Brazilian Frutas In My Mouth

I have done my best to be informative and enthusiastic in my food posts from Brazil but I must admit that generally speaking the food hasn't really thrilled me. That was a bold statement and maybe hindsight will change my mind but as it stands there is just one thing that I miss eating now that we have we left, and that's the fruit.

Brazil is the only tropical country in South America (or so Simone said in the cooking class!) and the fruits there are like nothing I've ever had before. Okay so we ate a lot of delicious watermelon in Korea, incredible mangoes in the Philippines and of course Britain is great for apples and strawberries...but the variety of fruits in Brazil is mindblowing and I honestly have never eaten pineapple like that before. I have a lot to tell you about and am worried I'm already writing too much so I'll try to keep the word count down...

We'll start with an easy one - pineapple. 

I say easy one, but we actually encountered two types of pineapple in Brazil. We didn't manage to try them side by side so cannot tell you how they differ from each other but none of it tasted like what we have in the UK. For starters, there is no woody central part. All of the flesh is edible and wow, it's juicy! It is also very sweet with hardly any of the acidity that one might expect. Definitely a winner and one of our most regularly selected juices. The taller ones you can see at the back of this photo have quite pale flesh and Dave bought a bag of it at a service station once, plucked from the back of a van and very skillfully chopped right in front of us. I will confess though, that I never bought one from the supermarket because I just don't possess the strength required to break into those bad boys!

Barbecued pineapple is a Brazilian classic. It tastes pretty good, especially when sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. Just remember to peel it before you grill it!

What are these bizarre and intriguing looking things below? Okay they are just grapes, but don't they look weird! They actually tasted pretty much like standard grapes though. 

This next fruit is a custard apple. We had trouble describing the flavour of the juice, but when we tried to actual fruit it was a bit clearer - somewhere between a mango and a pear. I'm not a fan of pears so would rather just eat a delicious mango but it is definitely interesting and worth trying.

Bananas are everywhere in Brazil and there are quite a few varieties, but since they all pretty much look the same, we didn't take any photos. Now we all know how I feel about bananas so clearly I didn't do any taste testing but this is what people told me about them:

• Banana d'agua (water banana) is the kind we have in the UK and these are considered the basic banana in Brazil
• Banana ouro (gold banana) is the smallest and sweetest kind
• Banana prata (silver banana) is not very sweet and takes a long time to spoil. This kind is sometimes used in the savory dish farofa, although traditionally that should be made with...
• Banana-da-terra (plantain) is not sweet and is commonly used in savory dishes in many different countries.

Ok I can't resist any longer, I need to tell you about açaí! This was by far the most significant fruit discovery of our time in Brazil and I am going to try really hard to keep this brief. Açaí berries grow on a tree in the Amazon. They look similar to blueberries and have purple juice. Because they are perishable and hard to transport, most people in Brazil only really know the fruit in frozen form. It is sold as a frozen pulp, which is then blended with sugar and sometimes honey, banana, strawberry and even guarana - a berry that contains about twice as much caffeine as a coffee bean. Açaí is considered a superfood, and you may have come across it in health food shops, but the way it is prepared and eaten in Brazil means it is highly calorific. Nevertheless, people eat it in huge quantities, especially by the beach. And in Manaus, which is a city in the middle of the Amazon, we managed to try fresh juice, although it really just tasted the same as the frozen stuff.

I have heard the flavour described as being like a cross between chocolate and raspberries...I'm not sure I agree with this, but can't for the life of me think of a more accurate description! If you want to try it for yourself, either book a trip to Brazil or come and visit us in Maidenhead where, if you're lucky, we'll let you sample the açaí liqueur we brought back with us.

Below is a fruit called inga. We were given loads of it by the "local" people we visited in the Amazon. It grows in pods that are about two feet long and the black seeds are roughly the size of a plum stone. The white part is edible and has a subtle, sweet flavour with the texture of wet cotton wool. If I had to compare them to anything it would be lychees, although I'm not too sure why. They are definitely the strangest naturally occurring thing I have eaten.

This little fruit below is called umbu, and unfortunately by the time we found out about it, the season had passed. We did get to try it once - the skin was quite thick and by the time we got into it, most of the juice was running down our arms! The flavour was very sour and citrusy, like a more flavoursome lemon. I'd love to have tried it as a juice and will make a mental note to try it again if I get the opportunity.



