Rude Food

My cooking head reattached itself recently, after a lengthy absence, and inspired me to buy a book of Brazilian recipes. It was surprisingly hard just finding a kind of 'overview' book – they all seemed to be either A Hundred And One Ways To Use Condensed Milk (and believe me, that book could run to several volumes in this goddamned place. You think you're getting lemon meringue pie and it turns out to be full of sticky, nasty… but anyway.), or books by foreign celebrity chefs – Jamie Oliver is very popular in Brazil, for some reason. Maybe fat tongues are a sign of virility here.

I did eventually find a good 'un, though, and I thought I'd start with feijoada, as it's the national dish and didn't look all that hard. It's a kind of tasty stew with black beans and various bits of pig, served with rice. The recipe called for a daunting array of different cuts of pork and sausage, but the supermarkets here sell packets of assorted meat for feijoada, so all was cool. These packets come vaccuum-packed so that you can't see all the contents, so I was expecting a few surprises, perhaps a trotter or a few unidentifiable bits of pig. However, the last thing I expected was – well, I *think* it was – a tail. It gave me a dreadful turn when I shook out the packet into a bowl, I can tell you. However, I soldiered on, and by the time I had all the ingredients chopped and cooking and Dan happened to phone, it had amused me enough to get my camera out:



I was already getting the giggles when I started trying to describe it to him. Stirring the pot all the while, it seemed to take on a life of its own… every time I calmed down a bit, it would poke itself above the surface to say hello…



After this, it all got a bit Carry On: no sooner did I poke the tail firmly down again, than other things began to surface that, in my heightened state of amusement, looked extremely questionable and honestly, I had tears in my eyes by the end of it.





However, the feijoada turned out fine, although a bit salty because I hadn't had time to soak some of the meat properly. The weird thing is that everyone who’s seen the pictures has asked me if I ate the tail. Er… no. For some reason, readers, I found myself a little reluctant to excavate a negligible amount of meat from this repulsive-looking orifice at the back.



So there you go. A delicious and tasty meal; almost literally, a silk purse from a sow's ear. And if you're VERY lucky, when I get home, I might just cook it for you too.


Still to come: Trip to a Tropical Paradise! Extreme sunburn! And me as a mermaid!