Passion Every Which Way: Good For Your Health

I'm talking about passion of the fruit variety.  Brazil's large maracujá are glossy yellow with a juicy orange pulp and are my current addiction.  They have become a regular feature in my kitchen, taking up prime fruit-bowl real estate previously reserved for disappointing apples and pears, which I have finally given up on.

When buying passion fruits you want the ones with wrinkled skin which  are ripe and sweet (in the sweetest way a very sour thing can be).  They should also feel relatively heavy if they are juicy.  I whizz them in the blender with water and pass through a sieve for a righteous-tasting drink.  Add sugar if you want but I prefer it without.  (If you add cachaça and ice you get a caiprinha de maracujá). But my absolute favourite way to eat them is in one of Brazil's finest and the World's easiest to make desserts - the classic Mousse de Maracujá.  Whizz them in the blender again, this time with equal measure of cream and condensed milk and pass through a sieve before leaving in the fridge to set. Eat and die happy.

There is a conviction here in Brazil that the fruit has calming properties, and is therefore a great thing to give hyperactive kids in the evening.  Mine adore the mousse but I'm sure all the sugar in the condenses milk negates the effect.  I'm ok with that, since they're getting an alphabet load of vitamins, anti-oxidants and fibre.  A bonus is that the seeds work naturally to combat intestinal parasites, which is great for my kids who play in dirty sandy playgrounds!

Apparently even consuming the skins of passion fruits can be beneficial as it limits the effects of glucose absorption, helps combat bad cholesterol and improves digestive function.  You can cook it until it's soft and add it chopped to salads but that doesn't appeal to me much.  I bought it today in a powdered format to add to smoothies and baked goods and will report back on how that tastes!

However good they may be, I read that you shouldn't exceed four maracujá fruits per day!  Evidently too much of anything, especially passion, can be a bad thing.

My Name is Natasha and I am a Sugarholic

I haven't posted for a while because last week I got sucked into a swirling, treacle-black hole of kids' birthday parties and road trips that threw me out the other side older, fatter and definitely not wiser.

It started last Wednesday.  I threw a Hot Wheels (a.k.a. "Ho-Chi-Weos") party for my now-four-year-old and his classmates at school.   Brazilian mums delegate sugary edibles, including the cake and ubiquitous trays of brigadeiros and beijinhos, to the local bakery.  I decided to cater myself, producing a very British spread of chocolate-crispies, egg-sandwiches, cheese-straws, jelly, popcorn and a home-sculpted race-track cake.

More fool me!

Four year old children, as it turns out, are not interested in broadening their cultural horizons and experimenting new forms of party food!  For three whole days we breakfasted, lunched and dinnered on 'very hard brigadeiros' (how the children referred to my chocolate crispies) and dejected cheese-straws, by which time it was time to throw birthday party take-two, in Sao Paulo, for friends.  More leftover cake;  More leftover crispies; Each bite bringing me one sugar-rush closer to popping the button on my jeans.  I just couldn't stop myself.

By Sunday morning my binge was in full swing.  We met friends in Frutaria Sao Paulo and I indulged in the sugar addict's hair of the dog: ice cream for breakfast.  The breakfast buffet included not one but two flavours.  Amora (a type of blackberry/mulberry) and avocado.  Yes, you heard me right, avocado ice cream for breakfast.  In Brazil that's how you eat avocado; sweet (but for breakfast?  That was news for me.)

At the point at which I went to lick my bowl, I recognized that I had definitely fallen off a wagon somewhere, and have since been scrambling to get back on.   Four days ago I quit sugar, cold turkey and took up exercizing like a mofo.  Today's calorie burning activity was skating along the Flamengo beachfront.

Even without sugar, life here is sweet indeed.

Sweets for my Sweets

I'm a pretty big advocate of bribing children with sweets.  Mine will do just about anything for a lollipop, but I'm not so sure I approve of Catholic Saints following the same strategy!  Today was apparently Saint Cosme and Saint Damiao's day and my children were thrilled to receive not one but five paper bags full of sweets from strangers on the ten minute walk to school, in accordance with Brazilian tradition. 