Next up is possibly the most controversial fruit we encountered - Cupuaçu. It's the things in the photo below that aren't bananas. After several tries, I decided that I definitely do not like it, whereas David is still torn. We had it as juice, in chocolate, as a kind of jam and as ice cream. Without sugar it is truly disgusting and with it...well I think it's probably the Marmite of the fruit world.

This was the first really weird fruit we tried in Brazil and as disgusting as it was (we made the error of not asking for sugar!), it didn't put us off. After that, we tried as many different fruits as we could and they almost all came in the form of juices.

This is acerola, which we saw translated on menus as "Barbados cherry"...whatever that is! This fruit is very high in vitamin C and has an extremely sour flavour. It is often combined with other juices, usually orange, and we even had it in a caipirinha once. It has a stone in the middle and a texture somewhere between a cherry and a grape. 

This is a bottle of suco de caju - cashew juice. Here is has been made into a fizzy drink but it is usually served as a normal fruit juice. If you have never considered where cashew nuts come from, I suggest googling it - it's fascinating! The juice tastes a bit like cloudy apple juice, with a subtle nutty aftertaste. Quite nice really, but not something I'll miss.

One of our favourite places to get juice was Bibi Suco - a relatively healthy restaurant that served juices made from frozen pulps. We probably liked them so much because they were a bit like a slushy and full of sugar! Below you can see blackberry on the right, which tasted just like a coulis! And on the left is caja, another Amazonian fruit containing a lot of vitamin C. The fruit itself looks like a small mango and tastes very sour and "tropical" - similar to a mixture of orange and mango really. It became one of David's favourites and I think he does miss this one.

Other juices we tried were watermelon (my favourite), pineapple and mint, tamarind, mango, strawberry, custard apple, and Dave's absolute favourite, graviola. Someone recently pointed out to me that graviola juice can be bought here - Rubicon make it and call it guanabana. Having tried it at least a dozen times, the best we can come up with is to describe the flavour as a bit like pineapple, or just generic "tropical" flavour. It's white in colour with quite a thick consistency and makes an amazing ice cream.

Finally, I'll leave you with this photo. Some of these fruits you'll be familiar with but there might be some you don't know. Starting at the top left and working clockwise we have: honeydew melon; papaya; more melon; passion fruit (yes they really are that big and yellow in Brazil! And they were by far our favourite fruit for caipirinhas); mango; guava; bananas.

This photo does a good job of summing up our trepidation each time we tried a new juice!

Búzios In My Mouth

We didn't eat at that many restaurants during our roadtrip along the coast but due to my excellent research skills and a bit of luck, we did have a few very delicious meals. 

On the first day, we had lunch in Arraial do Cabo at a very well reviewed restaurant called Bacalhau do Tuga. Bacalhau means cod, and in Brazil it is usually salted and dried, and then rehydrated to make dishes of Portuguese origin. While our main wasn't actually cod, we did have a starter of the very famous Brazilian snack food, bolinho de bacalhau. I tried one once and it was a little fishy for my liking, what with the salting and drying aspect but these were absolutely delicious! Crispy on the outside, juicy and herby inside with some chilli oil to dip them in, I could have eaten two baskets full! For main we took a risk and got some fish in mango sauce. It didn't say what fish it was and I didn't ask but it was meaty, white and mild in flavour. You might remember our recent fishtastrophe of a meal in Fortaleza, when the mango sauce was like custard! Why did we order it again?! Well, I am so glad we did because it was delicious. The sauce was just the right level of sweetness while still definitely being savoury, and it came with a side of coconut farofa that blew my mind. I have never seen this on a menu before and it was hands down the best farofa experience of my life. I mean, it was still like eating sand but like the sand of a tropical island somewhere, with coconut trees all around and the baking sun toasting everything until it's crunchy and brown...fantastic. I'd also like to mention the restaurant itself, which was very quaint and the service was brilliant. 

You know I can't resist Mexican food, so getting a cheeky plate of nachos at Mr Brad in Buzios was a no-brainer! We were drawn in by the live music and promise of passion fruit caipirinhas, which we enjoyed under the canopy with a great view of the street - we love a bit of people watching! After a quick flick through the menu we settled on the nachos, which were made of yellow, red and green chips and a very generous amount of toppings. Simple and delicious! The rest of their food looked really good too.

