I haven’t been around the blog the last week because I’ve been fighting awful insomnia all week and it was all I could do to keep it together for the things that HAD to get done. I have been cooking though, and have a few awesome dishes to share with you over the next week. Tonight is the beginning of Yom Kippur so there will be no eating in our family for 24 hours starting at sundown tonight . . . the only one who gets to eat is the dog actually!
Until I get new content up, here are pictures from the Brazilian Independence Day Festival I went to a few weeks ago (which I also never managed to post!):
My absolute favorite Brazilian food/snack: a cheese pastel! It’s like a Spanish empanada but with a much thinner crust and it’s deep-fried instead of baked. The fillings can vary wildly but the most common are plain cheese (usually filled with “farmer cheese,” a very fresh cheese that has a nice tang to it and doesn’t melt all the way when heated) or ground beef (sometimes with olives mixed in). This is a common street food in Brazil and like all fried food, it’s best when eaten immediately after frying. This particular one had obviously been sitting around for a while but it still satisfied my craving for home!
All the Brazilian favorites were on display in the various tents:
The sausage is Linguiça, which is the Portuguese equivalent of chorizo. The little rolls in the middle are Pão de Queijo (cheese bread) and on the right is Coxinha, a deep-fried dough concoction filled with stewed chicken meat. Pão de Queijo is certainly up there with one of my favorite Brazilian things to eat, but it’s absolutely disgusting unless it’s fresh out of the oven (even worse than the pastel) so I didn’t even bother trying it. The Coxinhas looked good but I gave up waiting when I realized that there was no “line” and everyone was cutting everyone else . . . also very Brazilian, unfortunately.
I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food at the festival but it was an absolute madhouse! It took us 20 minutes to walk one block and we were both so claustrophobic when we got to the end that we just left without looking at anything else. I really went for the food so it was OK with me to leave after sampling some! We got to drink a Guarana (a very sweet soda made from the guarana plant’s fruit, which as far as I know only grows in Brazil) and snack on some street food, so it was worth the claustrophobia for me.
If you want to see more photos (mostly of food!) from our visit to the festival, check out the Flickr set here.
