food update

I don't know if you dudes were aware of this, but we Leaders of the Free World are giant wusses about food. I just had paella (I think that's it...the Spanish seafood and rice dish), apple pie with grapes, ice cream and beer for lunch. The thing about paella is that it is delicious. The other thing is that it is terrifying. It looks like something from Indiana Jone and the Temple of Doom. There are little purple tentacles sticking out all over the place and whole midget-lobsters floating around in the rice. I mean it. About six inches long, all their legs and claws and eyeish things included. I know people who can't de-shell shrimp, which I think is kind of sad. But I had no idea how to get the edible bits of a lobster out of their fortress. I just kind of hacked away at it until something mushy-looking that I thought I could eat popped out.

Brazilians eat a lot more of animals than we do, I think. Full feijoada uses just about every possible edible thing on an animal, including feet and ears. Just about every type of Bahian cuisine I've heard of uses another improbable part; stomachs and intestines and all kinds of nonsense. Brandon's São Paulo favorite is roasted chicken hearts. And that, my friends, grosses me out. Not just me, either. I think most people I know would at least raise an eyebrow. Maybe not in the deep South; maybe it's just us Yanks that are pansies?

In other food news, last week ate what basically amounted to a giant plate of cream cheese and jam. There's a dessert called Romeo and Juliet. It's candied Goiaba fruit on top of slices of a very mild white cheese from Minas Gerais. It is stupidly delicious. The other day we didn't have any Goiabada (the name for the candied paste bar thing) or cheese, but we did have Goiaba jam and Requeijão, which is like white nacho cheese, kind of. They use it like cream cheese, on toast and sandwiches and stuff. Francisca put blobs of each on her plate and ate little globs of each together. It was the gooiest thing I've ever eaten.