The food

I've been wanting to do a post about the food for a while now. And I guess I've been talking about food quite a bit. But still. I wanted to do one just for the food people eat here. So I decided to do a food-diary kind of thing. So during the last week starting on Sunday, I took a picture of all the things I ate. So I can tell you what it was. Well, almost all. I didn't take a picture of the fruits (because I have a whole separate post about those coming up... sometime in the future. Once it's done. Before I leave Brazil.), or all the bread or the breakfast tapiocas. But basically.
Sorry (I'm not actually sorry, I had a lot of fun doing it) it's such a long post, but at least it has a lot of pictures!

Sunday

You might remember (or not) from last week's post that I went to the market on Sunday. And I had breakfast there, because that's what people do there. (This is actually why I started on Sunday already and not on Monday. I wanted the market breakfast on the post.) I had a tapioca there, with tucumã (is a palm fruit) and Brazil nuts, and some goiaba (=guava) juice.
(Funny story about Brazil nuts. They have so many names in Portuguese: castanha-do-brasil, castanha-da-amazônia, castanha-do-acre, castanha-do-pará... And apparently the one people at least in this area use is castanha-do-pará. Pará is a state, the second largest in Brasil after Amazônas (the state that Manaus is in, and that is basically just loads and loads of rainforest), located between Amazônas and the Atlantic ocean. Anyway, one of the professors (originally British, I think, the professor) here kept calling them castanha-do-brasil during a class, at which point every time the entire class was like "castanha-do-pará!". Because you know, it would be stupid for people from Brazil to call the Brazil nuts. (House MD quotes, anyone?) And actually in Finnish we call them parapähkinä (=para nut) too, so it's not just the Brazilians who use the state and not the country in the name.)
Back to the food. The tapioca was great. It was also huge. The size options were small-meduim-large, and I was like, I guess I can do a medium, small sounds small. Yeah, a small would have been enough. I ate again at about four in the afternoon, and wasn't really very hungry yet even then. But I thought I should eat something.
This is what I ate. I should have taken a picture of it before adding the cream so you would actually see something. But it's essentially pyttipannu: some cassava (which in this form is basically like potato, except stickier and better), chicken, onion, tucumã that I bought at the market. And I had some cream I figured I should get rid of, so I poured that over all of it. Because cream makes everything a bit better, right?



Monday 

 Breakfast. A tapioca. I've gotten into the habit of eating one every morning. Saves time both in the store and in the morning if I don't have to waste time deciding what I want to eat. I usually just put cheese in it, but I got some tucumã and Brazil nuts from the market yesterday, so I put those in too. My guess is at this point is that this is what I will eat every morning this week. It was very good. (I folded it after taking a picture, but I thought this way you can see what's inside.)
If you're still confused about how to make a tapioca, let me clear that up. I made a (possibly) helpful graph of how to make them (a while back, which is why you're not seeing the tapioca I ate this morning):

How I make them, that is. Because there are other ways of making them. I could, for example put the goma (the flour) through a strainer. A sieve? I'm not entirely sure what that thing is called. But the point is to get the lumps off. I never bother. I just take a spatula or a spoon and break the lumps down to small enough. And anyway, the basics of making are the same: spread goma evenly on pan, heat until it sticks together to a panckae. Fill with anything. Eat. (Some people take the tapioca off the heat once it's stuck together and only add fillings after, but I want the cheese to melt in the thing, so I keep it on. You could also flip it and heat from the other side too. Or add some tiny seeds to the goma before spreading it out, so that they are in the tapioca itself. Or put a layer of goma, then the fillings, and some more goma on top to keep it all together, like you saw in the tapioca from the market.)

