Food in Honduras

We get a lot of questions here wondering how we like the food. I guess it’s a big change for a lot of people. Beans and rice. Beans and rice. And maybe some more beans and rice. For us, it’s not such a big change. With my gluten sensitivity, we eat a lot of rice in the US anyway. Plus, we somehow became convinced that we needed to stockpile bags of beans and rice, then, later, we decided to move. I decided we should eat all of the beans and rice before we moved (it didn’t happen – we had somewhere around 4 or 5 bags of beans and just as many bags of rice), so we’d been eating a lot of beans and rice before we left for Yellowstone.

To go with the beans and rice, we have a fresh fruit and vegetable market. It is definitely seasonal as we watch fruits and veggies come and go. We take advantage of trying out fruits we’ve never seen before, with more success than failures. I would love to tell you the names of some of the fruits we’ve tried, but the vendors tell us the names and we promptly forget them as soon as we get distracted by the need to  ask for something else. We are also fortunate in that some of our favorite expensive fruit purchases in the US are native to Honduras and, thus, are relatively cheap: pineapple, papaya, plantain, avocado. February is watermelon season – Alex’s favorite – so we have at least one watermelon a week. I allow my students to eat during class (it actually helps to keep the classroom cleaner), so I was surprised one day when one of my 8A students asked, “Miss, can I eat a jicama?” He pulled out a peeled jicama and proceeded to eat it like an apple. I’ve had jicama on salads, but I never thought of eating one whole, but that’s now one of our afternoon snacks. Another big plus for me that can be purchased at the vegetable market is freshly made corn tortillas. They come at the whopping price of 40 for $1. They are my main bread substitute, but I still ask Alex if he thinks I’m crazy every time I use them to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Supplementing our beans and rice with a little bit of meat is a bit of a challenge. We’ve made a few strange meat purchases, like the hamburger that was clearly what hamburger used to be – all of the ground up parts that maybe we didn’t want to be eating any way. Then there was the purchase of frozen, unpackaged chicken legs and thighs that were placed into a plastic grocery sack for our transport home. We can buy hanging meat in the market, but, after purchasing cheese from a vendor who was slicing raw meat before our purchase and didn’t wash her hands to slice our cheese, I am reticent to buy meat in the market. Many of the mini-grocery stores sell frozen meat, but what we think we’re buying is not always what we get, as evidenced by the hamburger purchase. We do buy a whole chicken every other week, like we did in Oregon, and make numerous meals out of it, finishing with boiling the bones to make soup. Our constant debate is do we buy the packaged chicken that we know is pumped full of chemicals or do we go to the store that sells “free range” chicken, not knowing what regulations are in place, if any, to protect the consumers of “free range” chicken? It’s a tough change since we bought our Oregon chickens from a local farmer in Tillamook. We knew where those chickens came from. A lot of teachers have become pseudo-vegetarians, preferring to only eat meat cooked in the school’s caseta (cafeteria) or in a reliable restaurant. This may be due to the fear of making the meat purchase or just the fact that a lot of the teachers are in their early 20s and have yet to master the art of cooking. (I’m planning to hold a “How to cook a chicken” class soon.) Unfortunately, Alex and I did not leave our ice cream addiction at home. We are regulars at one of the local ice cream shops, buying the tub of ice cream that cost 5 limperas more than other stores because the owner of the store is nice to us and it comes in a better, more re-usable container.

Some of our new recipes (I cook like my dad – mostly on trial and error, occasionally with a recipe):

Plantain – serves 2 to 3

1-2 ripe plantains (skins are turning brown)

Slice plantains however you want to. Place in a shallow baking dish. Add any of the following to the dish: sliced green mangos (I haven’t seen these in the US), mildly hot chili peppers (like jalepenos), honey or freshly grated sugar, freshly grated ginger, liquid cheese (most closely related to sour cream, but not really). Dot with butter and put in the oven at 270 – that would be Celsius, but I’m thinking it’s around 400 or 450 F. Yum!

Chicken soup – serves a lot – probably 8, but could serve 10-12 with side dishes

After you’ve cooked and eaten most of a whole chicken, but the remaining meat, all of the bones, and drippings in a pan and boil the heck out of it all until the bones all fall apart. Strain the liquid into the soup pan. Pick all of the remaining meat off of the bones and add to the broth. Throw the bones out into the empty field 2 doors down for the hungry dogs of Copan Ruinas. Put the broth back on heat so that it will start boiling again as you add vegetables. Add whatever you want in your soup – vegetables, beans, rice, barley (used in Oregon, not here). This is a great way to use wilty vegetables – once they’re in the soup, you can’t tell that they were wilty! If you spiced the chicken well, as we do, you may not need to spice the soup, but add spices to your liking. Don’t forget the salt – not too much, but not too little.