Eat to live, live to eat

The classic Fuchs story of traveling is that the boys are told, “You can eat when you get home. It’s cheaper.” No wonder Tyrel liked traveling with me. Especially in Colombia where I argued, “Actually, I think it’s cheaper to eat here.”

My Colombian friends tried to help. Bibi had ajiaco prepared for our Sunday dinner. It was the meal I’d eaten last in Colombia, this delicious chicken and corn soup with avocados the size of a cantaloupe sliced on top. Sunday evening she bought fresh bread from the bakeries for which Bogota is famous. Pan de coco (coconut rolls) competed with roscones (bread with arequipe) for favorite status, but there was nothing wrong with the savory pan blanda, especially when dipped in thick Colombian hot chocolate. The hardest of Colombian cheeses dropped to melt in chocolate was an extra treat. 

I wasn’t willing to wait for peanuts on the plane as my breakfast on Tuesday, so Tyrel and I began the great empanada adventure. We ate these meat filled fried pies three days in a row, providing a solid nutritional start to our day and trying to determine the best place to buy them. The airport did not win that prize (although the almojabana, or cheese roll, that we also bought there was definitely among the best of its kind). On Wednesday, we bought them from a stand outside a fruit market, while on Thursday we resorted to a street table, where a little old man with few teeth was frying them along with balitos of rice and chicken. The first balito was so delicious that we saved the other until after we’d finished our empanadas. Unfortunately, it was only partially cooked and, since we were at that point on a boat, we were stuck with the bad taste in our mouth for the next couple of hours.

Bogotan tamales are like masa with chicken soup inside, so when I spotted the squared and tied green palm leaves on the streets of Leticia on Wednesday, I was excited - then surprised. Even within the country, the contents of the tamal had changed: here I found shredded chicken and flavored rice. With only one spoon to share amongst the 4 of us, we dove in with our fingers. I felt Asian.

Our favorite food adventure took place outside of Leticia on Tuesday night. We were exhausted. Hot. It was almost dark and the electricity all along the road was out. We walked by one restaurant with a porch full of beer drinkers and decided to ask at the next, though it appeared that the family serving food off their porch had already stacked the chairs for the day. Of course they would serve us! the matriarch said, and for only 7000 pesos, she’d give us rice and some kind of meat... Actually, she went to cook and our food was delivered by a young man with no shirt and no shoes. It was well worth our $3.50 - sancocho (a plantain, potato, and chicken soup) that would’ve filled us alone, rice, fish (almost without a fishy taste), juice of some sort of jungle fruit (I thought it tasted like salad dressing, but I was thirsty!), and sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions. We had a candlelit dinner to boot, as our shirtless waiter brought us a candle stuck in a beer can. It only fell over once.

The juices in Colombia are unique, as one realizes even in Bogota. Juices made with milk, juices of lulo, guayaba (guava), granadilla... Juices in the jungle are even more unique because it’s likely you’ve never heard of or seen the fruits from which they are made. One night we were served juice and asked by our waiter if we could recognize the flavor. I couldn’t, though it bore a vague resemblance to lemonade. Tyrel did - it was copa azul, he said, the same fruit we’d been given to sample by one of our jungle tour guides. That tour guide had shown us the fruit. It grows on a palm, looks vaguely like a coconut, and is a cousin to the cacao plant. In fact, the seeds can be ground and used like cocoa. We just like sucking the juicy rich pulp. 

Juice can’t be unique unless the fruits are unique. I love granadillas, and I had the privilege of introducing them to the Fuchs: you bite the shiny orange skin and peel the top half off, then you sort of suck/chew through the inside, which has a texture resembling snot and a sweet, cold flavor that hit the spot the day we hiked in equatorial sunshine. We also saw acai. This is not, I don’t think, the same as an acai berry. In fact, when we asked the old man selling it on the streets of Brazil for a sample, it looked more like a carrot inside an orange peel. And it tasted. I don’t know. Maybe it tasted like salad dressing without the vinegar and sugar? I didn’t buy any.

Also in Brazil, we entered a chocolate shop. Even in Portugese, those are recognizable words. The chocolate was delicious (we passed on all the Hersheys brand candy), and Tyrel found a package of cookies very much like oreos with cocount filling for only 75 cents. Once we began filling the basket of the saleslady who attentively followed us around and proved that we actually intended to pay, they offered us tinto. As in Colombia, the tiny cups of black coffee had sugar, but unlike Colombia, the tinto was so strong, so rich, that the coffee flavor far outweighed the nasty sweet taste.

During our Amazon trip, we rode the boat across the river to Santa Rosa, Peru. Struck by the poverty of the tiny island community, we wanted to give our business to those working there - and I really wanted fried platano for lunch. “Platano?” the storekeeper/cook asked. “You only want platano?” She couldn’t believe that even tourists wouldn’t want something else to eat. Nevertheless, she served us a plate overflowing with soft slices of ripe fried plantain, along with juice. After we drank about half a glass, we wondered if the juice was made with filtered water. Nothing like testing your immune system - but she later reassured us that the water was bottled. Ethan also found tiny hot peppers on the table. I warned him that while peppers are not common, they are hot. After he ate one (with no platano left to follow it), he agreed.

We toured a bit in Bogota on Friday after our flight. I always have a hard time walking by the sugar-coated fried fresh coconut, but I did it. I was glad, because Fabian and Jessica decided to introduce the Fuchs to street food. Whole potatoes, sliced thinly and deep fried to make chips. Whole plantains, sliced thinly and deep fried to make chips. Churros (similar to Mexican churros, fried bread sticks rolled in sugar). Obleas - wafers spread with arequipe (caramel) and mora (blackberry) jam, then sprinkled with white cheese and topped with another wafer. It’s a wonder any of us were hungry when we finally made it to Crepes and Waffles for supper. Ethan was particularly adventurous here, choosing a Mexican crepe, while Tyrel stuck to a mozzarella/tomato sauce pita. And I was thrilled to discover Crepes had a new ice cream: not only could I get coconut ice cream with my choco rochelle (chocolate ice cream with crunch things inside), I could get the new kind in which the coconut was TOASTED. It was a delicious ending to a delicious week.