Foods of Brazil, Part Dois

After our first successful Foods of Brazil post, we are back for more.

Coconuts are loved in Brazil, especially northern Brazil. This is an decent size supermarket, but not massive. Here is the selection of coconut milks. In the US, we're lucky to be able to find any coconut milk when we need it.

While we were on the boat to Belem, Tara got very excited because most of the Acai gets shipped through Belem, making it probably the cheapest Acai in the world. She bought this huge bag of it (liquids in bags are common in this part of the world) for about $1.50.
I wish I had a picture of her face when she first tasted it. She thought it was so gross that she asked how long until the boat left. The guy said 30 minutes and off she ran to find sugar. Here she is, looking somewhat dejected, but with enough sugar to take care of the problem.
It is impossible to underestimate the importance of cookies in the Brazilian diet. They are everywhere, in every imaginable flavor. We go through about a roll of them per day. So, when we reached the big city of Rio and discovered that some stores are solely devoted to selling cheap cookies (biscuits, as they call them), we were very excited.
The first few days we were in Brazil, we ended up eating rather expensive meals on the main streets. We got sick of that quickly, and discovered that much better meals exist for much less money. This is a very typical meal and generally costs about $3 if you look around.
We haven't eaten real food at McDonald's, but we do sometimes have ice cream there. Cones are sometimes 50 cents in Brazil. We try not to buy unless that are 50 cents or less.
Brazil has these food carts that sell "salgados", which are lots and lots of random snacks. This one was some kind of grain fried with ground beef inside. The deal on salgados is one of them and a glass of juice for $0.50. We try not to pay more.
I bought these solely because the bag said they were bacon flavor. I would compare them to the things that come with Chinese restaurant soup, except that they were a decent artificial bacon flavor.
This one isn't food we ate, but is interesting. This comes from the favela (shanty town) of Rio, where apparently the undeveloped eggs inside female chickens are considered somewhat of a delicacy, so they leave them attached.
If you want to get Tara to buy a yogurt, call it limited edition or experimental. This was limited edition cashew nut, which Tara was really happy to find. Unfortunately, it apparently didn't taste like cashews at all.
All over Brazil, they sell these massive blocks of guava jelly. Next to them, there is always the similar looking yellow/brown stuff. We finally bought one and it turned out to be sweet potato flavor. Not really that good.
We are told that Sao Paolo has the highest concentration of Japanese people outside of Japan. As a result, most of the street food is Japanese. We had a big bowl of yakisoba noodles for lunch. Tara is mostly smiling because there were vegetables in the noodles.
We'll have at least one more post on foods in Brazil (or maybe combined with foods of other countries).