Que Rico!

Small restaurants in Costa Rica are called sodas, which I find interesting because they don’t even call soda (as in soda pop) soda; they call it gaseosa or refresco.  If you walk into a soda and ask for a typical plate of food, they’ll serve you a casado (which literally means ‘married’).  Casados consist of rice, beans, a little bit of salad, a piece of meat, platano maduro (which is almost exactly like a banana but it has to be fried up), picadillo (diced up potatoes), and a fruit drink.  Meat of all kinds is used, but you will be served chicken, beef, or pork.  The fruit drinks are delicious.  Sometimes you get pineapple juice, or watermelon juice.  There are also some fruits that aren’t very common in the U.S. like guava, papaya, tamarind, and soursop.  They sure sound funny, but the juice tastes delicious!  

A Costa Rican Casado with beef

The soda in our school

In fact, the fruit is my favorite part of the food here in Costa Rica.  When I go on hikes with the Scouts, the neighbors will sometimes give us bananas that they’ve picked in their backyards as a snack.  Have you ever heard of guayaba?  It’s a type of passion fruit that’s often made into jelly for toast, but you can also pick the fruit right from the tree and suck out the pulp on the inside.  Pipas, or young coconuts, are my absolute favorite.  If you’re lucky enough to have one, you chop off the top with a machete (or just bust it on a rock if no).  Then you can drink the juice from it as if it were a cup!   

Guayaba Fruit with bars of guayaba candy

Pipas still on the tree

Rice and beans are very common here.  The typical breakfast dish is called pinto gallo, which literally means ‘speckled hen’.  The leftover rice and beans from last night are fried up in a pan and served on a plate with scrambled eggs.  I live by myself now in my own house, so I cook for myself, but when I lived with my host family I was sometimes served rice and beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!  Ketchup is usually available, but most people spring for the chile panameño, which is a jar of pickled hot peppers.  You take a spoon and scoop out the juice (or one of the peppers if you’re brave) to spice up your meal a little.

There’s a lot of food that we eat in the U.S. that is common here too, only it’s eaten differently.  For example, have you ever eaten a plate of spaghetti piled atop a mound of rice?  I doubt it.  Pancakes?  How about we serve them with sour cream instead of syrup? Does any of you like the taste of sour milk?  My host mom, Doña Ivonne, saves the crusty stuff on top of the milk as her favorite part!  I’ve never gotten used to the taste, nor have I gotten used to the taste of salt sprinkled on top of my fruit.  The pineapple here is absolutely delicious.  Just hold the salt, please.

I live in a part of the country that’s quite different from the rest of Costa Rica, named Limón.  Here the food is also quite distinct.  Rice and beans are still very popular, but it’s cooked with coconut milk and spices to make the dish a lot richer.    On the side are served patacones, or fried plantains.  They taste a lot like french fries.  

Patacones, photo courtesy of Flickr user Beth M

And I’m sure you want to know about candy!  Well, the fruit here is so sweet that kids are usually happy buying a bag of cut-up mangos or pineapple to munch on.  A lot of neighbors in Limón 2000 make homemade ice cream.  It’s a little more liquidy than regular ice cream and is typically sold in little plastic bags.  To eat, you just bite off a corner of the bag and push the ice cream out.  Kids like chocolate, but it’s expensive here so they don’t buy it very often.  There’s one similar treat that kids just love, if they can get their hands on it:  cocoa fruit.  Chocolate is made from cocoa seeds, which come from the fruit of the cocoa tree.  The seeds grow in pods about the size of a football.  You can crack these pods open and you’ll find inside the seeds mixed together with the fruit—kind of like a pumpkin, but with bigger seeds.  You pick out the seeds and suck the fruit off of them, and then spit them out.  They taste nothing like chocolate but are still very delicious.  

Cocoa fruit, photo courtesy of Flickr user Slipkjohn2