Midway through our day of beach-hopping in Buzios we found ourselves on Geriba beach with grumbly tummies. There seemed to be mostly snacks on offer at the beach huts and we were after something more substantial, so we were very happy to come across an actual restaurant about halfway along the beach. The food was good and reasonably priced and we sat looking out at the sea, which is always a lovely way to enjoy a meal. I had a huge steak and Dave got squid, which amazingly didn't come with any carbs! The restaurant is called Fishbone and it turns out it is a very famous beach club - possibly the best and most famous in Brazil! I can't speak to the nightlife as we didn't venture back in the evening but there have been international DJs there on occasion and it is apparently a brilliant place for a night out. It is open to the elements with a relaxed vibe and relatively good service. The music that was playing while we ate was interesting and the whole place would have been at home on a riverbank in Berlin, during the summer of course!

Pimenta Siria was on our list of places to eat for two reasons. Firstly, the top rated restaurants in Buzios seem to be European, which doesn't really appeal to us at the moment. But Pimenta Siria is a Middle Eastern restaurant which (and this is the second reason we went) offers an all-you-can-eat meze kind of thing for a very reasonable price. This may only be available on Sundays, but that wasn't clear so I could be wrong. Anyway, the waiter brought us one of each item on the starter menu and then we were free to order extra portions of anything we wanted more of. So we had hummus, baba ganoush, some feta spreads, stuffed vine leaves, falafel, kofta, sish kebabs, olives, rice, cabbage salad...probably loads of other things I am forgetting but basically it was all delicious and a very welcome change from the usual Brazilian meat-and-three-carbs! And we washed it all down with a very icy beer. Yum!

One restaurant that we wanted to eat at but didn't, was Restaurante do David. It has very good reviews and for some reason the name really appealed to us. We didn't eat there because we simply didn't have time but we managed to sneak in a cheeky caipirinha (passion fruit of course) and were impressed by the service. Having said that, the place was empty so who knows what it would be like if it was busy? Oh and I know we've used the photo below before, but I love it! 

Brazil In My Mouth - Cooking Class Edition!

Now that we know we will be leaving Brazil soon, we have been putting a lot of effort into ticking everything we can off our Brazilian Bucket List. We’ve already blogged about some of it and now it’s time to tell you about my recent cooking class.

Having researched it online, I decided to book a class with Cook In Rio. This has a lot of great reviews and informative videos online and the website was clear and easy to navigate. All good signs! Laure, who we met in the jungle, was still hanging about in Rio so I invited her along to join me and we had a great time.

The finished meal - it tasted better than it looked!

Cook In Rio offers two types of class, each four hours long. I decided not to do the feijoada class, as this is not my favourite dish and is something that I think would be easy enough to recreate at home following a recipe anyway. So we went for the moqueca class. Moqueca is a dish from the northern Brazilian state of Bahia, which we recently visited on our 3-week holiday. We ate this warming fish stew in Lençois and really enjoyed it. The recipe is at the end of this post if you fancy making it!


We weren’t really sure what to expect with regards to the size of the class, as it was just a random Wednesday in the middle of “winter”, so surely it wouldn’t be fully booked…? Actually I don’t think we could really have fitted anyone else into the little room, but having ten of us there gave the whole night a bit more of a sociable atmosphere, as we were a mixed bunch from different parts of the US and Europe so conversation was easy and interesting.

Simone, the teacher, was very Brazilian – loud, talkative, open and funny. She was very inviting and gave us a LOT of information about the culinary style in Brazil and the things we were cooking. I learned that bay leaves are used a lot to aid digestion, which is important because of all of the heavy foods, such a beans and red meat. We were told that marinating meat and fish is important in Brazil not only for flavour, but to make sure all the bacteria on the food is killed! As a general rule, fish is marinated in lime juice, chicken and pork in white wine vinegar, and beef in red wine vinegar. She taught us that the word ‘salary’ has its roots in the word ‘salt’, which is how many people were paid way back when.

Laure did a great job of adding coconut milk!

I have to say that had Simone not been so knowledgeable about the food history of Brazil, and generally so entertaining, I would probably have been a little disappointed with the experience. There just wasn’t really much cooking involved. The things we made were pretty simple (which I’m not too surprised about, having eaten a variety of Brazilian dishes), and there was only one cooking station, so rather than all of us cooking while Simone gave instructions, we just took it in turns to do a bit of the prep or stirring while she took the lead.

It was a good experience and the food was tasty. I suppose the class isn’t really aimed at people who have been living and eating in Brazil for as long as me, but rather for people who are on holiday and want to do something a bit different. Whatever my expectations had been, I left happy and full and I count that as a success!

