OK, a little cheat… I *didn’t* learn anything new or take new pictures since yesterday. This week, I’ve been struck down with an intense case of exhaustion. The stress from that article has finally broken and I’m crashing… so I’m going to show you some of the stuff that Marcella and I did last Saturday at the street bazaar and get back on the photography horse tomorrow. Verdade. (Truly!)

This is gutter water. Which means it’s about as clean as swimming in an unflushed toilet… but it just seemed so pretty and fresh to me… I think I miss Canada sometimes.

duck spout.

so many mirrors!

I spy, with my little eye, something that’s not a valid Canadian currency at the numismatics booth…

… and then I just had Canada on the brain, I guess, because these felt a bit Canadian for me. Random.

This particular pasteis (remember them?) booth is award-winning… and as I watched them make the pastel, it occurred to me how much it’s like a savoury McDonald’s pie. Don’t tell a Brazilian I said that.

See what I mean? I also learned that if you hold them vertically, the cheese all slides to the bottom. Lessons from the trenches, everybody, lessons from the trenches.

New favourite thing: a buraco quente—literally, a “hot hole” (keep it clean, kids). A crusty roll has a plug drilled out (for lack of better wording), and they pour in a warm meat mixture. Really tasty, but the “hot” definitely refers to the temperature, ’cause nothing in Brazil’s got HEAT. Marcella’s also eating a cup of bean soup served with puffed pork things on top.

This day ended with a round of brigadeiro, but you’ve seen those already. Instead, I’ll end with a photo I took of the WORLD’S SMALLEST ANTS marching in formation… don’t know where they’re going or why, but ever since the day they went into the wall, they haven’t been in the kitchen. Or my bed. So… progress?

HAPPY FRIDAY!

I’ve turned a few corners in the last 24 hours… I made my first wholly independent, un-coached food order in Portuguese (YEAH, BABY!), I took my first fitness class in a language I don’t speak (YEAH, BABY!), and I figured out what the what was about with my camera’s ISO settings (YEAH, BABY!).

And now, I have a new dilemma.

At the market on Saturday, Marcella and I shared coconut water. At the end of it, people usually chuck the coconut and keep shopping. But I thought, “well, what if there’s something I can do with all this flesh?”

Marcella doesn’t think so. But she also thought that white chocolate brigadeiro was irrational and wrong.

Luckily, I ignored her twice on Saturday—first with the brigadeiro and then with the coconut: we returned to the nice man with the machete and had him hack up my coconut.

Which was a really good start… and so we brought it home, put it in the fridge with the rest of our market-haul, and went about having a weekend (and may I just say that I’m still *so* burnt out that it takes me until Wednesday to get over having been so out-and-about and social all weekend? Zounds!)

But…

now what? I turned to Google with this one and asked “what can you do with the flesh of a green coconut”, and the first hit returned was my old friend Wikipedia. Wiki makes me a bit nutty—since I’ve been a prof, and I’m expert in a couple of things, I know that when I read the pages for the stuff I *really* know, I always say “well, yes… but also not exactly exactly“—and yet, when it’s a matter of getting started on a topic, it really can’t be beat.

Seriously: where else might I have learned that, “The meat in a green young coconut is softer and more gelatinous than that in a mature coconut—so much so that it is sometimes known as coconut jelly.” (Thanks, Wikipedia—though mine isn’t jelly-like at all. Just sorta gummy).

Or, even better, that green coconuts don’t fall from the tree unless they have mould problems: only the brown ones do. In fact, falling-coconut-related deaths are so rare that they’re often compared to shark attacks. Apparently, “This was the subject of a paper published in 1984 that won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2001. Falling coconut deaths are often used as a comparison to shark attacks; the claim is often made that a person is more likely to be killed by a falling coconut than by a shark, yet such evidence as there is would suggest that the number of deaths due to falling coconuts is small.” You can’t *make* this shit up!

Secure in the fact that my coconut harbours no secret homicidal agenda, it now sits, impotent, in the fridge, awaiting my flash of culinary brilliance.

Hm. And on to the photo! For this, I began reading an online guide to my camera as well as Kristen @ Swanky Dietician’s “Photo 101” post (thanks, Kristen!). I decided to play with my ISO-setting, since I was going to photograph my coconut inside, at night. I think flash makes everything look a little dirty, a little low-budget, a little ick… so I always go no flash and hope for the best. Now, I need not hope, I need only fear God, and keep the ISO high (which is a play on “fear God, and keep the powder dry”, an old military maxim from the 19th century. I did mention I was an Historian, right?).

Here’s ISO-200.

And here’s ISO-1000.

I *was* drinking wine when I took these photos, admittedly. These are likely the worst of my photo-magoria, I promise. But still! You can see what a difference changing the ISO setting makes! The crispness! The edges! The focus! Duh!

So now that that’s done, here’s a gratuitious photo of a stunningly red tree flower I saw on our walk between metro stations yesterday:

And with that done, I’m still left with my coconut pickle. (Or, coconut pineapple, if I’m being Portuguese-friendly.) I’m stumped, and will accept all tips, jeers, or cat-calls regarding the flesh of my green coconut.

Send help.

This is embarrassing. Earlier this week, I got tagged for the 7 Posts by the inimitable Kristina at Spabettie… and I was wracked with fear. You’d think that asking a blogger to talk about him/herself reflexively should be no biggie—this is partly why we blog, I think—and while I’m happy to tell stories about STUFF, I only had panic about the 7 posts.

