I am disinterested in tourism.

I really am—I don’t want to hit the key sites in the big cities, because I won’t feel like I *know* a place until I live it. That doesn’t mean in a hotel, surrounded by foreigners, consuming the marketable versions of a country or city’s crown jewels… for me, it’s when I spend time with locals, do mundane, every-day things, and try the things that are their staples that I start to feel like I’m getting to know my destination. And this post is what that’s about—foodie style!

Now, my control group in this is made up of two people, which is bad for statistics, I know. So I won’t claim that this is average, but it’s average for Marcella and Renato, and it’s new to me!

Picanha

I was a vegetarian for 12 years, so my knowledge of cuts of meat is poor—therefore, I had to turn to Wikipedia to help me with this one. Picanha is a Brazilian favourite, apparently, which you might know better as “top sirloin”.

In truth, I never eat sirloin in restaurants. For no good reason, I have always thought it was a cheap cut of meat, and if I’m going to pay $30+ for my steak, I want a filet mignon, you know?

I’m sure I’ve had it before, and yet, I really had never had it until I had it in São Paulo.

This was one of our purchases on Saturday from the central market; at home, Renato salted it liberally with rock salt, and tossed it on the barbecue till it looked like this:

It wasn’t at all done, just seared (or something—bad vocab when it comes to meat prep), so he then sliced it into steaks and returned it to the barbecue (well, 2/3 of it was frozen for future bliss). My Lonely Planet concurs that the most usual way of cooking meat in Brazil is just to salt it, and cook it up, and so this was, as well. And you know what?

It was *incredible*.

When Renato first pulled the steaks off the barbecue and brought them in, Marcella took a piece and pronounced it “perfect”. I took one look at how red it was, and said “oh, no.” But then I tried some—and I’m not typically a fan of rare meat—but Marcella was exactly right.

I have never eaten such tasty, fantastically-textured beef before, in terms of a DIY steak.

Even rare, it’s buttery soft and so tender that you hardly need a steak knife to cut it. The only garnish it needed was “nose peppers“: Marcella heated some butter in a frying pan and then just swished the sliced peppers around in it to coat them and heat them up, releasing their scent…

We accompanied it with a side salad:

and drank the lovely rosé that Marcella had brought back from France:

and ended one of the most amazing, simple meals ever with fruit for dessert. That brings me to:

Pinha or Fruta-do-conde—a “Sugar Apple”

This is the ugliest fruit that I love. Bless the samplers in the market, because without them I might never have been brave enough to give this a try:

I look at it and think, “like an armoured artichoke, isn’t it?”

From the outside, I wonder how anyone ever thought they should *eat* this thing… but inside it’s the most amazing bright white flesh and black-black seeds…

You can sort of see the seed lurking in the bigger piece up there. This is such a sweet fruit, it’s like candy—and well-named as the “sugar apple”, though I don’t see where the “apple” reference comes in. The flesh is like white fish in its consistency—in a good way—and it’s addictive!

Manioc (Cassava)

We had a few cold days this week. Yesterday, for example, my notoriously incorrect Yahoo weather was telling me it was 3°C overnight. My nose was cold, my toes were cold, and I couldn’t sleep for it, so it certainly *was* chilly. As a result, Marcella said: “there’s only one thing to do. Mandioca soup.”

So we peeled it, sliced it and boiled it:

And then heated some butter to sauté bacon, onion and garlic:

(and please: peek-a-boo the sink in back of Marcella… see how it, too, has ONLY ONE HANDLE? No hot water for dishes. WEIRD. Marcella says “we don’t need it”… I say, there’s nothing quite as stubborn as congealed fat in cold water…) (!!!)

As I was saying, though, with some broth added and a little blender-treatment, lo, our soup was born:

Marcella said, “it needs salt.”

I said, “forget that—how can you cook without pepper?!?” (When in Brazil…)

So with parmesan (and red, quasi-pepper, in my case), we had a lovely and filling soup. When I reheated it the second day, you could definitely see the tapioca-starchy properties of the manioc—I had to add water to turn it back into soup and away from a semi-congealed mass. It was quite rich in flavour, and I was a bit tired of it by the end of the bowl you see here… but still—a winner! If only I could get my hands on *real* black pepper…

And, as a “dessert” segment here, let me just tell you that *everything* comes down to milk in some form—here’s a little gallery to prove it:

Leite

1) Doce de Leite, eaten straight, by spoon:

(Oopsie! Didn’t get the inside but it looks—and tastes—like caramel).