They were accompanied by Luiza today, but I checked the booty when I got home and found a thoroughly Brazilian stash of goodies.  Twirly meringues (suspiros), shaggy white coconut sweets (cocada), heart-shaped pumpkin and sweet-potato sweets (doces de abobora e de batata doce), peanutty squares and brilliantly named 'pe de moleque' which means 'rascal's feet', presumably because the nut pieces stuck into toffee look like really dirty feet.  Finally, slack handfuls of fruit chews and lollies.  The kids think they have died and gone to heaven.

Funnily enough, my nearly-four year old did ask me this morning what happened to people when they died.  I told him no-one really knew, because once you're dead you can't tell anyone.  Some people, I explained, think they will go to heaven where there are loads of sweets and toys.  They also believe that if you are naughty you will go to a hot place with lots of fire.  Other people think that you will be born again as someone else's baby, or an animal.

He was excited by the potential for fire engines in hell, but finally decided to back being reborn as a bee who didn't sting people.  Dear Cosme and Damiao, it's going to take more than five bags of sweets to win this one over!

Home Is Where The Mango Is

My body arrived in Brazil 48 hours ago but my spirit is still lost in transit somewhere, last seen browsing the duty free shops in Heathrow's Terminal five. I'm still floating around in a jet-lagged, sleep-deprived fog. This morning, I think I made waffles for breakfast in my sleep for a child that had been up since 4.30am. Tonight, I'm ready for bed and it's barely 7pm.

So, when people keep asking me how it feels to be back in Brazil after six weeks, what can I say? I feel nothing? On one hand I should be sadder at leaving things behind; On the other I should be happier about coming 'home'. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. Certainly, when I started thinking about all the things I would miss, I realised that there was something of equal measure that I could be thankful for...

For instance, I'll miss British berries: juicy, fragrant, summer-sweet strawberries: raspberries as luscious as a big fat French kiss, that you can stick your tongue right inside and roll around until they burst.

But I will have passion fruits and mangoes.

I will miss English roses: the cumulus clouds of white and pink blossoms that flood over stone garden walls, into which I like to stick my entire face to inhale their heavenly sweetness.

But I will have orchids.

I will miss the dairy aisle: the food-porn pleasures of thick-set Greek yogurt, crème fraîche, yellow Cornish clotted cream and French cheeses that deliciously ooze and stink.

But I will have a lower risk of heart attack.

I will miss the distinctly middle class shopping experience: gentrified shopping streets with tearooms and coffee houses: shops that sell stuff that falls comfortably between expensive designer and made-in-China rubbish.

But someone will pack my bag for me at the supermarket and carry it all the way home.

I will miss Sunday barbeques in the garden that stretch on into the late-lit evening, enjoying charred, fat-to-bursting pork sausages.

But I can enjoy the best filet steak in the world, as often as I like.

I will miss baked beans but give thanks for black ones: Indian food but will learn to cook Moqueca: The Thames Path but will run on the Aterro: friends but I will make new ones: family but I have my children and husband.

I will miss home, but my home is here: And my spirit just walked through the front door, without any baggage.

The Flu in Brazil

The Flu. Or is it just a bad cold? A friend told me yesterday that the scientific difference is whether or not you would be arsed to bend over and pick up a fifty quid note on the floor...If you could, you don't have the flu.

At any rate, the whole week has been punctuated with temperature-telling, medication measuring, coughing, sniffing, and the tiresome ritual of getting all wrapped up in blankets because we're freezing, only to unwrap our sweaty selves again five minutes later.

Of course there's nothing else that makes you miss 'home' more than being ill. We all yearn for our mothers to come and make it all better with familiar remedies: Vicks rubbed into our chests, Olbas oil on our pillow and syrupy spoonfuls of Benylin. Then there are the comforting, homely recovery foods like boiled eggs with Marmite soldiers and Heinz baked beans on toast.

The first time you are sick here you have to totally relearn all these rituals. You may be able to find approximations of Lemsips, Strepsils and Benylin but how can you replace your mother or Marmite or Baked Beans?

As it turns out I had a comfort food breakthrough this week. For the first time in 5 years I actually craved Brazilian-style black beans on rice: A warm, soft, sloppy, aromatic bowl of solace that more than made up for a lack of British beans.

I even made concessions to Brazilian medication and bought some Propolis extract. Propolis is a natural antibiotic produced and used by bees to protect their hives. Brazilians swear by it as a first line of defense against absolutely any ailment from minor cuts to major bruises. I got as far as buying it. I didn't yet use it but I can feel my throat starting to burn so I'll pop some drops before I head to bed.

