A taste of (the) America(s)--Foods of Panama and Costa Rica

Considering that we spent a week in Panama and only two days in Costa Rica, this post will be heavily skewed toward Panamanian foods. Which, it turns out, thanks to its long history of close ties with the United States, often strongly resemble American foods. (But not always!)

One of the first things we bought on our first morning in Panama City were batidos, or fruit smoothies, from one of the many blender-filled stalls on the street that was whizzing them up fresh for passers-by. Many Latin American countries have batidos, but Panama's stood out for 1) being cheap and 2) having the secret ingredient of a dash of vanilla extract thrown in. (The other ingredients were fruit, evaporated milk, ice, and a few spoons of sugar.) My favorite was papaya and my spouse's favorite was banana, though the peach and pineapple ones we tried weren't bad, either! Sadly, we have no pictures of said batidos, which came in not-very-photogenic (or environmentally-friendly) styrofoam cups.

On to the foods we do have pictures of!

Andy's "second breakfast"--a grape sno cone. Again, sno cones are not uncommon in Latin America, but Panama's were cheap (25 to 30 cents) and came in all of Andy's favorite flavors: His third breakfast that day was a pineapple sno cone and his fourth breakfast was a mint one.


Panama had a different treat in store for me...lots of different kinds of yogurt! Even including some locally-produced, preservative-free ones with crazy creative flavors--here I am about to try a papaya-melon-pistacio yogurt. It wasn't quite as amazing as the label made it sound, but still pretty fun.

Andy and I went out to dinner on our first night in Panama City. I was excited that the local beer cost just $1...

...and Andy was excited that we got free tap water at our table! Panama is the very first country we have been to that apparently felt confident enough in the quality of its tap water to serve it freely at restaurants, American-style. Being usually disgustingly sweaty and thirsty by dinnertime, we enjoyed this perk immensely.

Peanut M&Ms! Another yummy piece of America that was newly available/affordable in Panama. Only 65 cents, less than I'd pay for a pack from a streetside vendor in NYC.

In the Colon free zone, we took a break from searching for a new camera to eat pancakes. Yup, good old American-style pancakes, with good old fake-maple, Aunt Jemima-like syrup, sold from a street vendor (of course) at the rate of two fluffy ones for 90 cents.

That morning on the fancy tourist train, we had received some complimentary snack boxes, filled with American-style treats like Pringles and sandwich cookies. Also included were some mint sucking candies, and I gave mine to Andy because I hate mints.

Hours later, I noticed that Andy's tongue was bright blue. Since we thought we had eaten all the same foods all day, we had to wracked our brains for a good 10 minutes trying to figure out what could possibly have turned it that color, before I finally remembered that he had eaten one of the icky mints.

I' ve already posted this picture, but I think it bears repeating. It is hard to overstate Andy's joy at discovering that that American institution and his favorite restaurant of all time, Dairy Queen, has seven branches in Panama City. When we finally spotted one in the distance at the bus station food court on our second day in town, Andy practically ran over some poor little Panamanian who had the misfortune of standing in between Andy and his DQ.

Two more things that Andy loves are smoked things and cashews, so when we found these packets of smoked cashews at the supermarket in Panama, we had to try them. Turns out that they were not actually smoked, just covered in a crumbly, smoke-flavored coating. Not terrible, but not worth the $0.99 we paid for each packet. (And it turns out they were imported from Brazil, btw.)

Moving on to the purely Panamanian, but completely inedible, here are some fun palm fruits that were hanging off a tree along Pipeline Road where we went birding. I was just testing out the super-zoom on the new camera with this shot. (Conclusion: Pretty super.)

On to Boquete, a cool-climated, flower-filled highlands town in Panama that I really liked. In part because I could sit in the garden outside of our hostel room and eat tutti-frutti flavored yogurt (70 cents) with a fresh granola bar (75 cents) from the bakery around the corner crumbled into it. Ah, breakfast bliss!

Andy's breakfast one morning in Boquete from the local "Central Park" cafe: A fried pancake, a slab of smoked beef, and a hash brown, all for less than $2.

For a small town, Boquete sure had a lot of Mexican restaurants! (A trend we are noticing more and more as we continue north through Central America.) We ate dinner at one, and Andy got a dish called something like "carne in su jugo" (meat in its juice), which actually turned out to be more like a black bean soup with some beef and bacon in it and tortillas on the side. Pretty tasty.

