churro and gradually pull it out leaving behind a filling of oozing doce-de-leite.  Doce-de-leite is a thick, very  rich caramel.

Fried batter, cinnamon and sugar, and a luscious filling made a delectable if extremely unhealthy treat.  We justified it since we had, after all, walked to the feira.  And we were there for a good purpose.  To buy healthy fruits and vegetables.

And, yes, we went for the churros too.

Of Ice Cream…

Most people like ice cream.  The few who don’t primarily dwell in mental wards.  Okay, not really, but ice cream really is a dessert loved around the world.

Every country has made the dessert their own by adding their own spin.  In Wales, I was surprised to see licorice and black current ice cream, and fell in love with honeycomb ice cream.

In Brazil, some of their different flavors were acai and cupuacu.  None of my family were particularly fond of those flavors, but we did enjoy tapioca ice cream with tapioca beads suspended in its creamy goodness.  That was in an ice cream store in Belem, which was about eight hours from our house.

Closer to home, we relied on the local markets for ice cream (as long as we took an ice chest to keep the ice cream from melting on the long trip home).  The selection of flavors was small.  Vanilla, Chocolate, Neapolitan, Flocos (chocolate shavings in vanilla) and Rum with Raisins.

We ate almost all the flavors, but our favorite was Flocos. 

The one we never tried of our own free will was the Rum and Raisin.

Mind you, I said of our own free will.  We lived in the southern part of Brazil for a year and a half, and were invited over to multiple houses shortly after our arrival. 

One house was a tiny apartment with room at the table for only the oldest four of my family.  My younger sister, Jolie, and I were put at a tiny table in the kitchen. We struggled to get though lunch, Brazilian lasagna.  Far different than its American counterpart, the lasagna was a lot richer than we were accustomed to eating.   

We were excited when we saw that dessert was ice cream and a type of fruit we’d never tasted.  Papaya.  Now, for anyone who has never tried papaya, I would describe the flavor as flowery.  I like the smell of flowers, but found the taste impossible to like. 

Jolie and I looked at each other and dutifully cut into the orange flesh of the papaya.  We would be polite if it killed us.  At least, we consoled ourselves, we had the ice cream to wash it down.

After a few bites of the papaya we rewarded ourselves with a bite of the ice cream.  We looked at each other in horror at our first experience with Rum and Raisin ice cream.

Thankful to be in the kitchen so no one could see our struggle not to laugh, we washed down the flavor of the papaya with the flavor of the ice cream, which we quickly washed away with the flavor of the papaya…and so on until we managed to empty the plates.

I never learned to like papaya.  I do still love ice cream.

Just not Rum and Raisin.

Of Roofs and Such…

After moving from southern Brazil to the North, my family was blessed to be able to live in a house belonging to an American lady while constructing our home.  While the two bedrooms were enclosed, and even had air conditioning, the rest of the house was not. 

Instead, the roof was made of rafters covered with red tiles. Each tile was arched with a raised area on the end to fit it onto the wood laid across the rafters.  Tiles were laid with the curve facing up and then tiles were laid in between those facing down. 

Made of red clay, the tiles were attractive to look at and held up to the weather well. 

There was one very big problem with them though.  When the tile met the wall of the house there was a gap left.  A gap of about two to four inches square. Or in other words, just about the proper size for a tarantula, or snake, or mouse, or other small creepy crawly you don’t want in your house. 

One creature that made its home in and out of the roof of the house was a gecko.  The gecko to show his appreciation left us a “gift” every morning in the hallway.  Sometimes, there was more than one so you didn’t walk around the house barefoot, and you cleaned up the floor first thing after leaving the safety of the bedrooms.

Of course, the safety of the bedrooms was dubious since upon arriving after a days’ long trip from the south, we were shown around the house.

In the master bedroom bathroom sink was a several inches long pior-de-cobra.  In English, that means worse-than-a-snake.  In other words, the bites of these not-so-little centipedes were worse that the bite of a snake.  Considering Brazil boasts quite a number of nasty, deadly snakes this was a bit alarming.

We were grateful for the use of the house and the refuge found in the almost enclosed bedrooms.  But we had very definite ideas about making our own house rodent, arachnid and reptile free.

Or so we hoped.