The best part of travelling for me is the food, and I want to try as many new things as possible. These days now I'm a stricter vegetarian it is more difficult. If it is not strange enough to be a foreigner, I also refuse to eat meat (and risk offending the kind locals always trying to feed me).
 |
| breakfast |
The tropical fruits are by far my favourite, most of which are made into juice with either water or milk. Medellin is covered in mango trees and on every corner green mangoes are sold with lemon and salt. Even the fruits that are familiar to me (mangoes, avocados, papaya, passionfruit) have several different sorts here... tiny sweet orange mangoes, enormous avocadoes. In the mountains, guava trees are common in the forest, and everyone here is sick to death of them and wonder why I pick them up because they are often full of worms (good protein for a vegetarian). A newly discovered favourite is lulo, a bitter fruit that grows on a prickly bush and is covered with fine spikey hairs, once you get through the prickles it is wonderfully refreshing in a juice.
 |  |
| Juice | Tropical fruits |
Most of the Colombian cuisine is extremely heavy, lots of fried food, meat and starch. They must be the only people who can serve four different sorts of starch on one plate. A typical breakfast has eggs, arepas (corn bread), rice and beans (calentado), potato and platano (fried starchy banana), and pork/sausages.
 |  |
| Fried banana with cheese | Fried platano chips with garlic sauce |
In the country of coffee there is a very different coffee culture to the Australian/European way... espresso machines are rare (I've only found one so far) and most places serve instant coffee. Chocolate seems more common to drink at home, which is prepared in a big jug with panela (sugar cane) and whisked viciously. Yesterday I was surprised to find a large piece of cheese floating in my chocolate, a firm homemade cheese that soaked up the chocolate and was delicious.
  |
| Street food: various fried doughs of corn or beans, usually filled with cheese, and lots of fruit |
In the villages, the food is that of the farmer, simple peasant food that is hearty and tasty, beans, tortilla soup, fried yuca (cassava), tamales... the packed lunches are wrapped in leaves and tied with string, a leak-proof, non-toxic and biodegradable packaging!
 |  |
| Tamales in preparation | Lunch wrapped in leaves |
The drink of choice of the farmers is chicha, originally made my the native americans of the Andes, a fermented brew made from sugar cane and corn. It looks like dirty pond water, smells like a science experiment, and tastes a bit like strong cider. It is definitely a man's drink and puts hair on your chest, but I am acquiring a taste for it.
 |  |
| Chicha | Coco Loco cocktail |
No comments:
Post a Comment