A note on food...

Alright momma. You want info on food, you got it.

Here are the Do's and Dont's of Madeira food (on a budget).


DONT'S

Fast Food: Let it be said, that the ONLY restaurant that is ever busy on the waterfront is McDonalds (mind you there are a LOT of shops along the waterfront). Right next to it is Pizza Hut, and I have also seen Burger Kings. Yuck. I really think they have a worse diet here than we do.

Burgers: I have found that the most common food eaten here is burgers with chips. They even go so far as to call a burger with an egg a "snack" on the menu. It's unbeilievable. I had a burger once... pretty bland, but very greasy. It's gross.

Espresso: the most common drink BY FAR is espresso. At any time of day you can look around and see 20 people drinking one. It's quite remarkable. They could probably power the whole island on that amount of energy.

Traditional Bread: I tried a local food today. "Madeira bread with garlic." Sounds good, doesn't it? I'm afraid you will be disappointed. The bread was undercooked and mushy in the middle. The "garlic" was actually a huge swab of garlic butter, and you get the bread either with bacon or chorizo (sausage). In my case the bacon wasn't even cooked. Overall, it was mushy, bland, and dripping with grease. I really felt like I needed to shower to wash off all the drippings. I don't recommend it.

This next point straddles the Do's and Don'ts line for me...

Mercado dos Lavradores: I finally made it to the famous farmer's market. It occupies a large building, and houses two floors of produce, flowers, handicrafts and fresh fish. I found most of the produce not to be of good quality, and it was largely overpriced as it appealed mostly to tourists. However...

DO's

New Fruits:

I did become aquainted with some new fruits. In addition to the recognizable fruits, pictured here are 6 different types of passion fruit, in addition to two fruits I have neither seen nor heard of before.



The green fruit in the second row at the left is called Anona or Custard Apple, which to me tasted a lot like mango (although the salesman was surprsied). It's quite soft, with the mealiness of a pear. At the top right (that green thing that looks like corn or cucumber) is called Delicious Fruit. It takes mostly like banana and pineapple, with a hint of the pine quality of a mango.

Passionfruit: I bought 5 different types of passionfruit to taste test myself at home. This is what I found...
The small yellow one was the best--a bit sweeter than the others, while the red oblong one was baaaad. Can't even describe it. There was another kind I had tried at the market which had a very sour lemony flavor, but was delicious with sugar. So I would either stick with the normal ones, or go for yellow!

Take away shop: By far the best meal I have eaten on this trip. I went to a small take away shop for lunch and scored a fantastic lunch for about 6€: a really fresh whole fried fish, cooked potatoes with onion (eaten much like the dominicans eat yuca... yum!), and a huge hunk of sweet potato (that was just like how I like to eat it in Ghana--soft and sweeeeeet! excellent). All the food was just perfect. I enjoyed every morsel that I could eat, but I definitely left some on my plate. I washed it all down with the bargain electrolite drink called Aquarius, which I find a better alternative to the pricey and sugary sweet powerade. Fantastic meal!