Ok, tapiocas out of the way (you probably won't see much of them for the rest of the post, unless I put in some really cool fillings some day), let's move on to lunch.
Most of the people here take lunch from home when they come to classes or work at INPA and heat it at the kitchen, but I ate at the restaurant on campus, because I hate coming up with what to cook. So it's easier to let someone else decide. And a meal there is about 10R$ (you pay by weight), which is what I'm used to paying for lunch back in Finland, so it's fine. And, for the purposes of this blog post, it makes more sense to show you food a Brazilian person made instead of what I made. Anyway, here you see, from top clockwise: some tomato-bell pepper-onion salad, which is everywhere, some farofa (the yellow thing), which is a kind of cassava flour, and also everywhere, rice, also everywhere, beans, also everywhere. Then there's a bit of spaghetti (there's actually more rice than spaghetti, but most of the rice is covered in beans), which is something there's always at places like this, for some reason, and finally some chicken.
They eat really weird parts of chicken here. By which I mean it's not actually weird, since they eat the whole chicken, which is a reasonable thing to do. I picked from the pots a drumstick and some fillet (I think), but there was also a bit with some ribs available, and last week I got a neck, which turned out to be very little meat and a lot of vertebrae. It also seems to be typical to just buy an entire ready-fried chicken here, since the places that sell those are all over the place.

Our lesson stretched a little (a lot) long, so I was home at about seven (an eleven-hour day, no biggy. Then I had to study some more.) So I basically just ate what ever (and everything) I had, meaning the rest of the cassava from the weekend (can you get cassava in Finland? The one you use like the potato, not cassava in all the other half a dozen forms they use here. Well, actually all the other forms too.), and the rest of a cabbage I had in the fridge. It didn't look like anything, so I don't have a picture of it. And some ice cream and cookies and fruit.

Tuesday

I'm not going to put up another picture of a tapioca for you, so I'm skipping directly to lunch.

This is a different place than where I ate yesterday (also more expensive, but I wanted to show you food from different places). The basics are pretty much the same. There's some rice, and some pasta, and some chicken and salad. And then there's some fried banana (the brown thing at the bottom), which is so good, but I think it's made from some sort of banana we don't get in Finland. I need to ask someone. The round baked thing in the middle had some cheese in it. All of it was really great.
And, since the place we were eating was also a bakery, I bought some bread rolls. They just look like wheat bread rolls, so I didn't take a picture of them.

Also a cake. Because these seem to be really typical cakes here. Maybe. At least I keep running to them all over the place. I've been wanting to buy a cake for a while now, but until now I haven't had the excuse. Now with this post I do. So I can show you the cake.
I stood there deciding if I want a cake that's half white half chocolate or one that's all white with nuts for quite a few minutes, but eventually ended up with the one with the nuts. Because apparently the nuts are a thing for me this week. I wish there had been some with both chocolate and nuts, that would have been the best. But there wasn't. (In case you're interested, that cake cost like a euro and a half. So that's not a price you would be able to get a cake at the bakery for in Finland. Even if it isn't a big cake.)
I also had some different cake and some passion fruit in class during the afternoon, because people keep bringing in food and sharing it with others. Mostly it's cookies though, the cake and the fruit were both rare occurrences.
On the way home there was this guy selling bananas at a street corner. There are a lot of people here selling fruit or snacks on the street. I have finally decided that the fruits I buy from them can't be poisoned or something, because if the street vendors sold bad fruit, no one would buy them, and that would mean there wouldn't be that many of them. So they must be ok.
Anyway, so I bought some bananas.

Some...
So I guess I know what I'll be eating for the rest of the week. Cake and bananas. But seriously, I seem to spend about half of my time thinking "man, I wish I had some bananas?", so now I decided to stop being ridiculous and buy some bananas, because they're super cheap and super good, and fruits are supposed to be good for you or whatever. So now I have bananas. I don't even think I'll have trouble eating all of them before they get too old. Not only because they're good, but because they're tiny. I've already eaten three just while writing today's bit.
So in the evening I just ate bread and fruit and cake. Because why wouldn't that be a good dinner. The cake was a lot fluffier than I was expecting. But it was really good.

Wednesday

The only difference in my breakfast compared to Monday and Tuesday is the fact that I added some salt. Because I still probably need some more salt. And a banana.

Lunch. Also basically the same as on earlier days (there is some rice under there too), except this time I had fish. Well, I had a bit of fish (the right-most bit in the picture), because that was all that was left when I was getting the food. So I took some chicken too. I don't know what fish it was, though, because I'm not really able to tell the difference between the local fishes, especially if they're in that form, a small piece fried. I would have wanted more of the fish to have a change from all the chicken, but the guy in front of me in the line took all but the little bit. So mostly more chicken.

