lunchtime

I just cooked and ate lunch by myself. That rarely happens. C is working today, but usually we eat a big lunch together everyday. Lunch is the main meal here in Brazil and I love it. Everyone gets a 2-3 hour lunch break in the middle of the day -- at noon a horn sounds in the center of town and business shut down for lunch. Kids are home from school and everyone eats together. Dinner isn't important at all unless it is a weekend type social event -- and in that case it is usually 9pm or later. European style. Instead people eat a big hearty lunch around 1pm and then snack on something light later on in the evening. People actually say, " have you snacked yet" when we Americans would say, "have you had dinner yet?" I would say hands down that it is so much healthier here were it not for the fact that the evening snacking is often not so healthy (a cold beer and friend pastry treats usually laden with cheese-- i.e the chicken teardrop, as coined by friend Eve).

But generally speaking our diets have gotten so much healthier. Most weeks we have organic produce delivered to our house. We call these really nice farmers on Monday night and tell them what we want and they bring it by Tuesday morning. Here's a look at what a recent delivery brought about...



Certified organic and all of it for less than $7 US.

If we forget to call the organic people we go to one of the farmers markets. There is one everyday in a different neighborhood. It's not certified organic, but it is super fresh and local. Farmers from nearby the city (frequently on a horse and cart) bring it in and set up their stands.


There are so many types of fresh greens I loose count and I still haven't been able to sort out what all the english translations are. Some of them aren't even translatable because they are only available here in our area. Tiaoba is one that I'm totally hooked on. It's a super soft green, totally delicious, and the people down south at the yoga retreat center hadn't heard of it, so it must be something available only here.


Of course all this minimally processed, fresh local and organic stuff brings with it bugs. It takes a while to clean it all, and I've just resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to eat some bugs in my life. At least I know that the food hasn't been hit with so many harsh chemicals. If it's good enough for the bugs, it's good enough for me...

Finally here are some pictures of these enormous pine nuts that C brought back from our land a couple weekends ago. They must be in the same family as the regular pine nuts we know back in the US, but these are of the Jurassic type (as is everything from our land.) We saw earlier that we had several trees that are a species of pine that give these nuts. But it takes a male and a female tree to produce the nuts and if you don't have the two genders you don't get anything. They weren't producing when I was last there, so C was really pleased to find out that they were super fertile and had dropped their nuts the last time he went. Yumm! I made pesto...