Muqueca Baiana 

(serves 4)
For the sauce

1 large onion, cut into rings

4 peppers (any colour) cut into rings

2 tbsp palm oil*

200ml coconut milk

1 bunch fresh coriander

Salt

For the fish

600g white fish fillet**

2 limes

1 tsp ground cumin

Salt and pepper

1. In a bowl, marinade the fish fillets in the lime juice, with a couple of pinches of salt, a generous amount of black pepper and a teaspoon of ground cumin. Leave to marinade for around 10 minutes.
2. Heat the oil in a large sauce pan and add the onion and peppers. Fry until they soften and the onion becomes translucent.
3. Add a pinch of salt and the coconut milk and bring to a gentle simmer, then nestle the fish (in whatever size pieces you like) in the sauce. Lay the coriander, stalks and all, on top of the stew and simmer with the lid on until the fish is cooked through (probably about 20 minutes, depending on the size of the pieces)
4. Serve with rice and whatever other sides you fancy!

*I don't know how easy palm oil is to find outside of Brazil so my suggestion would be to use vegetable oil and then add a teaspoon of sweet paprika at the end of frying. This will give a colour and slightly musty flavour that is similar to the oil.

**Traditionally this dish is made with whole fish, cut into pieces. It is also often made with prawns, so you should feel free to experiment with different fish and seafoods - the world is your oyster after all!

Ceará In My Mouth

Final food post from our holiday! But not the last one from Brazil, don't worry. This post is about the food we ate in Fortaleza and Jericoacoara, both of which are in the state of Ceará. 

Now, Rio de Janeiro might be a coastal city but there seems to be a distinct lack of fresh seafood, and what there is tends to be very expensive. With this in mind, you can imagine how excited Dave was when people told him how cheap and delicious the seafood in Fortaleza is! We had already eaten quite a lot of fish in the Amazon but David was really looking forward to eating prawns and crabs that he has heard some much about from his colleagues. I don't enjoy shellfish but I do enjoy watching Dave eat it so all in all we had high hopes!

These lovely, crunchy, battered prawns were devoured by a certain someone while we were sitting on the beach at the Croco Beach kiosk/resort. It was a great place to spend an afternoon, but very touristy and therefore not quite as cheap as we were hoping. But regardless they were munched with gusto. The sauce was a generic mix of ketchup and mayo but the kiwi was a pleasant surprise! Kiwis aren't cheap here so it was a bit of a luxurious garnish.

During our whirlwind beach tour Dave convinced me to let him order a seafood sharing platter. It came with prawns (for him), langoustines (for him) and fish (for me). As you can see in picture below, the fish wasn't particularly prominent. Everything was grilled and well seasoned and David really enjoyed it. The fish was quite fishy and full of bones so not really my cup of tea but I did manage to eat half a langoustine. Now, I can appreciate that it was fresh and well cooked, and the flavour was pleasant enough (a little sweet and a bit smokey from the grilling) but just like with prawns, it was the texture that really got in my way. I just don't like that crunch...even the thought of it now is making me shudder. I don't know why, but it is really unappealing to me and so no matter how great this kind of thing is, I don't know that I'll ever be able to enjoy it.

As well as the above platter, we ordered some crab. Naturally, because we always order too much! But crab is hard to come by in Brazil and it was so cheap in this restaurant that I insisted Dave get some. Unfortunately, it took over an hour to arrive and when it finally did we simply didn't have time to eat it because the coach was leaving. It looked and smelled amazing though. Oh well, maybe next time!

Now, this next restaurant was a little decadent but we went at the end of the holiday when Dave was starting to get the blues about going back to work. It is called Coco Bambu, and there are several branches in Brazil, with one opening soon in Rio. It was very highly rated and when we arrived the queue was massive so we were really excited.

We started with a kind of anti-pasti plate of sundried tomatoes and Brazilian halloumi, roast aubergine in tomato vinaigrette, herby marinated prawns, fresh grilled tomatoes and a really delicious salmon ceviche. It came with various breads and we demolished it in no time. The salmon was the stand-out on the plate, but everything was really tasty. Great start!

Next we shared another dish from the starter menu - lobster in butter with capers and mixed peppers. I was apprehensive about the lobster for obvious reasons but actually it was quite soft and not too crunchy. This was a really tasty dish and the flavours all worked very well together. So far we were very impressed with the restaurant, even though it was quite pricey. 