On our second morning in Boquete, I stupidly let Andy convince me to try a new type of yogurt he found on the shelf (though considering it was locally-made and cheap, I might have tried it anyway if I had noticed it). It looked like it had fruit on the bottom, but that turned out instead to be jello. Ew! Jello is disgusting. Who would contaminate lovely yogurt with nasty jello? I stuck to the national Panamanian brands after that.

Panama was the first country we had been to in a long time that had fresh milk on the supermarket shelves, rather than just Parmalat and powdered milk. Another American-style perk we greatly enjoyed. We didn't have cups, so Andy taught me how to drink straight from the carton (yes, I had a sheltered childhood and had never done that before).

At that same breakfast, we enjoyed some foraged fruit that Andy had collected the day before. He found the orange under a tree at a garden we visited and the guava at the side of the road somewhere, I think.

The guava only yielded about one bite of edible fruit for each of us, but it was tasty.

I didn't enjoy our muddy hike up a hill near Boquete that day, but I did enjoy these fresh blackberries picked from a bush alongside the trail!

And I enjoyed these fresh raspberries even more. Yum, berries! Panama was the first place in a while where I had seen berries growing as well as your more standard tropical fruits.

Speaking of tropical fruits, this is a naranjilla, which I believe only grows in Panama and maybe a handful of other countries. Our hiking guide said that the flesh looks like a tomato, but tastes like an orange. Or maybe it was the opposite...

My reward for hiking all day (and falling on my butt in the mud twice)--fresh kiwi ice cream! Just 50 cents at another local panaderia called the Shalom Bakery. (We thought that this might be a kosher bakery, but we were wrong, I guess they just liked the name. So much for trying to Jew it up in Boquete!)

Dinner that night was at a local pizzeria recommended by our hiking guide. The standard pizza came with your choice of four toppings, so we got three types of meat and...peaches. Hey, they were on the toppings list, right alongside pineapples and melon! We were a little wary, but the combo actually turned out to be quite tasty.

The backyard of our hostel in Boquete had some fruit trees, including one bearing these cherry-like fruits. We didn't eat any and still aren't sure what they are. Any guesses?

On to Costa Rica! The first thing we got were a couple of empanadas at a bus station near the border. Turns out that all empanadas in Costa Rica are very fried, and that the breading is made of cornmeal, which makes eating an empanada kind of like eating a gigantic, stuffed tortilla chip. Greasy, but tasty. (This particular empanada was stuffed with chorizo and fried rice--we'd also never had an empanada with rice in it before. Pretty good.)

Costa Rican restaurants are expensive, so we bought some groceries and made most of our own meals during our two days there. My first dinner consisted of roll-ups of corn tortillas and avocado slices sprinkled with a little salt. Here's a glamor shot, pre-roll.

Andy made a couple of peanut butter and jelly tortilla roll-ups before digging into this bucket of Dos Pinos ice cream. Dos Pinos is the big dairy conglomerate in Costa Rica, and you see their trucks and their products everywhere. We remembered this well from our first trip to Costa Rica in 2007.

Another product we remembered quite fondly was the Tropical line of "juices"...really mostly sugar-water with a small percentage of fruit, but so refreshing and tasty. It was HOT in the beach town of Uvita where we stayed on our first night in CR, and we downed this bottle of mixed-fruit Tropical rather quickly.

In Costa Rica, I was happy to return to a country that sold big bottles of drinkable yogurt. Dos Pinos brand, of course. (I got the blueberry flavor simply because I hadn't seen blueberry anything in a long time!)

A peanut butter and jelly tortilla roll-up, pre-roll. The jam is pineapple, the PB is Peter Pan Creamy Honey Roast--Andy's favorite--which we found for a decent price in Panama. Between the PB and the DQ, I feel pretty confident that Andy could survive in Panama for a long time.

And that is what we ate in Panama and Costa Rica! I should also mention that we saw a lot of frozen turkeys and Thanksgiving sides for sale in Panamanian markets...not so much in Costa Rica, and almost nothing here in Nicaragua ,where we are now. What kind of T-day meal, if any, we will actually find this Thursday is definitely up in the air, but we'll be sure to report in our next foods post!