For one thing, I don’t know what of my posts have been popular and what hasn’t. I have no idea how to check my traffic. My “incoming links” thing has also been SNAFU’d on my dashboard for awhile, and I can’t fix it. My blog isn’t terribly important to more than my happy little circle of blogger friends—and most of my friends don’t know I’m here / aren’t inclined to read, and I didn’t personally tell much of my family, either: blogging anonymity is OK by me! So I don’t think that the habitual way that the 7 Posts is floating around fits with me.

Instead, I’m going to do this as the 7 Blogger Recipe Posts That I’ve Used the Most. There are so many good foodie blogs out there that this is actually quite arbitrary in the end: so all I did was comb my “Recipes” bookmarks and think about what I used the most before I came to São Paulo and since. These are different things, since I can’t have some of my old faves.

For example, and I mentioned this just last week, HEAB’s protein ice cream is right up there for me. I don’t like the way ice cream feels in my mouth, so protein ice cream was like a summer miracle. LOVE! But since I talked about this one last week, I’m taking it off my 7s list. What’s left, deliciously, wonderfully, magically, are the following…

(I’m doing this with images by way of screen shots of peoples’ blogs, and if this is a problem for anyone, email me right away and I’ll yank it down.)  (extreme.balance.blog@gmail.com)

1. The Sandwich of My Dreams, and I Don’t Really Dream of Sandwiches Normally

I have no words for this perfection. No words. It is perfection.

(image courtesy of Spabettie’s post right here.)

2. The “Pasta” That Inspired My New Favourite Thing

Kath’s 7 Special Posts post mentioned that she didn’t know why her carrot tagliatelle hadn’t taken the world by storm yet. Well, in my case, it’s because cooked carrots = ick. BUT: it gave me the idea to do the same thing with zucchini… tonight, post-gym, I served it in tomato sauce with mushrooms, fresh basil and some goat cheese over a scrambled egg. Not pretty, but SO, SO, SO good. There you have it, Kath: LEGACY.

(image courtesy of Kath @ My Funny Little Life’s post right here.)

3. The Burgers That Made Me Realise I Really, Really, Really Love Lentils

And now I can’t stop eating them in all sortsa ways. Even in cookies.

(image couretsy of Sabrina @ RhodeyGirlTests’ post right here.)

4. The Dessert That Became A Minor Obsession and Weekly Fixture

OK, this one I can’t show you ’cause it’s copyrighted on the site… but click here for the glory. Really. And below is my own reproduction of my beloved peanut butter cup, served on my beloved vanilla yogurt cheese.

(image courtesy of my intense nostalgia for the familiar foods of home…)

5. The Lasagna That Led to My Go-To Quinoa Mix

I’m not really in a position to be buying stuff right now. My possessions are in storage, and I’m abroad. I bought a Kindle so I wouldn’t want to buy books. But I really, really want this book—even if I *am* non-conformist and this is definitely popular right now. I’ve made that decision based solely on this:

(image couresty of none other than Sarah @ Peas and Thank You right here).

6. The Cookies That Made Me Think I Can Learn to Be Sugar Free, Except Macarons

These beauties are “Banana-Sweetened Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies”—refined sugar-free, (potentially) gluten-free, and tasty. I modified them lots when I made them (dropped the nuts, added dried apricot, added a little butter, added ground flax and psyllium fibres), but they stand as a really good idea for people like me who want treats, but don’t want to commit to the insulin spike.

(image courtesy of Carrie @ Carrie on Vegan’s post right here).

7. A Life Without Soup is a Life Half-Lived: Natasha’s Borscht

Honestly, I’m doing something wrong. I will eat things, and write about things, and show pictures of things… and crickets ensue. It’s even—hilariously—happened that I talk about some food lots, and then suddenly it appears on a blog I read (who reads me), from this GENIUS idea they JUST GOT from a big, popular blog, and I just laugh. It makes me feel like I could be Tyler Durden, intersplicing dirty words into my blog just to see if anyone’s paying attention.

This isn’t even my recipe, but this was my post—Borscht for people who don’t like beets, you could call it. It’s vegan. but more than that, it’s FREAKING AWESOME. I can’t believe everyone isn’t eating this for dinner. And breakfast. And everything in between. I thank dinner at Natasha’s house last August for this little beauty, and you should, too. (The recipe is right here).

So those are my seven. Because I’m an Historian, I always have to go to the source—and now you have it! These are the sources of some of my most frequent flyers, even if each flight follows a slightly different trajectory…

I think this game has been done to death, or I’d tag others, too. Come back tomorrow for more Paulista happenings!

Sunday, 31 July 2011. Or, “The Day we Macaroned to Victory”

I’d like to own that my first macaron attempt looked like this:

<<shudder>>.

Today would be different. Give me macarons or give me death!

It started like this:

Because of this:

Lookin’ good!:

Except Batch 1 did this:

Ookie. (at least it made feet):

So the team mobilised:

as Ivan made fresh pasta (baking is hard work):

Andrea set the table (*gorgeous* place!):

I pondered Batch 2′s cracks (verdict: underbaked):

and we rallied around the VICTORY frosting, either moving too fast to be caught on film or *after* a bottle of vinho verde… (spoiler: it was a *really* good wine…):

loverly!:

With the miracle of Batch 3… (perfeito!):

…and some of the darkest chocolate cupcakes (oh! And a little bubbly? Don’t mind if I do…), we’re foreshadowing triumph:

Andrea piped for Canada:

(and, actually, she hoped it was for the pleasure of Brazil):

Our efforts begat fabulosity:

and Ivan, as the representative of Team Brazil, declared it a win:

With that, I proclaim the month of July CLOSED. On a high note!

What are your August plans? I’m going to Machu Picchu. And the gym. But not in that order.