In the evening I just ate more fruit and bread and cake. Because those are the things I have at home.
I took a picture of the bread, because I decided that I'll put the fruit on the bread. Simply because I can. There's some banana at the bottom, and some guava (pt. goiaba) on top. That's what the red stuff is. In case you people on Finland have no idea what guava looks like. I think you've probably heard the name, though, even if you don't know anything else about it. I had, at least.

Thursday

Ookay. Skipping over breakfast again, because that still hasn't changed. I doubt it will during my entire time here. I mean, even in Finland when I'm at home I've had the same muesli for breakfast almost every day for years. Because it's just easier.

Ok, for lunch I thought I'd walk a little, and went to this place that's actually all the way on the other side of a different campus that we're on. But it was worth it. You see here again the salad-rice-beans-spaghetti-farofa-combo. This time there was some kale in with the rice. It's really common here to have something in the rice, and actually just plain rice as the place on our campus has is quite rare, except obviously when people cook it themselves and just don't bother. It might be kale that's in it (they eat a lot of that here), or some tiny carrot cubes or onion or other vegetables, or some herbs, or beans. Or some tiny ham cubes. That's the most annoying thing people put in the rice, from the perspective of a person who doesn't eat mammals. The rice is a side, how about not making it so that some of us don't eat it? Anyway, I really like having something in the rice other than rice. It's a super-easy way of making it seem fancier.
Ok, the rest of the things. The dark brown thing at the bottom of the picture isn't meat, it's soy, very well seasoned, and fried with onion. I've eaten some soy only a couple of times during my time here, but both times I've been surprised at how good it is. And then, next to the soy, is a lasagna-kind of thing with chicken in the best form it could possibly be. It seems to me that it this country people either eat their chicken whole and grilled, or shredded, like in this case. I guess it's basically pulled chicken, except at least in Finland the pulled turkey that we get anywhere isn't really that good. Mostly because I don't like the way it's seasoned. Because somehow it always tastes the same no matter where I eat it. Also, the meat strands in the pulled turkey and pork in Finland are still quite long, and this chicken is in pieces that are a lot smaller. And the best thing is, you can do literally anything with it. Put it in a lasagna or with pasta or a pie, or pizza, on in a pancake, or a... pastry? (I guess pasteija or possibly a lihapiirakka in Finnish. And yes, I know lihapiirakka translates to meat pie, but all you Finnish people know the difference between a lihapiirakka in Finnish and a meat pie in English.) I've even had some meat balls here that were made out of shredded chicken, and they were excellent. Learning how to make some of it is on my definitely-do-before-leaving-list. Apparently it's very easy, though. You just throw some chicken in cubes into a pot with some water and spices and cook it until the chicken breaks apart. If you want to reduce time you can use a pressure kettle. But still, I want to learn to make it while I'm still here. Because I am not kidding about this, this is the best form or chicken I have ever run into.
Ok, moving on from the chicken. There's a tiny cube of some fish, and some fried bananas on the plate too. Because fried bananas are so good. All in all, an excellent meal, though I got a bit carried away with the chicken and the soy when piling the food on my plate and accidentally ate a little too much, but that's probably ok, since my dinner will once again be bread and fruit and cake.

Except it wasn't. (Yes, I wrote that earlier bit during the lunch break.) My food-day took an unexpected turn as the class ended for the day and it turned out that there is an organic food market practically right next to INPA every Thursday, and that some of the people from the course were going there. So I went with them. And there I had a (vegan) salgado, which is a ball of dough filled with something (in my case tucumã, because apparently tucumã is also the thing for this week) and deep-fried. It was eaten with some mayonnaise, but I didn't include that in the picture, because I wanted you to see the salgado properly instead of just mayonnaise. These are also things that are everywhere here, but I somehow haven't gotten around to try one yet.