2) Marcella won’t eat fruit straight. Yesterday, it was strawberries with condensed milk…

3) And today, bananas with powdered milk.

Behold, the mashing:

Followed by the addition of powdered milk:

Carefully measured with a tape measure…

Combined:

Tasted:

(see my bed in the background? At 2 metres from the kitchen, this is why I dream in food)

and then questioned—”are you sure this milk is still good?”

I confess—I was not a fan of the strawberries and condensed milk to I gave the bananas and powdered milk a miss, though Marcella swears by it (even when the milk in question seems suspect).

Since I was not before and continue *not* to be a fan of milk, I’m finding Brazilian desserts easy to eschew. Luckily, there’s still the fruit.

Do you see this door?

A porta permanence fechada. THIS DOOR STAYS CLOSED. Remember the skittering bug I mentioned last week? We got to know each other cara a cara last week. Face-to-face. I had gotten into the habit of turning on the light and fan before going into the loo as a warning… well, one time, he wasn’t so warned.

I screamed. AND I ran. Up those very stairs, in fact, bursting in on Marcella and Renato watching TV upstairs, almost in tears… because I’ve NEVER see a bug that big in my life. Basically (and this is to scale), it looks like this:

It’s SO BIG that there’s a HUMAN-SIZED WOMAN, dressed as a BIRD, STANDING ON ITS HEAD.

And now you know why I screamed.

I’ll come back to what that really is later… but to foreshadow, let me just say, “North America is as exciting as tepid bathwater when it comes to cultural exhibitions.” Yep.

Saturday was the best day ever. We went to TWO markets!! The first one was a local fruit-and-veg market, and the second one let us drive through central SP—my first glimpse—which meant I got to see some amazing architecture and absolute squalor. Interestingly, the place of the greatest history and beauty is also *the* most dangerous in town. I was basically agog, taking it all in—so photos (from the car!) will follow the next time we make the trek. This time, I was in awe. But now: the food.

I have a bad habit of feeling awkward about photography when out in public—and it shows in some of these snaps, a bit out of focus as I tried to take the pic and hide the camera in one quick step… but they *do* get some of the sense of the market.

It was hot and sunny when we made our way there, and the first thing that struck me was that my Lonely Planet was right—aaaaaaaaaand so was my Dad. I tend not to trust him when he tells me about “how it is” where he’s travelled, or about History (sorry Dad! Love ya!) because I’m both an academic *and* I have a different travelling philosophy, so I see the world differently.

BUT! He was right! SP has the *largest* Japanese population outside of Japan, which was obvious at the market. See, exhibit A:

A poor exhibit, admittedly, as these people are really just Asian and I’ve gone and extrapolated, but now imagine that this photo is a microcosm of the market—maybe 25% of people there were Japanese. Cool!

I tried to capture the breadth of the market—which is tough to do when you’re a shorty in a crowded place, but lo, a break in the crowd density let me catch this one… and this is only slightly less than half of it… awesome.

Our first stop was for sustenance, however, since Ondilège cereal doesn’t really tide you over…

This is the first time I’ve shown Marcella here, and I *LOVE* that she’s eating in it (OK, drinking)—because approximately 90% of the photos I took of her in Germany three years ago had her doing the same thing.

Everyone, that’s Renato and Marcella. Marcella and Renato, everyone.

This would be the coconut water part of our day—which I actually found to be quite tasty, in spite of really not caring all that much for coconut most other forms.

As a shout-out to Brazil’s slave history, the African transplant of manioc (aka, cassava) was on offer—and we bought some… I’ve had tapioca before (and wondered where it came from), but this is new! More to follow when we decide what we’re going to *do* with it. They cook it up right there at the market, too, so I got to taste some boiled. It had a pleasing, sweetish taste, with a texture like a cross between a potato and a parsnip.

Fascinatingly—even at 27 degrees out—the meat just sits in open cases.

And Kath asked me for proof of the gargantuan produce… well, in this next image, the cauliflower is normal-size. And that makes the zucchini about 8 cauliflowers long.

And then came the peppers…

Newsflash: Brazilian food is NOT hot. They don’t put black pepper on the tables, and when I used more than one splash of Tabasco on my mushroom-polenta last week, it became a topic of 2 minutes’ conversation about whether I should be allowed to *eat* it… and it wasn’t even hot after all that!

So it’s no surprise that we passed on the “Oh Shit” peppers, and opted instead for what Marcella called “Nose peppers”—because they’re so fragrant. And pretty!

They sell sugar cane in bags, like so:

and then Doce de Leite and other sweet treats:

But what fascinated me was the sugar cane juice:

100% natural, the man’s shirt boasts, and pressed right there in the market.