I feel I should mention the menu because it was huge! It honestly took us ages to choose our dishes because there were probably about a hundred things on the menu, a lot being very similar with just slight variations to the sauce or accompaniments. But we were happy to take the time to read the whole thing, especially once our white wine sangria arrived! It was really delicious and full of fruit. Another extravagance but hey, what are holidays for?! We're not backpacking anymore you know. Anyway, we chose a main to share and it's just as well because of course, it was big enough for two. I wish that was clearer on all menus in Brazil, because sometimes it's really hard to tell just from the price. But we had suspected this was the case based on the dishes being taken to other tables so on this occasion, it wasn't a surprise.

Well, we finally decided on a fish dish, although it didn't specify what fish so this is a mystery! Grilled fish, with a sauce of mango, passion fruit and ginger, served with broccoli rice and pumpkin puree. Oh and it was topped with chopped cashew nuts. A bit of a weird sounding combo but that just made it all the more appealing. I don't really know what to say about this meal other than that it was soooooo sweet! The pumpkin puree was okay but tasted more of the cheese that was melted on top of it than anything else. The rice was nice but there wasn't as much broccoli as I have had before. The actual fish was meaty and tasty but the sauce...oh my, the sauce. Objectively it was a really tasty flavour, with big slices of juicy mango. Unfortunately, it was so sweet and creamy that it was basically like a fruit custard or melted ice cream, which believe it or not didn't really go so well with the fish! Such a shame.

Moving on, the photo on the left is of some seaside snacks we had while sitting by a lagoon during our three beaches tour. Sliced sausage and Brazilian halloumi. Both grilled to perfection over a few coals in a bucket. On the right is an epic pile of three ice creams, from a shop that boasts fifty flavours! And during the half an hour it took us to decide, I think we tried almost all of them. In the end we settled for ferrero rocher, dulce de leite and one called Obama, which was hilariously a mix of dark, milk and white chocolate with chunks of chocolate and caramel. Delicious!

I'm going to whizz through these next things because this post is getting too long! First up is a tomatoey stew of sting ray, if you can believe it! We got it in a really really cheap restaurant in Jeri and it tasted good, if a little basic.

Next is a tapioca pancake filled with chicken, tomato, mozzarella and basil. Tapiocas can be quite dry but this one was really tasty and a great little snack to keep me going until our lovely romantic dinner with the Swedes!

And here it is - a feast for four from the delightful little restaurant Na Casa Dela in Jericoacoara. It was all outdoor seating in a beautifully decorated garden with fairy lights and other wonders hanging from the trees. We got two types of beef which were obviously delicious and then as many vegetable sides as we could! I would highly recommend this restaurant because the food and service were both brilliant.

This banana cake is apparently a bit of a famous dish from Jeri. I am told it was nice enough, but very sweet and nothing special. Just a biscuit base with condensed milk and bananas on top, sprinkled with cinnamon and baked. Nothing to complain about of course, but nothing Dave will be looking back on and pining for.

On the left is a well known Brazilian dish called vatapá. It's a seafood stew with a coconut sauce that had an incredible depth of flavour. No chilli, but a lot of creamy, rich sauce and apparently excellently cooked prawns and lobster. On the right is what I ordered - cashew-crusted (perfectly cooked) steak with a black pepper rosti. Absolutely delicious! Both dishes were from a great restaurant in Jeri called Tamarindo. 

Dave couldn't leave Jeri without trying this dish we had seen at so many restaurants there - prawn stew in a pineapple! He really enjoyed it, although I think the big chunks of pineapple maybe made it a little too sweet at times, but then we have come to accept this as something we need to get used to when fruit is involved in any Brazilian dish.





Our final mean in Jeri was from a rough and ready fish restaurant called Peixe Brasileiro, where Dave personally selected a fish that had been caught that morning, which was then grilled simply and served with lime and a few sides. I have no idea what kind of fish we had but it was flaky, creamy and delicious. And there was a band playing at the cafe across the tiny little street so we got some free entertainment too! A great way to end a lovely few days in sandy, sunny Jericoacoara.

Bahia In My Mouth

We had very high expectations of the food in Bahia, as it is known for being flavoursome, punchy and spicy. The food we tried there was good, definitely more variety of flavours than the standard options in Rio...but it didn't blow my mind. Maybe we ate too much incredible food on our travels through Asia, but Brazilian food just isn't standing up. 

What we know of Brazilian food in the UK is meat, barbecue, and more meat. So if that's what is worth exporting then maybe it's the only thing that really translates to people outside of the Brazilian lifestyle and culture. And of course, Brazilian barbecue is incredible and we haven't had beef that was anything short of brilliant here so this reputation is definitely well deserved. I'm just not sure there is too much else I will miss (food-wise) when we leave, unlike the numerous Korean dishes that I pine for on a weekly basis!

