Mexican food

We were only in Mexico City for the day on our way back to the UK but we managed to pack in a few tasty treats.First up was a small, friendly cafe with good coffee, pastry and juice. We wandered on and stopped at one of the many juice bars, Mexican style, where Rachel reminisced and Simon had his first try of a delicious, cool and refreshing horchata, a rice based drink with cinnamon, lime juice and sugar.We couldn't visit Mexico without stopping at a street cafe for fiery tacos. You could order all sorts of cuts of meat, tripe featuring heavily. We opted for a straightforward pork. What makes them is the guacamole, chile and freshly squeezed lime. It didn't take too much searching to find a charming and very cheap local lunch establishment where we enjoyed several courses and refreshing lime juice served by a lovely, old waiter. It felt as though this place hadn't changed much in the last thirty years.We enjoyed soup to start, accompanied as always in Mexico with chile, lime and fresh tortillas.Next up was a plate of salad.
We were starting to flag under the quantity of food by the time we got to the third course, fish in a tomato sauce for Rachel. However, it was very nice so we happily stuffed ourselves before our long flight home. It was the perfect food end to our Latin American adventures.

Food. So much glorious food.

It's been a long time since we last posted a food update, and needless to say, we've been experiencing a lot of good, tasty meals. Here are a few of the highlights.

Esteli and Sontule

Mini-novelty cauldrons with a candle inside, and bubbling refried beans with a mozzarella-style cheese on top. Served with tostones - squashed and lightly fried savoury plantain.

Burgers - there's no McDonald's anywhere in Nicaragua, outside of the capital Managua, but most places do have a good independent burger restaurant. This is the first time we ate burgers in Nicaragua, and tasty they were too.
An impressive carbohydrate loaded meal in Sontule - rice with veg; spaghetti with tomatoes and oil; boiled melanga (centre) - a nice root vegetable, although can be a bit cloying; beans; and an ayote (like a watery squash/courgette) sliced and fried with egg on the outside and cheese in the middle.

Visa trip to Costa Rica
Chinese food was everywhere in Liberia in the north of Costa Rica. This restaurant was recommended to us and was a popular place serving up massive portions for about $5. It wasn't as gloopy as Chinese food can be in the UK, but it was certainly different to a traditional Nicaraguan meal. Above - noodles with prawns and vegetables in soy sauce, and below, breaded fish in a tomato-based sauce.

Seafood by the Pacific
Delicious lobster. The cheese slices wouldn't be an obvious addition in the UK but here they are seen as fancy.
Fantastic seafood platter to share. Fish, squid, clams, octopus, king prawns and lobster tails.

Seafood soup loaded with crab, squid, octopus and fish. It was very hard to get any meat from the crabs but they added great flavour and the bits were good to suck on.
Barbequeing with Jan and Nick. It's always good to cook for ourselves sometimes. We produced a very agreeable pile of steak, sausage and chargrilled vegetables.

Sweet treats
New sweets (to Simon) can be just as exciting as gourmet meals. These assorted-coloured sweets all tasted of banana - the artificial flavour that you get in those banana-shaped foam sweets at the pick n mix at the cinema or Wilko's.

In the East of Nicaragua, a new crop of maize is producing some yummy food. This atol is in between blamanche and semolina pudding in consistency, but with a fresh, maize flavour and topped off perfectly with a sprinkling of cinnamon. A treat like this perks up any long bus journey - a lady got on the bus to sell them at a bus stop for around 15p each. Maybe we should introduce this into the UK.

They look like grapes or blackcurrant, but they are neither. They are coyolitos - harvested from a certain kind of palm tree, they are incredibly sour but enjoyed by Nicaraguans with a good dose of salt. We could only appreciate them in a heavily sweetened juice.

The Caribbean

Food is very different here to the rest of Nicaragua with strong influences from Africa and other Caribbean communities. It's out with the tortillas and in with fish and seafood cooked in coconut milk.

'Run down' is the traditional seafood soup in the region - fresh fish is cooked in coconut milk along with yucca/cassava, plantain and melanga. We enjoyed this one with local community guide Orlando (pictured) and family after a trip to his land.

Delicious breakfast for £1.50 each in Bluefields port with great views over the dock and lagoon. Fresh fruit, pancakes, cereal, freshly squeezed orange juice, and unfortunately, instant coffee.
This fruit is called an apple, but it is quite different to any apples we know. It's definitely not a direct relative of the apple as it has one big, lumpy stone in the middle. However, it does share a similar taste, quite sharp and full flavoured with a light, crisp water-filled consistency. Very refreshing.
Orland stood next to an 'apple' tree. His son was up the tree knocking down apples with a big stick.
Munching on an energy-boosting sugar cane. A treat for local kids and sweet-toothed tourists.
An assortment from the bakery: coconut bun - a bit like a cinnamon swirl but minus the raisins and with a light coconut flavour; coconut bread - white bread baked with coconut milk, so delicious when fresh; and sticky, spiced ginger bun with raisins.
Fresh prawns in coconut milk, garlic and tomato. The prawns here are harvested straight from the lagoon and the sea using circular nets thrown by hand from small, wooden canoes. It's lovely to eat prawns of all different sizes as the ones bought in the UK, which all seem to look alike, are a reminder of the shrimp farms they come from, which are very damaging to the environment.
This is a pineapple plant. A quite improbable looking spiky shrub to be the producer of such a delicious fruit, which grows out of the middle and then sits surreally atop the plant.
A very rich prawn salad with tomatoes and cucumber, cooked with coconut milk, butter and mayonnaise. The coconut bread served with it was some of the nicest bread we have ever tasted.
A spicy beef patty served hot from a basket at the port in Bluefields as I (Simon) had just eaten a big breakfast, I limited myself to two. They cost around 15p each and were brilliant.

