Rice, beans, beans and rice, rice and beans. Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.
Blog Post: completed! Oh wait…
I’d be lying if I listed anything besides rice and beans as the staple diet of Costa Rica. It gets manifested in every possible form. Sometimes the beans are ground up instead of whole. For breakfast, the rice and beans get stir-fried together (gallo pinto). Sometimes, you find them in soups, other times as “side” dishes to an entree. But the main point is: rice and beans.
After that comes an abundance of fresh fruit. I LOVE the fruit. A pineapple costs as much as three eggs (pineapples are cheap and eggs are expensive). It’s awesome- my host mom always has fresh juice for us that she makes each day. Every restaurant and roadside stand has a full menu of fresh fruit and juices. My host mom makes fruit juices from mango, papaya, manga (a bigger version of the mango), pineapple, passion fruit, banana, orange, lemon, guanabana (no, there’s not English for that), cas (still no English), carrot (which goes with more fruits than I’d have guessed), apple, and other random fruits I can’t name or translate. And then mixed and matched juice combos of all of the above. So delicious. There’s also plenty of fresh veggies including avocado on eeeeeverything. But, luckily, not in my juice.
A popular breakfast is gallo pinto, is a stir-fried combination of rice and beans served with a strange cheese or with sour cream (natilla). This can also be accompanied by an egg or a corn tortilla. After a bad tortilla experience in Argentina, I wasn’t too hopeful for Costa Rican tortillas but they’re actually way better than what I’m used to in New Mexico: a little thicker, more flavorful, and a little softer. An easy dinner or lunch is a casado which includes- you guessed it- rice and beans along with some meat and a salad. A popular dish served at basically any get together is arroz con pollo (rice with chicken) which is affectionately called arroz con siempre (rice with always) because of it’s frequent appearance.
While meats and dairy are around, beans are the main source of protein with most meals. Milk, like in Argentina, comes in a box and has an absurd shelf life which still kind of weirds me out. There’s also plenty of sandwiches available. An interesting one I tried included bacon, lettuce, tomato, ham, cheese, onion, zucchini, and some sort of pink dressing. Strange but tasty. The white cheese served with dishes like gallo pinto is soft and extra salty and definitely doesn’t mesh with my mental concept of “cheese.” There’s also decent availability of fish dishes like ceviche and a variety of soups.
Besides all the fresh fruit, my new favorite food is definitely fried plantains. While the greener ones can be fried up and salted for a drier salty side dish, the mature plantains are a delicious sweet treat to accompany any lunch or dinner. My host mom also makes another delicious dessert of mangos with honey. Think of marinating sweet tiny mangos in something like apple butter and then eating the sweet saturated fruit plus mango infused sauce.
Costa Rican coffee comes with a high recommendation and I’ve found that I’ve really enjoyed all the coffee I’ve tried while here. We don’t drink coffee here in my family, so I’ve ended up having it at a variety of different venues, but all tasty. I’ve found it to be milder and smoother than the coffee I’m accustomed to and really like it. A popular drink I haven’t gotten to try yet is agua dulce (sweet water) which is made with sugar cane juice. I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually, but I’ll keep enjoying my fruit juices until then.
The foods I most miss are breads and spicy foods. While breads are readily available at bakeries, rice is the staple starch, sometimes supplemented with tortillas and potatoes. Spicy foods, on the other hand, are pretty much a no-go. Apparently, some exist on the Caribbean coast, but I haven’t made it that far yet. In the meantime, I’ll content myself with lots more sweet pineapple and passionfruit.