A Food Blog...

It is amazing how cyclical life can be. This week the desire to do everything on the Island in a short period of time has been reignited in me, like it was in my first weeks here. Two weeks and a day or so is all the time I have left here in Ecuador and it is really challenging to understand how that makes me feel! Next week my class is heading back to Santa Cruz for a dive trip and a few of us are leaving early so we can take a tour of Floreana Island and explore Santa Cruz more. I am sure I will have much to share after all of that!

One of the things I liked hearing about most while planning my trip here was what the food would be like. There are two main reasons for this: 1) I like food and 2) I like to cook. It is also fun to hear about what people eat around the world. From reading blogs from past students in this program, I expected to only have two options for food while I was here, fish and rice. Now, I am not sure if it is seasonal differences, and don’t get me wrong I eat A LOT of fish and rice, but we have had quite a few more options than that. Therefore, I thought it would be fun to do a food blog! It ended up being more difficult than I thought because due to condition one about I usually remembered to take a picture after I had finished everything on my plate. Anyway here is what I have!

Breakfast

We eat breakfast at home Friday-Monday and at the University Tuesday-Thursday.

At the University we have options like bread, fruit, cereal, juice and another dish that changes everyday. I usually eat a bowl of fruit (papaya or watermelon, sometimes pineapple) with granola and yogurt. This day the special dish was yucca with herbs. I also always have coffee at school because why pass that up?

Probably my favorite breakfast at school: the granola mentioned above and scrambled eggs. We eat a ton of eggs here (which I have been told Californians pronounce wrong or at least I do saying “Ayeggs”) and I love them now. Not that I didn’t like eggs before, but I would have passed up a fried one easily. Now I am excited when we get them!

Breakfast at home is similar, only every morning we drink hot chocolate. I am not sure how we go into that, but I think we gave off the impression that we loved it and now we have it every time. On Saturdays Mariana and I usually wake up first. On this Saturday we made pancakes, with sweetened condensed milk on top, and had homegrown cantaloupe and scrambled eggs with it.

Lunch 

We are on our own for lunch everyday of the week. It is usually the biggest meal of the day here, but since we get dinner provided most nights, we usually eat a smaller lunch. Betty will give us lunch sometimes, or on Sundays instead of dinner we will all eat an Almuerzo (that just means lunch in Spanish but in my mind it means a big meal).

This is a typical lunch on a diving/ snorkeling trip. I am always grateful for the steamed veggies. We also had fish, rice and pasta.

Patacones in the making! These are twice fired plantains and are so good. You fry them once, smash them, fry them again and sprinkle them with salt! Really they could go in any category because people eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

The Sunday before the farm, we ate Almuerzo at home. This was the salad we made for it. We eat salads with cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, peppers, onion and garlic. Sometimes we can buy ice berg lettuce and they do have spinach but it is only used for soups.

This is the finished product! Rice, baked chicken, potatoes with oregano, patacones and salad. YUM!

Last Sunday, we were invited to my host mom’s daughter’s house for grilled fish. Here it is all cooked up! They eat all of the parts of the animal here which is interesting to see, but not my favorite to eat. Actually, I have never seen someone eat the fish head, but there have been eyes in soups and sometimes more bones than meat. Sautéed cow liver wasn’t my favorite either, but that was a while ago!

Here is the whole lunch from that day. Grilled fish, yucca, a plantain “tortilla,”salad and lemonade. Everything in that shape is called a tortilla, so it could be anything from an omelet to a grilled cheese, but usually it is specified like “tortilla de verde” would be a plantain tortilla.

During the school week, Mariana and I sometimes buy groceries together and make salads or make peanut butter sandwiches at school in the mornings and eat those. This day we mashed up avocado with veggies and ate it on bread. We also had guava juice. Juice is huge here. People drink it with every meal and it is SO SWEET. Usually I pass on it, but sometimes it is a nice treat!

Snacks

Bananas are a relatively unlimited resource here and considering neither Mariana nor I like to eat them plain, making the perfect banana bread became our mission. We were successful with what has to be our last batch (way too much butter to make again). We made a crumble topping with oats and it was so good!

We also snack on fruit. This was papaya, cantaloupe and oranges. We also ate jello with crackers which I don’t necessarily need to eat again. I guess I am not the biggest jello fan!

Got to love watermelon! They are gigantic and so tasty cold from the fridge after a day at the beach!

Dinner

On Mondays and Wednesdays we eat at various restaurants in town. We eat every other dinner (excluding Fridays and Saturdays when we are on our own) with out host families.

This restaurant dinner was pesto fish with pesto rice, pureed potatoes and a patacone.

Last night we had chicken lasagna with rice and buttered vegetables. It was a first for us although we do have spaghetti sometimes and it always comes with rice on the side!

Dessert

With all of the panaderias and sweet shops around, sweet treats are not hard to find.

My favorite are the palmiers from Panadaeria Frigata. They are so flakey, crispy and sugary! Sammy and I had this one after our dive one day.

Mariana and I made this cake for the Easter dinner we had at school. For real Easter we made another for the family and it had better frosting as this one melted off the cake on our walk to school.

So there you have it. A loose summary of the food I eat here in the Galapagos! Tonight we had ceviche again for dinner. I love the tangy lime juice with the fish and onion! Although there are a quite a few foods I miss from the US and I don’t feel the healthiest I have ever been, I really like the food we eat here and am completely happy with it!