Brazil 7 - Eating Out No Brasil

These are things they don't say in any of the stuff I'd read on Brazil...

In Brazil, the portions specified on the menu usually serve far more than one person (but the menus don't tell you this or indeed how many they serve), and it is quite normal for a table to receive only one or two dishes of main course, and for the plates to already be on the table when the diners sit down.

They say in Italy that it is very hard to be a vegetarian and eat out. In Brazil, it is very hard to get vegetables at all when you eat out. I was at an upmarket Italian restaurant yesterday, and of 100 or so dishes on the menu, only one that I noticed came with vegetables. And because of the contraints hinted at above, none of the four main courses that were delivered to our table of 9 or so had vegetables. Potatoes of various varieties and rice are common, and some dishes contain beans and/or olives. But I mentioned to a Brazillian that in England we are supposed to eat 5 helpings of fruit or veg per day. He laughed and guessed that he ate 1. And that seems to be the expected norm.

Because of that (and because it is easy to order), I tend to drink fruit juice when eating out. Now fruit juice comes in two major varieties. Normal fruit juice is sweetened, but occasionally you find somewhere that does very very nice unsweetened fruit juice, at which point it seems normal in Brazil to request extra sweetener.

And that brings me neatly onto puddings. I'm normally a big fan of puddings, and I often like them quite sweet, so one might think I'd be on to a winner here. What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer quantity of sugar...

For example, in a fairly upmarket restaurant, I ordered apple pie and ice cream. was glad that I had when I tried a friend's chocolate mousse, which seemed to consist almost entirely of sugar. But then this came...

Points to note:

• The "apple pie" consists mostly of confectioners' custard (sweeter than in the UK), with a small quantity of apple on top, matched by a roughly equal quantity of brown sugar on top of that
• The ice cream appears to be coloured by some bizarre synthetic chemical, and does not actually display evidence of having made contact with strawberries
• The glace cherry fragment was only added for aesthetic reasons - the whole ice cream was roughly as sweet as glace cherries usually are
• I did not manage to finish this pudding - the ice cream was too sweet
• There is a bottle of artificial sweetner liquid in the background.

It's also worth another comment on the phenomenon of sweet pizzas...

• Brigadeiro is roughly what was pictured in the previous discussion of this, except with condensed milk as well
• The bottom entry on that menu is caramelised apple and confectioners' custard pizza. Now, I know I'm a big fan of custard, but no. Just no.

If I had to make a choice now between being vegetarian for life and eating normal Brazillian food for life, I'd pick vegetarianism at the drop of a hat. It doesn't surprise me at all that there is an epidemic of diabetes among the middle classes here. It only surprises me that no-one seems to be trying to do anything about it except the manufacturers of artificial sweetener.

Brazil 2 - Food and Drink

I'm holding off the weightier matters of the trip for a bit - I want more time to reflect and get experience on some of them before writing much. Instead, I'd like to discuss a subject very close to my heart - food and drink.

An awful lot of the differences between food and drink in the UK and in Brazil are down to climate. For example, I've been here nearly a week, and I don't think the temperature has dropped below 20C, day or night.

So I haven't yet come across anywhere that has two taps for water. There isn't much point having an extra water heater if it's at 25C normally. And water at 25C stays fresh for only a very short time - bacteria breed like crazy. As a result, tap water in Brazil is pretty much undrinkable - in many areas it's dangerous, and in the big towns it's often chlorinated to nearly the level of swimming pools in the UK.

Milk, too, is off. And if it isn't, it goes off very quickly. I haven't yet seen anywhere that sells fresh milk here. Instead, milk comes in three main varieties - UHT, powdered and condensed. Because of that, cereal is unusual for breakfast, and not many people drink tea. It saddens me to think that people think the English drink vast quantities of a beverage which here is generally made with UHT milk.

Missing, too, are lots of standard English / European vegetables, which tend to prefer a somewhat cooler climate. But in their place are large quantities of all sorts of different fruits, some of which I've heard of and some of which I haven't. Passion fruit is popular, as are oranges, bananas, melons, pineapples, lots of sorts of berries, and so on. Some are really nice. Some are absolutely disgusting. I tried some tamarind juice today, and I'd feel guilty pouring something that horrible on my plants, in case it killed them.

The fruit doesn't seem to go off easily - I've had bananas which have looked really bruised, and in the UK would be a kind of mush, but which were absolutely fine on the inside and which taste much better than the usual ones we get in the UK. I dread to think what they do to bananas before they reach British shops...