And one last glory shot of Marcella eating a cheese Pastel: a thin dough square “stuffed” (with a thin slice, mind you) with cheese, fried. Renato had his with cheese and “carne seco”, aka: beef jerky.

By then, Marcella was “tired of the noise and the crowd”, which I thought was funny since she *lives* in a MEGA city, and so we headed off to drive to Mercado 2: the central market.

Since it’s in such a bad part of town, I was warned not to take my camera out *outside* the market, and by the time we were inside, I was feeling distinctly cautious. So I took only a few photos—one of the stained glass:

And one of the pretty fruits—a better display than at the other market (and quite a bit more expensive):

And my thrill—did you know that cashew nuts come from this fruit?

I don’t get it… but I will.

And to my amazement after finding Brazil pricey, our trip to the markets was an absolute *bargain*! Marcella said “we should make a habit of this.” oh YES!

And at the end of this fine day, we cooked a nice meal (yay! Next post!) and then took in the “Parintins folklore festival” on TV—Marcella was reading from the Portuguese Wikipedia to tell me about it, and it was WAY more substantial than my link. Wiki is wrong—because I *saw* the blue Coke ads (no hoax!), but ultimately, the whole event was somewhat beyond my understanding, so I’ll close with some choice images (maybe better viewed while under the influence of *something*), and renew my statement that North America needs to kick up the colour of cultural events somewhat, non?

Oh. Yeah.

PS: I’m absolutley being HARASSED by this IP address: 91.224.160.146 which has spammed me 64 times in the last 4 days. I want them to leave me alone, but I don’t know how… can anyone give me suggestions, remembering that I’m technologically un-inclined?

Thursday was a religious holiday in SP—Corpus Christi, in this case. That likely means something to the mostly-Catholic people of SP, but for we secular kids it meant that Wednesday night we watched foo-chee-bow (er, “football”) on TV and drank wine, slept in on Thursday (OK, I do *every* day—plus naps), and spent the rest of the day achieving one of the things on our list. So, pretty normal. This is all like a soothing balm to my dear departing Type A soul, as I learn to come down and not care so much about the details, lest I go quietly mad.

Our 1 thing? We drove and drove and drove on an abortive mission that led us to a mall that I was pretty sure that I, in my patched jeans and 8-year-old sandals, was probably too déclassé to enter… to buy a cookie sheet. I’ve started to notice something—my due diligence sucked, because Brazil is actually expensive. I was seduced by a currency that’s .61 Brazilian real to the Canadian dollar… when in fact food can be pricey and (some) goods are, too. Like anything imported…

Marcella has a can of Campbell’s tomato soup in the kitchen. Just one. She says it’s “in case of emergency”. I think that emergency *might* be “I won the lottery and want to splurge!!“, because this can cost her the equivalent of CAD$4.

Marcella also has a love that is deep and true… for Special K. I half thought I should buy her a cow when we were in Berlin, what with the amount of milk she went through for the sake of her beloved… But there’s no Special K in Brazil, so Marcella has found the next best thing:

Ondilège cereal is Casino brand—as in, the same brand in the Parisian grocery stores—and this one box will set you back 15,00 reals. Or, CAD$9.15. For breakfast cereal.

I don’t really have words.

But that might also be because of the throbbing pain in my finger for the last 24 hours… remember when Kath wrote about her thesis, and provided a clip of Pinky and the Brain? I’m not plagiarising her, or anything, but the play on words was just way too tempting.

Here’s pinky:

and here’s its brains:

How awesome is that? This is why Marcella and I are friends: an equal love of ridiculous kitchen items. Like ice cube trays… that produce brain ice cubes, redefining the phrase “brain freeze”. Heh.

So, here’s me using my head:

Stop me if you’ve heard *this* one before, but I WAS BAKING… and multitasking: I was also trying to make and eat lunch. Being too lazy (and without the counter space) to pull out the toaster, I tried to toast my bread over the gas stove… and had I known that the kitchen hid a pair of these:

I *might* not have been so inclined to use two forks as pincers… and then to grab the tines of the fork to reposition the bread mid-way through the laziest operation ever…

Who does that? WHO grabs hot metal?!?

Ouch.

After I’d gone through three brains, my water-logged finger still showed the signs of one and a half tines. Yarg.

I *can* say that that was the best damned toast I had EVER had, and the cookies weren’t bad either. I used this recipe from one of my favourite food porn websites—The Traveler’s Lunchbox—but added espresso instead of vanilla extract, reduced the sugar and added a mashed banana to try to recapture some of the lost moisture when I was without *actual* brown sugar.