I might even go so far as to say that the only thing on my list that can't be replaced is Marmite, because I do have a maternal stand-in: Eloiza. It is she who makes the delicious rice and beans, who takes my children out to play so I can rest supine on the sofa all afternoon, gives me suitably sympathetic looks and offers me hot tea with garlic, lemon and honey (which I decline). Of course I have to pay her to play this role, but she does it beautifully.

She would pick any stray fifty note off the floor, wash it and iron it before I even noticed it was there. How sick does that make me?

You say tomato, I say...Caqui?

My children were pretty disgusted when I gave them what appeared to be a chopped tomato as their after-supper treat. It was, in fact, a Caqui, and an exemplary one at that. It had been specially selected for me by the disbelieving stall owner at the feira when I told him I'd never eaten one.

I was instructed not to put my dense, shiny, red orb in the fridge under any circumstances, and to eat it 24 hours later, when he deemed it would be perfect. And so there I was, alone at the table, my children long since having excused themselves without bestowing upon theirs a single exploratory lick.

Inside, the fruit looked like a tomato without the seedy bit. Its flesh had the same texture of a perfectly ripe pear, neither slippy or grainy. The skin, also pear-ish, had a bite to it. It didn't have any particular flavour or aroma. Tastewise it simply registered as sweet. Almost sickly. The skin was like toffee. It was pretty much on a par with eating white sugar, which is too bad for my children because they would have loved it! For my part it was okay, but I couldn't help feeling it was just a sin in fruit form.

Trusty Wikipedia informs me, however, that caqui is low in calories (around 80 per 100 grams) and full of vitamins, calcium, iron and proteins. There is apparently a less sweet version of the fruit called caqui-chocolate, which has a more orange hue. Both types are abundant in Brazil, having been introduced by Japanese immigrants around 1916.

And that, my friends, is all I, or the world's free encyclopedia, have to say about the caqui.

Market Scares

My first visit to an outdoor Brazilian produce market (feira) was fine until something caught my eye at the fruit stall and my gait hesitated. I was immediately jumped on by store owners shouting, gesticulating and shoving tropical fruit into my mouth. A dozen of everything I didn't want, need or recognize was bagged-up and hooked over my wrists before I could protest. I paid a mint and staggered away feeling very foolish.

That was four years ago, but I'm still intimidated by the feira. On Tuesday mornings I go to the one off rua do Catete to buy fish from the stall at the very edge of the market, so I can avoid the rest of it. When I do brave it, I walk briskly, without eye contact. I don't accept samples. I gesture and point, in the hope that I'll be taken for a Brazilian mute rather than a gringa to be ripped off. Even still, when confronted by a stall with 8 different choices of banana, I usually end up retreating to the safer, simpler, pricier supermarket.

This has got to stop.

The other thing that I can't sustain for the rest of my life here is an exclusively European diet. I import Earl Grey teabags, Marmite, Shreddies, pine nuts, french chocolate, dried cranberries and a million other things. I insist on making roasts even though it's infernally hot. I complain that Brazilian ovens can't make a decent Yorkshire pudding and that the grill is incapable of browning anything, not least a shepherds pie. In five years, I have barely tried anything indigenous to Brazil, with the exception of the traditional arroz feijao (rice and black beans), which only made a recent appearance in our household thanks to our maid, and would now be eaten by my one year old for breakfast (if it weren't for the Shreddies).

Yesterday, in the interests of getting over my feira angst, getting better acquainted with Brazilian ingredients and giving me something to write about, I vowed to go every Tuesday, intentionally purchase something alien, photograph it, prepare it, pop it in my mouth and write about it.

With that promise to my one blog follower in mind, I went to the feira with an open heart. And guess what? I was not assaulted or conned by anyone. The stall owners couldn't have been more helpful (and amused) in response to my questions of "is that a fruit or a vegetable?", as I pointed to bizarre plant growths, and asked them how to prepare them. When I took out my camera an outcry ensued, as each out-hollered the next, wanting me to shoot their stall.

Upshot was, I walked away with an expertly selected caqui given to me as a gift, along with a handful of maxixi. "What are they?", you wonder. Well, I bet you can't wait until the next installment...