Another huge difference is the sugar. Sugar is easy to grow in Brazil, and they eat vast quantities of it. Fruit juice, as bought in the supermarket, is usually pre-sweetened. Brazillian coffee is often served with shovelfuls of sugar and a small amount of coffee. It is quite normal to have bottles of artificial sweetener liquid on the table at meals. People look oddly at me for drinking unsweetened juice. Buffets seem to consist largely of fruit and cake, and it's quite normal to eat very sugary things for breakfast, even among adults. I've been brushing my teeth quite a lot...

This has knock-on effects even as far as pizza. Among favourite pizza toppings here (without tomato, of course) are banana & brown sugar, which was ok, and chocolate (yes, chocolate pizza), which was a little OTT even for my liking.

Random Thoughts

I was in a supermarket the other day, and was disturbed by just how much more space is given to fizzy drinks than to fruit juice. I mean - who drinks more fizzy than fruit juice anyway? I think I might have done for about a year when I was a teenager.

Today I've sung two great songs about the cross - And Can it Be and Oh to see the dawn. And what struck me was just how little we often pay attention to the words of great hymns we're used to, especially when they've got lively tunes. I remember years ago reading through a hymnbook with a new Christian - teaching them hymns and so on. We got to "And Can it Be", and my reaction was just to sing it quickly and skate over it. But my friend broke down in tears, because she actually paid attention to the words...

And can it be, that I should gain
An interest in the Saviour's blood? Died he for me, who caused his pain, For me who him to death pursued? Amazing love, how can it be, that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Now it is that "Oh to see the dawn" has a better tune for the words, or is it just that we're less familiar with it? Because I'm always moved when I sing it, and I just welly And Can it Be out without getting moved so much...

Food Labelling

Labels on sealed opaque food containers generally carry a picture of the food that is inside.

A bit of me feels sorry for Koreans (or other such nationalities) on finding out that this food doesn't taste as good as it looks...

Good News

Some good news for everyone this Christmas...

Except for the waistline that is, and for those struggling with food addictions. I honestly don't understand why we as a society treat food addictions any differently from alcohol or drug addictions, and yet we do. Or why gluttony is such an easily overlooked sin. Or, for that matter, why so much of the church seems to hold a neo-Platonist view of food that says that if it tastes nice it must be evil.

They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.
1 Timothy 4:3-5, NIV

So enjoy chocolate, but enjoy it responsibly!

Custard!

I do like Custard. Hence the name really - it's good on so many levels. It goes really well with almost all cakes (Carrot is the only notable counter-example). It's a wonderful non-Newtonian fluid, with all kinds of interesting colloidal properties. In the right circumstances, it can be used as an explosive.

But that bag contains 1000 servings when full. That's a lot of custard!

Thanks to Su for the photo!

John's Thoroughly Nice Chicken Enchiladas

I do quite a bit of experimental cookery. Sometimes the results are odd or dubious. Sometimes they are quite nice. And sometimes they are better than anything I've had when eating out. Thinking about it, they seem to be at their best when freestyling vaguely close to traditional recipies. This is one of those.

(serves 2)

• Preheat oven to 200C
• In a frying pan and while heating, mix about enough oil to fry something gently with the same amount of honey. Add a large pinch of hot chilli powder and a decent sprinkling of garlic powder
• In that mix, fry about 150g of chicken, chopped into pieces no larger than 2x3cm in their smaller two dimensions, stirring as necessary.
• When it's nearly fully cooked, add about half a tin of peach slices (without juice)
• After frying them too for a couple of minutes, add half a tin of chopped tomatoes, a small tin of sweetcorn, a large handful of chopped spinach, a Knorr beef stock cube and a couple of large pinches of mixed herbs.
• Boil, stirring fairly frequently, until it's nearly the thickness of sauce rather than soup.
• Use 60% of it, including all the meat, as the fillings for three soft tortillas. Roll and place them in an oven-proof dish.
• Add the other half of the tin of tomatoes, and peach slices, including all the juice, to the remainder, along with a crumbled digestive biscuit and about 50g of crumbled Cheshire cheese. Heat and mix well, until the sauce is fairly smooth.
• Pour the sauce over the tortillas, and bake for 20 mins.
• Eat

Purple Peppers

I bought a purple pepper from Sainsbury's the other day, because I wanted to know what it would taste like.

The cashier also said she wondered what it would taste like.

It was incredibly bland.

There seems to be this dumb idea that has got into the heads of food-selling people that people care primarily what food looks like rather than what it tastes like. Just try apples from a supermarket! And it's rubbish. I don't know where the idea comes from. I'd far rather have something that looked dodgy but was really tasty than something that looked all purple and shiny, but didn't taste of anything. And I think I'm in the majority for once on this.