I had some carambola juice with it. Which was new. I didn't think they made juice from carambola (it's the star-shaped fruit for anyone who doesn't know). But apparently they do.
And I had some of those banana chips (just one tube, not all the ones in the picture) I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before, some time in the very beginning. Probably in the post about the weird things. They are still great.
And one of the guys bought these mini-oranges, that could be just eaten directly with the skin and offered them to everyone to try, and wow are they weird. Because they taste exactly what you would imagine an orange tastes like with peels, except the whole thing is so small and there's so little peel that it's all good and doesn't taste simply like orange peel. But I am very, very confused about this fruit.

And in case you're confused about the fact that the fruit in the picture looks nothing like an orange, because it's not, well, orange, then I'm right there with you. But for some reason the oranges in this country are green and/or yellow. I haven't seen a single orange orange during my time here. I have no idea, don't ask. What I think makes it more confusing is that they, too, call them oranges. I mean laranjas, but that's also the color in also Portuguese. So yeah.
I did also eat some bread and fruit and cake in the evening after I got home, but only because they haven't gone bad yet, but I do need to keep eating them to make sure they will stay that way until they're all gone. And because they're good. Though in the end, I did feel like I probably ate a little too much today. But no can do.

Friday

Today I finally had some reasonable amount of fish at lunch. Once again I have no idea what that fish is, because the only couple of fish I'm able to name from around here are way, way bigger than this one. What you see on my plate there is the back half of it. I generally don't like eating fish that small, because small fish have small bones, and small bones means you have to pick through the food really carefully to find them before putting the thing in your mouth. (Yeah, I don't like food that includes things I'm not supposed to eat. Like bones. Or tendons. Or skin. Tendons and fish bones are the worst, because they're way too invisible until it's too late.) But after picking through the fish for a while I got all the bones out, and it was fine. Not super-good, but good enough.

And then I had this guava-flavoured pocket-cookie-thing for dessert. I've had those before. They're good. They're like the local equivalent of jaffa cakes, I think, except without the chocolate, and they're not as good.
I also bought (from the supermarket where I got the cookie from) some soda. They have this soda here that's flavoured like guaraná, which is a fruit that I'd never heard of before coming here, and I doubt at least you in Finland have heard of either. Here it's basically only used for making a soda, according to Wikipedia. Also according to me. I haven't seen it anywhere else except in the soda.

But it's good. And you can't get it in Europe. No, no wait, apparently you can get it in Portugal. But that's about as far in Europe as you can get form Finland, so that's not helpful at all. So now I'm drinking it here as long as I can. Although I think I prefer the lemon and orange sodas, but those you can get anywhere.
Anyway, I got the soda because there's a party tonight, because our two week course on community ecology finished today. Because apparently a course ending is reason enough to have a party. And the logic is everyone pays a bit and we get some collective snacks, and everyone brings their own drinks, which I guess for most people means beer or possibly wine or something, but I'm all "beer tastes terrible and is expensive so I'm gonna buy this two-liter bottle of soda for four reals instead, because it's good and cheap".
(I also bought it because I wanted to share it with you, because it's not a thing that exists in Finland. Also in case you're wondering, I got two liters of it, because the size options here are basically ~0.33 l, which is too small if I'm taking it with me to a party, and the 2 liters. So yeah.)

Here is the snacktable at the party. There were actually two cakes, but the other one didn't fit in the picture. And someone brought in some peanuts and banana chips after I had already taken the picture. The ball-things in the pizza-boxes are... I think they actually called them bolinhas, which literally means little balls. They're just some kind of dough with cheese or meat or something inside. There were some also with chicken, but those were more tear-drop than ball shaped and they're called coxinhas. Which is just a word for that kind of thing but tear-drop shaped and with chicken in it. Apparently the shape and the chicken always go together for some reason. And these were tiny versions of this, they're usually bigger. Streer-corner food. They were really good, which was terrible, because they're just small enough that you keep thinking "I'll have just one more", and them you end up eating way too many of them.

And then there was the pão de queijo. Literally meaning the bread of cheese. One of the people in the class made these there, so we had them fresh from the oven. This is a really typical thing in Brazil, though this is the first time during my trip I've had any. But Brazil in enormous, and I've been told there's huge variation in also the popularity of pão de queijo, and that if I was in maybe São Paulo or somewhere I would have been eating these every day. So it's popular here too, just less popular than in other places around the country. A thing that I did not expect was that instead of putting the cheese inside the thing like with the bolinhas, the cheese actually goes in the dough, so that it's quite literally a bread made of cheese, and some other things that make it more bread-y and less fried cheese. I'm definitely getting the recipe, although I was told that for them you need some kind of sour cassava flour (apparently different from both farofa and goma de tapioca), which I was told is a little hard to find even here. So I don't know. Anyone in Finland know if I can get it there?

