Let's eat!

Who’s hungry? Because I have quite the backload of food observations for the enjoyment of your stomachs! It will have to be imagined enjoyment, but I have faith in your imaginations.

So, you all may remember that one of my first meals here included soup with a chicken foot it in. Well, things haven’t really gotten stranger, but they also haven’t been much more “normal.” Or at least they weren’t until I got used to them.

Food here, in general, has some very defining characteristics. They are, to quote a friend who also studied here, “carbs, carbs, carbs, carbs, and more carbs!” I’d add a bunch of salt in there somewhere, but that honestly pretty accurate.

Now, keeping the abundance of carbs in mind, people here ARE very creative with what they have to work with. And the sheer variety of fruit that is available here makes up for the lack of differences in the main course.

A typical lunch here (which, if you remember, is the big meal of the day) consists of a bowl of soup (with a starch and some carbs in it usually. Unless it has a foot, then it’s mostly just foot and broth. Or maybe that’s just all I noticed…), a piece of meat, a “salad” (this means there is a spoonful of some sort of vegetable-like thing cut up, often salted, and placed on your plate), and lake of minestrone next to a mountain of rice. (When I come home, DO NOT FEED ME RICE. Thanks.) If you’re out eating, you will also receive a tiny little desert at the end of your meal. What this desert actually consists of is usually in part a mystery. A mystery that is often not resolved even after you finished eating it. (I know that was a strawberry, but what was on top of it? Or that spongy thing that looked like a cheesecake, but tasted more like whipped yogurt? What do they make this stuff out of???)

Don’t get me wrong, I really do love Ecuadorian lunches, but they are just all so similar.

One wonderful thing about food here is that it is CHEAP. If I have to pay more than 3 dollars for lunch, I feel like I’m spending too much money. I good lunch usually costs me $2.50, but if I don’t have a lot of time to eat and pick something up at the bus station, I can eat pretty well for about $1.

There’s honestly way too much to say about the food here not to break it down into sections. First up: fruit. Just about any fruit you can think of grows here, which is just wonderful if you ask me. There’s yellow and white pineapple, a couple different kinds of mangos, pears, papaya, passion fruit, a jillion kinds of orangey citrusy fruits, delicious strawberries, mora (a kind of raspberry/blackberry type fruit), and more! The only thing that is really disappointing about the fruit, is that the apples here aren’t very good. And they don’t have cherries. Of course, I might just be spoiled by home-grown Michigan stuff, but I really do miss good apples. A couple of the fruits I’ve tried here, that I’d never seen before, are absolutely delicious. Guanabana and pitajaya are the two that come to mind most readily, for they are delicious. I know that one can buy guanabana juice in the states, but I don’t think pitajaya exists outside of the tropics. I could be wrong, but I certainly had never seen it before I got here. 

Dairy. Is interesting. People here really love their mozzarella. Like, REALLY. In the grocery store, there’s a small portion of a shelf next to the deli devoted to some expensive hard cheeses. However, there is a portion of the wall about 10 ft long devoted to mozzarella. And nothing else. Next to that is a bit devoted to queso fresco, which is kind of like a hard cheese before it has been hardened. Sorta. But there is a real discrepancy between the amount of mozzarella and everything else. You can tell what kind of cheese these people like. Anyway, more dairy. Milk here comes in bags (I have yet to see any in a carton), and is generally drunk warm. Yogurt is drinkable (seriously, completely drinkable and super runny) and comes in a number of flavors, but not quite the variety we have in the states (we kind of go a little overboard I think). I really like the yogurt though. It’s delicious, and makes for a good portable snack, being drinkable and all.