This recipe is brill for two reasons: you melt the butter (so you don’t have to plan ahead for room temperature butter), and then you freeze the cookie dough balls, and can thereafter bake only as many as you want to have at a time.

See how it’s glossier than “normal” creamed-sugar-and-butter cookie dough?

And then, frozen:

I wrapped them up in threes, and we baked six of them for dessert:

and in the end, they were a bit less pretty than they might have been, had I actually used brown sugar—they just sorta looked like they could use a couple of hours in the sun, you know? But they were baked to happiness, and I wasn’t going to overdo it for the sake of aesthetics. The banana flavour was very faint and, I think, a nice way to decrease the sugars… but I bet these are inSANE when the recipe’s followed to a T.

Well! Two days, one solid achievement… and today (Saturday), we went to TWO food markets, so tomorrow’s post will be filled with some weird and wonderful—whenever I felt OK about bringing my camera out. Stay tuned!

I thought for awhile that I might read a book a day during my three months in Brazil… I’ve done it before with academic books, no less, while getting ready for my Comprehensive exams in my PhD. But it’s actually not *fun*, it’s work. And if I did it with fun books now, I wouldn’t have time for the gym (hopefully starting next week!) or learning Portuguese.

Still, I’m reading. I’ve been exploring new blogs, which has been REALLY fun, I <3 my Kindle, which has let me read two Jane Austens (Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility—will have read all Jane Austen by the end of my trip), and I’ve been reading historical fiction. So far, Alan Furst’s Dark Voyage: A Novel (so-so… disappointing after all I’d heard about Furst, really), and I’ve started Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter. I’ll let you know…

(source)

I actually entered into a bet / dare last summer with an old friend to see who would write a work of historical fiction and get it published first… and then he went and got engaged. And I got 3 months off—seriously: I’m SO gonna win this! My mission right now is to read the good, the bad, and the ugly of historical fiction as research. More precisely, I’ll be writing creative non-fiction, since I’m going to write a creative story about an actual era based on good research, but I plan to make it fun so that more than 4 people read it.

So I’m reading a lot. I’m also sleeping whenever the need arises… which means I stay up late (and have thus learned that the Brazilian noise laws prohibit having, say, a DJ into the middle of the night, but if your neighbours want to have a VERY LOUD CONVERSATION OR FIGHT WITH HIS/HER LOVER, THAT’S A-OK. LOUD AS YOU LIKE, LATE AS YOU LIKE.), get up around 10am, and nap. Which feels A-MA-ZING. I’m usually too much of a stressy kid to nap, and now that I can… it’s like candy!

AND: I’m happy to report on my achievements: I accomplished goals 1 and 3 yesterday—showered (with no ill effects, other than WTF is *this* all about?!?

Behold: the shower head:

(are those *electrical* cords sticking out the top?!?!?)

And then there’s this:

And… that’s the shower.

So something is clearly missing, eh? Like a means for changing the *temperature* of the water? There just isn’t one.

True story.

As a result, this puppy was NUCLEAR, and I’m a girl who likes a hot shower! No permanent damage was done, nevertheless…)

I also cracked my Portuguese book…

… only to discover this:

Do you see it? the puckering? The discolouration? Freaking water damage on my book. That actually makes me want to use it less, for no good reason at all.

I’m still in Chapter 1, and I’ve learned to beware false cognates, but thanks to the fact that I’ve learned a language or two in my time, I’m already aware of the danger… it’s time to be all Nike about it, and then I’ll be fine. Watching TV and just listening to people talk… I’m gettin’ my groove on.

(source) Amen, brotha.

I’ve eaten out every day so far because Marcella doesn’t *cook*. Well, *I* do, and once we get a few more kitchen implements (and groceries), I’m in like Flynn. A lack of a baking sheet means the cookies haven’t happened yet, either… just give it time.

What’s Brazilian food like? It’s distinct. And I’ve not been brave enough to photograph my food in the restos yet, but I’m working on it. I’ll bore you senseless with food talk later.

For now, I’m excited that today I *finally* got money out of a bank machine (took 4 freaking tries to find a bank supporting Cirrus), I had a mini-workout at home with bands and the stairs, and… TOMORROW IS A HOLIDAY! That means, I’ll be able to go outside in daylight, and Marcella and Renato are going to take me on a walking tour of all the places to go.

SP isn’t exactly scenic, but I’ll bring back pics, nonetheless.

It’s starting to sink in… I’m in *Brazil*. Wow.