Food!

Dear Friends and Relatives,  (I don't know if you're supposed to put Dear Somebody on a blog, but it's my blog and I'm going to do it that way.)

Many people have asked about the food here.  Cuenca has lots of good restaurants to try---many Ecuadorian, of course, but also from other countries.  There are, to our disappointment, very few Asian restaurants, and we haven't seen or heard of any Thai restaurants at all.  But last night we went to a great Mexican place where we ate ourselves nearly into oblivion.  We've been to an Italian place where we had the best spaghetti we had ever eaten.  And we've also had some wonderful Ecuadorian food.  

The absolute best deal in town is called an almuerzo, which is lunch.  Seems that most restaurants have a menu of the day, and you get what they have that day.  It will start with soup of some sort, some meat next to a huge amount of rice, sometimes a vegetable or salad, usually a little tiny desert, and sometimes some fresh squeezed juice (papaya is my favorite).  The price is normally about $2.

A few restaurants list their menu options in both Spanish and English.  Last week I saw "jam sandwich" on a menu.  I figured it meant "ham sandwich," since the word for ham is jamon, and  j's are pronounced as h's.  I asked the waiter if the sandwich was really going to be made of jam, and, proud of his knowledge of English, he assured me it would be.  So Bobby ordered jam sandwich and ate the ham sandwich that arrived.

The other night at the Raymipampa Restaurant, I noticed they listed dishes in 3 languages, French being the third.  I ordered Locro de Papas, which is a delicious Ecuadorian potato soup with cheese and avocado.  For fun I looked at the French translation and laughed out loud when I saw Potage de pommes de terre avec fromage (so far so good) et avocat.  Which means I ordered potato soup with cheese and lawyer!  (The soup was good, but the lawyer was tough and unsavory.)

There are lots of little cafe's, and one of our favorites is La Molienda, which is Columbian.  The owner always comes over and shakes our hand and talks to us.  There are a few vegetarian dishes, which most Ecuadorian restaurants do not have.  I love their lentil burger on an arepa, which is like a very thick tortilla.  It has some kind or sauce and lettuce, tomato, onion, green pepper, and of course, avocado (without the law degree).

I decided I would try to figure out how to make the lentil burgers to serve to some Cuencano friends we had invited for dinner.  We bought some plain arepas from the restaurant, I cooked lentils with quinoia (a grain), added garlic and egg and something else, I forgot what, shaped them into patties and fried them.  I heated the arepas, invented a sauce, added the salad stuff, and served one to each of the 4 of us.  I wasn't able to figure out how to keep the burgers to a manageable size and they turned out really huge.  After adding everything else, the entire things were absolutely enormous.

Bobby and I made it about halfway through ours before we conceded defeat and stopped.  Our guests continued bravely plowing through, making comments about how delicious it all was, until they had eaten every crumb---and these are not large people!  Several days later an Ecuadorian friend explained it is extremely insulting to your hosts not to finish what you have been served in Ecuador.   The poor couple must have been miserable!  Since then, we figured out we should serve family style and let guests take what they think they can actually eat without hurting themselves.

We were taught by the gringo couple down the street that if you're invited to eat in an Ecuadorian home, you must go bearing gifts.  Flowers?  No, flowers are for funerals.  Food?  Yes, but it must be sweet and delicious.  Chocolate is always popular, and also one of the Ecuadorians' favorites.....canned peaches!  The couple we nearly killed through overfeeding brought us a tourist book and a large can of peaches.  You can't go wrong serving canned peaches for desert.  Don't bother serving bread or cookies from the local bakery, because they are singularly unremarkable.  But canned peaches!  A absolute plethora (yes, plethora!) of fabulous, exotic fresh fruit in this country, and they love canned peaches!

Ecuadorians are meat eaters, so a meal will always have meat (or fish) of some sort.  They are also into starches.  The other day, for an almeurzo, we had soup with potatoes and pasta, then meat and rice.  Oh, and a fried little patty of something else starchy that I couldn't identify.  That was extreme, and restaurants of any size will also have veggies and salads.  

If you can tolerate the caffeine, you should drink the Ecuadorian coffee any chance you get, because it is fabulous.  You can get black tea bags in the grocery store if you're craving some southern iced tea, but most of the tea is not black, but herbal (I think.  I don't know what some of the boxes say).  In the produce markets you can buy a big bunch of dried or fresh weeds (it looks like to me) for making your own tea, and it is better than the teabag variety.

Last week I was paid a visit by Monty Zuma, who seemed to think my ancestors had wronged him, and he was set on revenge.  I tried to explain that my ancestors had never even been to South America, but he seemed bent on ensuring that my insides become squeaky clean.  And he was successful.  At our Spanish lesson, in between trips to our  teacher's bathroom, she offered me some tea.  What kind of tea?  Manzanilla.  Oh, good.  That's chamomile, which must be good for the insides because Mrs. Rabbit did give some to Peter after his trip to Mr, MacGregor's garden when he ate too much and had a stomach ache.

The tea came in a cup with a sprig of chamomile, little daisy-like flowers and all, inside the hot water.  Mrs. Rabbit knew what she was doing.  My stomach started to feel better immediately.  After the lesson, after a mad dash home in a taxi (No, I cannot take the bus---I won't make it), Bobby went to the grocery store to find more manzanilla tea.  He brought some home in a box with tea bags in it, and I drank that tea all that day and the next, but it never did any good.  Fresh weeds, that's the ticket.  Straight from the dirt.  That stuff really works.

For our last Spanish lesson, our teacher took us to Feria Libre, which is a humongous market (and I know that word is overused and isn't even truly a word, but it really is appropriate here).  She taught us how to haggle and what the different fruits were.  I bought a handful of chamomile tea with it's roots on, which she said to put into water when we got home, and I did.  We also bought 24 fresh long stemmed roses, cream-colored with red tips, for $2.  You heard that right, Ladies and Gentlemen----$2.  One fifth of a ten dollar bill!  

Well, we're off to our neighborhood oraganic produce market.  We need milk, yogurt, and of course, papayas.  Can't get enough of those papayas!

I decided to put this group email into a blog so I could add pictures, but so far I haven't been able to figure out how to do that.  But Bobby has figured out how to put pictures on his Facebook page, so if you want to see them, you'll have to go there for the moment, until I get smarter.

Hasta Luego (which means, "Until Later," Sumiyati), 

Terri