What's For Dinner

People have been asking me about the food here for some time now, but I’d been finding that I didn’t really have much to say about it yet because I hadn’t experienced much of it. Food is a frustratingly hot topic in the BaseCamp house, so I also found that we were spending so much energy discussing what we should eat, when we should eat, what we had to buy, what we’d already paid for, who owed for what meal, etc. that when it came time to blog, food was the last thing I wanted to talk about! I’ve been paying attention that what I’ve been eating the past week or so, though, and I’ve noticed a few things worth sharing. I don’t want to spend all night blogging, though, so I’ll leave you with two for now.

1. Fresh food makes a huge difference.

I’d heard stories of people who said they’d eaten pineapple in Hawaii and couldn’t eat it at home anymore because the stuff in our grocery stores was like a completely different fruit that disappointed them every time. I don’t think I ate pineapple in Hawaii, but I didn’t really believe that it made that much of a difference. I was wrong! Fresh pineapple for breakfast was my first favourite thing in Nicaragua for a good reason: it’s fan-freaking-tastic. After it appeared on the table for the first time, I was so inspired by its tastiness that I went into the kitchen and said, “¡Me encata la piña fresaca! Es blanco aqui, pero en Canada, es amarillo.” It took me a lot longer to say it than it took you to read it, but the point is that the pineapple is amazing. We have it in juice form sometimes and it’s equally good.

Another fruit that tastes completely different here, as I’ve mentioned, is the humble banana. At home, bananas are a useful staple; I mush them up for banana bread, slice them up for PB & banana sandwiches or blend them into smoothies, but I rarely eat them plain because they’re kind of boring. Not here! Here, they aren’t much to look at but they’re incredibly sweet. This sweetness is what makes them so amazing when they’re fried, too. (That’s right, fried bananas. Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it because they’re sinfully delicious.)

Today, I discovered that the wonder of fresh food doesn’t only apply to fruit, but also to eggs! Because today is a national holiday, Inès had the day off and we had to fend for ourselves for breakfast. Brianne scrambled up a bunch of eggs and I took the time to actually taste them properly. They were super rich (in part thanks to the butter, I’m sure) and, like all the other fresh food I’ve tried here, just tasted more..

We get lots of fresh bread, too, but that belongs in the next section.

2. The Atkin’s diet would have failed miserably here.

Mr Bernardo, our weekend guard, makes incredible bread. He makes triangular loaves of fluffy white sweet bread  (pan dulce) with sugar in the middle, he makes big loaves of fluffy white bread without sugar in the middle and he makes small loaves of fluffy white bread without sugar in the middle. He makes a lot of bread, so we eat a lot of bread – like with every meal and for snacks.

Inès, our cook, makes a lot of rice. She makes rice with beans and onions (gallo pinto), she makes rice with chopped up peppers and she makes rice that she stuffs into empanadas. She makes a lot of rice, so we eat a lot of rice – like with every meal and for snacks.

In Eat Pray Love, the protagonist’s friend jokingly says that she’s on a “no carb left behind” journey. It would appear that we really are because despite all the bread and rice we eat, we still find ourselves at the internet café down the street buying delicious rum cake and brownies! They’re delicious, but I’m already craving crunchy, leafy greens. (Of course, even if I can find such a thing, I’m not supposed to be eating things that haven’t been cooked or peeled; lettuce doesn’t exactly lend itself to that kind of treatment.)