Saturday

I didn't eat anything special all day. A tapioca in the morning. I made some tuna pasta in the afternoon for lunch, because I wanted something easy and familiar. I finished the cake and the bananas and almost all the guavas I had. And since most of those are things I've already talked about and tuna pasta isn't in any way Brazilian at all, but instead my go-to-food when I don't want to decide what to eat, I don't want to get into today's foods more than this. (I was planning on doing some brigadeiros, just to show you what they are, but after all the food at yesterday's party, I am not in the mood of chocolate balls. So I'll do that some other time.)
Instead what I want to tell you about as the last thing about the food is the tambaqui. I've already mentioned tambaqui a couple of times. It's a fish that lives in the Amazon. They eat it a lot here. Here's a picture of some grilled tambaqui I had a while back:

There you can see first of all the rice with beans (black-eyed! I'm only able to guess because of Bohnanza) and tomato-onion-salad in the bowls behind the fish. They were a part of the meal, as they are a part of pretty much all the meals. But you can also see the whole fish. It's less than a meter long, so it's not a small fish, but it's also not enormous. I mean, pirarucu, that also lives in the Amazon, is 2 meters and 100 kilos. So that's a big fish.
Tambaqui (fin. mustapaku) is a relative of the piranhas, but it is a vegetarian. Look at those teeth on the fish, they're amazing. You can't actually see them very well in that picture, you'll have to zoom. I thought I had taken a picture of just the teeth as I took these pictures of it, but apparently not. Either way, it has it has very vegetarian teeth. Which I find confusing on a fish, because I somehow imagine that fish either have sharp teeth for eating other fish, or they have no teeth. But I was wrong. This one has cow-teeth.

The reason I personally like tambaqui so much, aside from the fact that it tastes great (despite being a vegetarian, my understanding is that it's usually the big carnivorous fish that people find tasty), is the bones. Just look at the size of those bones! Yes, those are the bones of the fish in the picture above. The bones are huge, which means it is very, very easy to pick them out before eating. It's actually impossible to put one of those in your mouth without noticing, because it doesn't fit in your mouth. Unless you bend it. The point is that this is finally a fish whose bones I don't mind, because they're so big. Ok, it also has these more normal-size bones on the back-side of the spine that branch about half-way through. I've never seen branching fish bones before. But they're big too, because a fish this size would have big bones even if it didn't happen to have these enormous ribs. So it's all good.

I think this ended up being a pretty good overview of the food here. I want to add a few more random pointers, though.
1. People keep telling be Brazilians really love sugar. I noticed that on the lectures in the past couple of weeks. People really did have a lot of cookies and stuff with them. And that was pretty much everyone.
2. I also noticed on the lecture that the most common fruit people had with them (because they also had some fruit, not just cookies) was an apple. An apple. Of all the fruits that they have to choose from here, the one a lot of people seem to choose for a snack is an apple. It doesn't even grow here. Apples are European-latitude fruits. So why in the world do people keep eating apples here, all their native (or native to the tropics, at least) fruits are better. Not to say apples aren't good, but the tropicals are better. I guess apples are a handy fruit to eat on the go, though. But still.

3. This is what the local potatoes look like. What. why do those potatoes have all the wrinkles on them? What is happening? (Btw, they call it the sweet potato, to which I said yeah, that's not what sweet potato refers to in English. In English sweet potato is the orange thing, and then I showed them a picture, and they were like never seen before.) The potatoes here are really good, though. It took me a while to realise why that is. It's because all the potatoes are new potatoes. They don't ever have to eat the potatoes that have been sitting in the basement all winter, because it's never winter. And the new potatoes are good anywhere.

Ok, I think that's enough. Most of you have probably stopped reading by now, but no can do. I apparently had a lot to say about the food.

~matu