Anyway, let's put my snobbishness aside while I tell you about what we ate in Bahia! We decided to dive straight in and go to a highly recommended buffet for our first big meal in Salvador. The restaurant is catered by a cooking school and offers a lunch and dinner buffet of a huge variety of traditional Bahian dishes. Slopping different stews onto our plates was never going to result in pretty photos, but I have included one because it showcases an unusual ingredient. On the left you can see some farofa, which was much yellower than the kind we have been served in the rest of Brazil. This is because it has been fried in a different kind of oil - dende oil. This oil is red/orange in colour and is made from the fruit of the oil palm tree. It is a traditional African ingredient and very widely used in Bahian cooking. It has a distinctive, musty flavour and adds a wonderful colour to the dishes it is used in.

The problem with eating at these buffet restaurants is that between us we try so many different dishes that it becomes really hard to keep track of what we ate, what it was called and what it tasted like. Making notes is always helpful but even then it becomes a bit of a blur when there is just so much to remember! What I do recall is that there was a lot of okra, which I love, Dave had some stewed mussels which was unusual and generally the food was tasty.

These next two photos aren't of particularly amazing food, but I'm including them for comic reasons. See, we're used to portions in Brazil often being enough to feed two people, even when it isn't explicitly stated on the menu, and we tend to use price as a guideline. We know roughly at what point a meal costs enough that it will feed us both...but Rio is an expensive city in Brazil so it turns out this method isn't transferable to Salvador! At one particular bar I ordered a portion of escondidinho (it can be made with a variety of meats, topped with cheesy mashed cassava - basically a Brazilian cottage pie!) and Dave got an octopus salad. If there had been four of us we might have just managed to eat everything but even with Dave's massive appetite, the two of us ended up leaving a lot. I hate wasting food, but sometimes it just can't be helped.

Moving on, this is a meal we had by the seafront in Salvador, after visiting Bomfins church. It was from a very popular quiosque and we ordered what looked to be the most popular combination of dishes. On the left you can see a salad of green tomatoes, onion and coriander, next to some sun-dried meat and a couple of pieces of juicy pork. This was served with a big bowl of cheesy purée de mandioca (cassava puree/mash) and some very hot chilli sauce. We washed it down with a local beer called Schin.

One very typical Bahian dish that we tried and really enjoyed was moqueca. This is a fish stew flavoured with coconut milk, tomatoes, coriander and dende oil. The fish was on the bone which made it a little annoying to eat but it was a lovely meal nonetheless. We ate it in Lençois in a very lovely restaurant called Quilombola and were given a free caipirinha and great service. On the left of the photo you can see a bowl of orange stuff. This was a weird, gloopy side dish made from cassava (of course!) and dende oil. I wasn't too keen but it was really unusual and gelatinous. 

This is a plate of food we had on one of our tours in Chapada Diamantina. It was pretty standard but there was one noteworthy item that we had not seen before. At the bottom right-hand side of the photo are some small green pieces of cactus. This had been cooked with, I assume, some garlic and onion to produce a lovely little side dish that we have not eaten before or since. There was nothing particularly special about the flavour or texture though, and I would liken it to eating slightly overcooked green beans, in a good way.

I am feeling guilty for being so harsh earlier so below is a picture that I have titled "A Tribute to Brazilian Banquets". We ate this particular feast sitting outside on one of the main streets of Lençois, at a lovely restaurant called Lampião. It was a simple affair of rice, beans, beautifully cooked steam, grilled onions and pineapple. I have had barbecued pineapple a couple of times here and have falled completely in love with it! I hope it works with the tough, woody pineapples we get at home because I need it in my life forever.

Last but by no means least I want to tell you about a restaurant I fell in love with in Lençois. On our first night there we walked past this place and were given a voucher for two free caipirinhas by a very charismatic and friendly waiter - #winning! So the next night we went to claim them and boy am I glad we did! The place was playing funky music and had some comfy outdoor seating on the pavement, from which we watched two hippies and an old man play panpipes and a guitar whilst serenading us in Spanish. The caipirinhas we got were the best passion fruit ones we have ever had and the pizza we order was a wonderful twist on a classic - ham, pineapple and mango! What with charming waiter and fantastic atmosphere, is it any wonder we nicknamed this place "Jamie's Italian"?! Of course the real name is el Jamiro and they didn't just serve Italian food but a whole range of dishes so it's well worth a visit if you're ever in the neighbourhood!