Beef casserole in Sontule

We had promised to cook a meal for the extended family in Sontule for some time. Shortly after Jonny's arrival in Nicaragua we loaded up with stewing beef from a friendly local restauranteur in Esteli and headed for the hills. It's tricky to know what to cook for so many people with no oven so we settled on a beef in red wine casserole with mashed potato. The meal officially opened the family's new dining room, linking the house to the kitchen and was accompanied by speeches from Rogelio, Lucia and us. Some loved it, some left it (it was a bit rich for all Nica palates) but all enjoyed the sense of occasion and trying our meal. It was amusing to note that they nearly all preferred the rice-crispie cakes which we had made for a previous party and which we found distinctly unimpressive, particularly as they didn't set.

Very small bananas

We've blogged once before about the huge variety of bananas available in Latin America, and Nicaragua is no different. Last week in Sontule we encountered what was definitely the tiniest to date. The one pictured was pretty much the same size as all the bananas in the bunch. That's just the way they are. They were very sweet but a bit hard in the middle, which made them just right for adding to our hot milk and oats each morning.

Baking day

Baking day is quite an undertaking at Lucia and Rogelio's in Sontule. We're not just talking about knocking up a quick victoria sponge or a batch of flapjack, there's a bit more to it than that. A large, igloo-shaped clay oven, a good two metres across, occupies part of the yard near to the kitchen. The oven is made from bricks and clay and requires a red hot pile of firewood inside to get the whole thing baking hot. The embers are then pushed out of one side and the baking is ready to be popped in the other side. The oven spends most of its time redundant, except for occasionally housing a laying hen, so baking day makes for a good spectacle.
Rosquillas were the main item for the oven, in their hundreds. These are small biscuits made from cooked and ground corn, cuajada cheese and a bit of margarine. Some are savoury and shaped like a little hoop, others are round and sweet, filled with an unrefined dark sugar and called hojaldras. There are always people selling them on buses and they're available in cafes and corner shops, but their quality varies greatly. They are definitely at their best when they're warm, but Lucia's rosquillas were particularly impressive and kept us coming back for more for a good few days. They go down especially well with a coffee.All the members of the house got stuck in to the baking process. Lucia and Endira did the preparations and Rogelio was in charge of the oven. Jackson did a bit of fetching and carrying, while we were taking photos and employed to clear the trays of cooked rosquillas and place them in a bucket. This involved plenty of sampling.

From one side of the oven to the other. It doesn't look hot in there, but it's baking biscuits in 15 minutes.
We took a photo of ourselves nibbling rosquillas in Esteli, which for some strange reason turned out like a promotional shot for a rosquilla company.

'Mmm...rosquillas'

Deer for lunch

Walking uphill in Sontule towards the cooperative building one morning after breakfast we heard a yelping up ahead and saw an Alsatian attacking something with skinny legs. As we approached and threw a stone at it, the dog ran off, leaving behind a beautiful, young, white-speckled deer with a mangled leg and blood dripping from its mouth. It is the first deer we have seen in Nicaragua and we were just thinking that it was a shame to see one in such unfortunate circumstances when Don Rogelio appeared on his horse, heading for the fields. He agreed that it was a shame for the poor creature but quickly moved on to the prospect of enjoying it for lunch. He was thrilled with us for seeing the dog off in time and asked Simon to pass the deer up to him on his horse. It was kicking weakly on the floor. Simon hesitated for a couple of seconds, but after a couple more 'pass it to mes' from Rogelio, Simon grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and its hind quarters and passed it up to Rogelio who slung it over the front of the horse and trotted back to the house with it. A few hours later, we were enjoying its tender meat in this delicious casserole with a beetroot and cabbage salad, rice, beans and tortilla. Sontule has been in a protected nature reserve since the 1990s and nobody had eaten deer for years. We were popular with the family for the rest of the week on the back of our deer discovery.

Lots more Nicaraguan nibbles (and Colombian ants and English flapjack)

A delicious pure fruit orange and carrot ice lolly in Leon. This lovely cafe only sells these ice lollies. Nothing more. Nothing less. But they come in lots of tasty flavours, including watermelon, melon, coconut, tamarind, mango and rice pudding (which we realise isn't pure fruit, but it is natural and yummy).

