Here's an open question to all expats here in Brazil...
Just what are your eating habits, anyway? Please take the time to answer the following questions:
1. Do you tend to continue eating the dishes you are used to in your home country or do you most often eat Brazilian dishes?
2. What is your favorite Brazilian dish?
3. Do you find the meal times here in Brazil much different than your home country, and if so are you having trouble adapting?
4. What dish from your home country do you miss the most?
5. Do you find it difficult to adapt to the staple diet of rice and beans every day?
To start things off I will give my own answers to the questions.
1. I tend to eat more Brazilian dishes, simply because I'm married to a Brazilian and she also cooks. I generally make the family breakfast every day and it is more a traditional Canadian (eggs & bacon & pancakes) breakfast.
2. My absolute favorite Brazilian dish has got to be Feijoada. All feijoadas are not created equal, but a good feijoada with a cold beer...... wow, life doesn't get better than this. Churrasco is a close second or maybe even tied for first place.
3. At first when I came here over ten years ago I found it very difficult to adjust to the much later lunch and dinner times than I was used to. Also the fact that lunch in Brazil was such a heavy meal took some getting used to. In Canada we started out the day with a BIG breakfast, a light lunch and a heavy meal for dinner.
4. Well, I cook so I do make many of the dishes from home. I really miss blueberry pie. Blueberries are hard to come by here and so darned expensive that I could make muffins or pancakes, but a real honest to God blueberry pie is out of the question for me.
5. While I'm still not really big on rice I do eat rice and beans almost daily since my wife and son are Brazilian and she generally cooks dinner for the family.
What are your eating habits?
1.Where I live in the US....we dont have many Brazilian resturaunts....but what me and my friends do is every weekend, we go to a different ethnic restaurant each time.
2. Feijoada has to be the best dish I have ever had. The meat mixed with the black beans...good rice. I love to drink beer with it but a Caipirinha with Feijoada...im ready to go to heaven haha.
3.I dont think the meal times will be difficult to adjust to.
4. I think I will miss.....carnitas....I used to live near the border of Mexico and will truly miss it.
5.No...living near the Mexican border conditioned me to that type of diet.
Hi mm0001,
First of all Welcome to Expat-blog and to Brazil.
Have you ever noticed just how many fitness centers they have here???? That's how........ in São Paulo and Rio they outnumber beauty salons. I really don't know about BH because when I lived there I lived in a remote bairro and didn't get into the city center often, but I guess it's the same there. That's how they keep their figures despite all the carbs. LOL
Have you checked out the Central Market (Mercado Central) for salsa and tacos? You might find the ingredients there. The Pão de Açúcar supermarket chain also has an imported foods section in their larger outlets, maybe another place to try. Now that you've mentioned it my mouth is watering for a taco.
BTW if you ever find a decent pizza in BH let me know where, most of the places I tried when I lived there you could use their pizza to do an oil change on your Jeep Cherokee.
Cheers,
William James Woodward - Brazil Animator, Expat-blog
i lived in Paraiba in a small village for the last 3 months...and yes the meal times were hard on me and the big lunch...was hard to get use to.
I dont understand pizza in brazil at all. i did eat rice and beans each day...i dont like the flies and the mosquitos ...but in spite of it all I AM GOING BACK>>>AND LIVE!!!! any contacts and words from friends in the NORTH let me know...my Barra is five hours inland from Recife.
Ken
Yeah, olive oil and even ketchup (believe it or not) on a pizza is definitely a Brazilian thing. LOL I'm the grandson of an Italian and I sure never saw that practice anywhere in Canada where I grew up. Then again, there's a lot of things about pizza (and other ethnic dishes) that have become 'Brazilianized'.
Even in São Paulo where they REALLY know pizza and the smallest little 'hole-in-the-wall' pizzaria turns out the best pizzas in the country, they aren't quite the same as Italians and Italo-Americans make them.
Cheers,
William James Woodward - Brazil Animator, Expat-blog
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