Foods of Brazil and Guyana!

Here's another entry in our popular series about the incredibly healthy food we've been eating around the world.

Brazil:

In Brazil, there are a lot of pay-by-weight buffet restaurants, but we weren't quite prepared for the pay-by-weight ice cream parlor!



It was fun because it let us try lots of strange (to us) local fruit flavors we may not have gotten otherwise. But since Andy can put away a lot of ice cream, it didn't end up being such a bargain.

Speaking of dairy, yours truly had to sample some yogurts, of course. You wouldn't believe how many different types of Activia they have there--big tubs, small cups, big and small drinkable versions...here I am with a carrot-orange-honey flavored one. (Note the "experimente" sign I'm pointing to on the container...I'm not sure this experimente in flavors really worked so well).



And here's a locally-made, prune-flavored drinkable yogurt I tried at the Boa Vista bus station, where we changed buses from Manaus heading for Guyana. Yum.



In Brazil, dulce de leche (in Portuguese: doce de leite) comes in jars, tubs, and many other forms. We chose the squeeze tube and had it on bread (lack of peanut butter leads to desperate measures!).



And of course, there were the amazing doce de leite filled churros, which I posted a picture of in my Manaus post.

Guyana:
The offerings of the Stabroek Market, the main market in Georgetown, Guyana's capital, really deserve their own post. Here are some snaps we took there:

Yum, fish.


A triangle-shaped flaky pastry filled with "pine jam" (pineapple jam). (Jews, this was kind of like a hammentaschen!)


On the right, the "cashew fruit," a tasty sweet-and-sour fruit that comes from the "French cashew" tree, different from the cashew nut tree. On the left, a not-so-tasty small fruit with edible seeds and flesh that had little taste and the consistency of cotton.

Both are usually sold in bunches but when we said we just wanted to buy one to try, the vendor would not take any money from us for them.

Boy walking around the market and selling live crabs on a string. Apparently he thought we looked like the types of people who might be interested in this, because he tried to sell one to Andy.

(P.S. It's school holiday time right now in Guyana, so we didn't worry too much about the occasional kid we saw, er, helping out at the marketplace...)

More tasty pastries. On the right, a pastry filled with more pine jam. On the left, cassava bread, which was dense and sweet and also had coconut in it.


Sugar-cane juice. It was surprisingly a little bit bitter with the traces of molasses still there from the raw cane. When you buy stuff with "evaporated cane juice" in it, ostensibly this is what the manufacturer starts with...

Side note--they love their little plastic bags in Guyana and put all sorts of commestibles in them that you wouldn't think should go in baggies. Like any fresh juice we bought, and snacks you'd eat with a spoon, such as...

Channa! (Tasty Indian-spiced chickpeas. This was at a different market, later in the day, but same idea as Stabroek. God, I love chickpeas.)


The one juice I got that didn't come in a baggie was this fresh coconut water, which came still in the coconut.


Also, please note that in this final picture I am wearing a different one of my three shirts! Yes, I do occasionally change my clothes.

In conclusion, the street food in Guyana was really tasty and darn cheap--I think that everything I posted pics of here cost 50 cents US or less. Here in Suriname, where we are now, there's not nearly as much fun street food and it costs more (we've been paying nearly $1 apiece for our sno cones, painful). So in addition to the lovely interior and bouncy flatbed trucks, the food is something we will surely miss about Guyana.