By contrast, and contrary to its appearance, this is the most revolting drink and fruit you are ever likely to set eyes on - nancy, or to Nicaraguans, nancite. Fortunately, the season is finally coming to an end, as its been stinking out buses, street corners and restaurants for a couple of months now. This nasty berry is best described as 'vomit juice'. The berries themselves are chalky, cloying and taste of vomit. In a juice, with plenty of ice, the first sip is bearable, but then as you swallow it, the full vomit force comes to the fore. Jon (pictured below) has recently arrived in Nicaragua. We thought it best that he experience the juice for himself rather than rely on our judgement. The vomit flavour had a delayed reaction for him and he got several sips in before it hit. At this point, he gave up and we gave the rest of it to a street kid. We were told by the restaurant owner that it is the most popular fresh juice in Nicaragua and the boy was delighted with it. They can all keep it and we'll stick with the passion fruit and guayaba juice options.
Taking on a nancite juice is an unpleasantly memorable experience for any tourist. You have to be brought up on this stuff or live here for a good long time to tolerate it.

ESKIMO has a national monopoly on ice-cream. There are at least five ESKIMO's in every town plus lots of ESKIMO street vendors with carts. Flavour of the month is a bargain at just 7 cordobas (around 25p) a cone. Simon buys the flavour of the month at least once a day when he's in a town and knows in advance the date that the flavour is due to switch. The flavours of the month are currently fig and condensed milk (Simon pictured with this), strawberry or chocolate and vanilla.

Another chalky, moderately offensive fruit (although it has nothing on nancite) currently in season and popular with the locals called jocote. Sold in clear food bags on the streets with salt and chile sauce, its dryness tends to leave your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth and other than that, the main points are coping with the excessive salt and chile. We have also tried the ripe stewed version of this fruit in natural yoghurt and it is definitely the preferable option.
Guayabas are in season and they're yummy. The trees are full of them in the countryside and their distinctive sweet smell and refreshing zingyness are a current highlight on our long walk to Sontule each week. Larger varieties, like the one pictured, are on sale in the streets of Esteli. People bite into them as we would an apple.
A couple of weeks ago in Leon, Nick cooked a bean soup with lots of 'trimmings' for a group of us. It was an ambitious undertaking given the heat and that everyone's soup was tailored to their egg preferences (poached/scrambled/fried). He managed the individualised frying pans admirably and the result was delicious.

The bean soup included a poached egg, fried onion and garlic, baby sweetcorn, cuajada salty cheese, green beans, peppers and avocado.
It was an early start for me in Sontule one day to make sweet corn tortillas, guirilas, with Lucia. Normal tortillas have the consistency of a dry dough and have to be 'palmed' into shape - forceful downward finger taps with one hand whilst simultaneously circular shaping the tortilla with the other hand. This sort of guirila is much simpler, it just needed a bit of swirling around the banana leaf with a spoon to form its circular shape. It was then cooked on the banana leaf on a hot plate over the wood-burning stove.

The warm guirila made a satisfying breakfast served with fresh cuajada cheese, made from curdled cow's milk from the farm.
When we're in Esteli, we like to go our local Mexican restaurant. Its delightful owner, Daniel (pictured above making Simon's burrito) proudly tells us that he is '100% Nicaraguense' but that he learnt to cook Mexican food from a wonderful Mexican chef years ago in Honduras.The food comes with an impressive array of extras - refried beans, lime, tomato and onion salsa, a minty and refreshing guacamole, hot chile sauce and tortilla crisps.
This bizarre fruit which grows directly from the branches of the tree is called jicaro. Its seeds are sold in a powder form to mix up with milk and water into a satisfying drink.
Waiting for the bus to Esteli one Sunday in a sweltering Leon, we ended up in the ropey, but air-conditioned, supermarket cafe. Simon picked out this rather large cake which I thought tasted overridingly of bubblegum.
Three months into living in Nicaragua and this is the first cooked meal that we prepared together for just the two of us one weekend in Leon when we were home alone. There's some good mince in the supermarkets, which bodes well for impressing our Nica friends with shepherd's pie.
There's a French baker in Leon and he does a good line in croissants and pan au chocolate.

I decided to made the most of a Canadian coffee roaster being in town to set up a coffee tasting session at Nick's to trial one of the cooperative's coffee brand's against the competition. Obviously it was far superior...if a little under-roasted. We're not about to drink it in this photo, we're smelling the coffee grounds.

We bumped into Simon's first language teacher from Lagartillo, Ermelinda, in Esteli the other weekend and were invited round for dinner to their place in Esteli. We thought the occasion warranted mum's flapjack and a bottle of red wine, both of which went down very well with Erme, her Colombian husband Luis and their son. Luis had recently returned from Colombia and had brought with him some roasted big-ass ants (one pictured on Simon's palm above). We had heard of them in Colombia but hadn't tried them. They were an odd experience. On first crunch they were crispy and a bit fried tasting but nothing more. As we continued to chew, a strong, burnt pork flavour emerged. I wasn't convinced but Simon ate a fair few.

We have now repeated the flapjack a few times for various friends and it's going down very well. It is particularly popular with Brenda and Candida, the cleaning ladies, at the hotel in Esteli. They requested the recipe, along with the lady who runs the pharmacy. We had a run through batch with them all.Sampling the finished product.