I was recently teaching classes at a major patchwork and quilting event, the 22nd. Festival of Patchwork and Quilting, at Gramado Brasil. The day before the opening I arrived in the town’s event centre to deliver some of my quilts to hang in an exhibition featuring myself and another featured Master Quilter, Marina Landi of Sao Paulo Brasil.
Once the quilts were delivered, I was free to explore the town to become a little acclimatised linguistically and culturally. The weather was frightful – foggy, cold and very wet. Though I had appropriate clothing, it was miserable out, and eventually I took myself into a cafe for lunch, several cups of coffee and a good read on my kindle. I ordered orange risotto:
They looked like prawns, but were small pieces of chicken, and you can see the chopped cilantro; there was finely chopped onion and I’m not sure what else beside the moist orange flavoured rice. But once home back here in Montevideo, I brushed up on how to cook risotto, included a bit of parmesan cheese and a slosh of white wine, and my version turned out remarkably like this, tasting every bit as good.
From a textile and teaching point of view I have already written several posts on my other blog, here and here and several posts before that about the preparations. From the first mention of my upcoming trip to Gramado in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, people began telling me how beautiful the city is, and how marvellous chocolate is there. Chocolate is big business in Gramado and the surrounding area, and in every main street are many shops decked out in eye-catching Disney-like style vying for your business! But everyone was right – the chocolate is good, even though my choc palate is neither refined nor demanding.
Other food notes from this trip –
- previous travel in Brasil led me to expect delicious looking cakes available for breakfast, and my hotel in Gramado was typical, with about a third of the breakfast buffet being cakes. Although they looked great, I just can’t eat cake for breakfast – I’m not such a sweet tooth. Instead, I selected the wonderful fresh fruit salad, whatever eggs they had and a nice tomato with onion thing that was available each day, and of course juice and coffee.
- Churrascaria restaurants are fairly well known, where waiters wander the restaurant with various BBQed meat, chicken, sausages, hearts, and other animal products on skewer. When a waiter approaches with something you’d like, he slices a bit off directly onto your plate. There’s either a salad bar or small dishes of salad arrive at your table. When you’ve had enough to eat, there’s a marker on the table that you set to let the wandering waiters know you’re done. An interesting variation on this theme was roving waiters with platters of pizza slices, which a fellow teacher and I really enjoyed.
- One day for lunch a few of us went to a restaurant where we were each given a plastic token/card as we went in. We selected what we wanted from a huge smorgasbord array of hot meats, vegetables, cold collations, salads and desserts, took our dishes to a weighing station where our cards were scanned, and this was repeated each and any time we returned for something more. As we left we simply presented our cards for a final scanning, and each paid for the weight of what we ate. This might not be new to all my readers, but I thought it was great!
- Is this dessert or salad? At the end of the salads section and the beginning of fresh fruit and desserts section. was avocado in halves or wedges, with passion fruit pulp spooned all over it. Whatever your thoughts though, give it a try – it was divino!