Eating meat here, as you may have guessed, is an adventure. When I go out to restaurants, I have started asking for the “carne” (meat) option, just because if I ask for chicken, I have no idea what part of the chicken I’m going to get (I usually end up with the tail. This may contribute to my carne preference). Don’t get me wrong, the chicken is usually wonderful, but I’m not always sure how to eat it. Ordering fish is also a good option, but only if you aren’t freaked out by heads and fins and scales and bones. The only thing they bother to do with the fish before coking it is take the guts out. My host dad’s favorite part of the fish is the head. I give him mine (or rather he just puts all the heads on his plate when he serves up the fish). Carne here refers to any kind of meat that is not chicken. (Vegetarians have a hard time with this. If you say you don’t eat meat, people will say “Oh! Then we will give you chicken!”) This means there is a wide variety of what you may be getting if you order the carne option. You could end up with a thin piece of beef, well done, but cooked well (as in, tasty), or you might get a hunk of pork, cooked exactly the same way. Who knows! Some of the best meat I have had though has been baked pig, and street food meat. (There is a picture of that meat somewhere on facebook. It was delicious.) When the meat is fried, they call it “fritada” (literally: fried. Go figure.) and that’s my favorite.

Carbs. Where to start? Bread here is delicious. I don’t believe in white wonderbread (I used to, but I’ve changed my mind), and neither does Ecuador. Which is fine with me! I get to eat really good, really cheap bread every day if I want to! Rice is everywhere here, though not in any sort of variety. It’s all white, and it all tastes the same. Just like people here are magicians with cement, they are magicians with potatoes. Maybe not quite as magical as with the cement, but they do have some wonderful ideas. There’s baked potatoes and boiled potatoes with all sorts of sauces to put on top, potatoes in soups, mashed potatoes mixed with cheese and fried, and, a staple, French fries. Though the French fries are by FAR the least impressive. (Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew: po-ta-toes [if you don’t know the reference, it’s ok.]) Yuca is also pretty common, though it is used way more in the Oriente than here in the Sierra. It’s tasty. Especially when fried.

Dessert here varies. Cake is often more like sweet bread, though at times it is moist enough to be good. The cake my host mom made for her birthday party was tasty, though undecorated and lacking any sort of frosting. Noting this, Susie sprinkled a packet of splenda on top to make it look prettier. There are some interesting practices surrounding cake eating as well. At birthdays of the youngest generation, the “cumpleañera” or “cumpleañero” (birthday girl/boy) is required to “matar” (kill) the cake by biting into it without using any sort of utensil. Of course, the other family members find it fun to shove the cumpleañera’s face into the cake and everyone gets a good laugh out of it. But there are other deserts as well. Ice cream here is amazing. It comes in a billion different flavors and I could eat it forever. Chocolate, on the other hand, is generally either awful or overly expensive. (And by that I mean costs the same or only slightly more that it would in the US. What can I say? Food prices here are spoiling me.) There are some delicious candies sold on the sides of all the roads leading in and out of Quito that I have been on: coconut balls made with molasses or other substances, a gel-y candy made from guayaba (I think), toffee stretched right there in front of you, and often pieces of sugar cane to chew on.

A specific food I would like to share, that all of you probably THINK you know, is tamales. Here, I have had 3 distinct types of tamales. One: a tamale without any filling, eaten with cheese. Two: your typical Mexican tamale, only wrapped in big leaves instead of corn husks. And three: the sweet tamale. These are great. They are made from a sweeter corn I think, filled with a bit of chicken and a piece of a hard-boiled egg, and occasionally have a couple of raisins in them. They are also made with leaves. SO GOOD!

One of the strange things about food here is the method of refrigeration. Or rather, lack thereof. Many things I would put in the fridge, just aren’t. Not that it matters much, they are things that don’t necessarily need it, but they last longer that way. For example, my family often uses the oven to store cooked meat and baked goods instead of putting the meat in the fridge and the baked goods in Tupperware.

The saddest thing about the general alimentation here is the lack of real coffee. These people live in the middle of coffee country, and yet, they drink instant. I don’t get it. The only good that comes of the instant coffee in my house, is that I can make a mocha in the morning with my glass of milk.

Well, I hope I made you hungry! Have a good week! I’ll be going to the coast and the Oriente this week because the University is on vacation, so I’ll try to post between the two trips, but no guarantees. You may not hear from me for a while!

P.S. Trix here is in the original shapes. Not the stupid multi-colored balls they make in the states now. It’s like I’m a kid again!!!

P.P.S. Pictures of rocks here!