Tag Archives: New foods

A VIP movie and Eastern NC comes to Panamá!

I’m a little overwhelmed by all the stories I have to tell from Matty’s visit last week, so I’ll warm-up my blogging skills by telling about our weekend.  Eric had a really long day of work on Friday, so we just took it easy that night…but I had plans for Saturday.  After a rousing capoeira practice for which only three of us showed up, Eric and I went to our very first VIP movie experience.  Fancy!

There is a new mall in town that opened in May and it is beyond fancy.  We’re talking Dolce and Gabbana, Louis Vuitton (I had to google how to spell it), Chanel, all the huge designer names that you never knew had stores because you live in North Carolina.  I hadn’t yet set foot in it because 1) there’s no way I’d ever buy anything there; 2) Eric, shockingly, has no interest in checking out the latest ridiculously expensive fashions with me; and 3) none of our visitors seem to have come to Panamá for the purpose of spending time in the mall.  Again, shocking.

But this mall, like maybe four others in town, has a VIP movie theater.  VIP means that they have fancy leather reclining chairs set up in pairs with side tables alla college classroom so you have a place for…wait for it…the food that the waitstaff delivers directly to your seat!!!!  Brilliant, right?  Asheville folk, it’s like the Asheville Brew and View, but with waiters and without fear of getting diseases from the old couches that they have.  A couple of big steps up, eh?

I was in charge of researching ticket purchasing, and unfortunately, I missed the memo that we were supposed to get them in advance.  We ended up sitting…in the front row.  As it turns out though, since we saw the new Misión: Imposible (NO, I will NOT translate that for you.) which was subtitled in Spanish rather than dubbed, we didn’t have to crane our necks to read subtitles.  This made it a rather enjoyable viewing experience, despite the “bad” seats.  We both ordered beers, which were served in actual beer mugs, which I prefer to pint glasses when in situations where I am rather likely to knock something over.  Stability and a low center are gravity are key to any beverage container within arm’s length of me.  We also ordered dinner.  I had some Japanese rice dish with shrimp and veggies.  It was a huge helping, so Eric ate a lot of it too.  Not phenomenal, but hey, it was a heck of a lot better than nachos.  Very filling.  Eric had some kind of pizza wrap thing that was in the shape of an ice cream cone.  Like, it was disturbingly close to the shape of an ice cream cone.  He said it was fine.  Meh, still a fun experience, and a good date night.

On Sunday we did a quick trip to one of the bigger but less fancy malls called Albrook.  Eric went by metro and I drove to see which was faster.  Problem is, I got lost inside trying to get to the previously determined meeting point.  Eric had planned to meet me upstairs in the food court.  I walked around for no less than 25 minutes (we’re talking speedwalking like my mother trained me to do in malls), consulting at least two directories which are brilliant in that they are electronic, but not so brilliant in that they don’t work…before arriving at the food court.  Unfortunately, I was at the food court with the giant staircase and the huge gorilla head, while he was at the food court with the carousel and the hot air balloons.  Whoops.

Anyway, I eventually found him, we met up for about 2 min, then we went our separate ways.  He again rode metro home…but we didn’t exactly communicate about who would be getting home when and who should have the key to our apartment.  I trusted his text saying he was leaving to head home, quickly wrapped up my errand of looking for skirts for a capoeira performance (a dance we’re doing in a show…we don’t wear skirts when we actually do capoeira, in case that’s unclear.  That would be tricky.), and got in the car.  He, meanwhile, figured I would be a while and that a stop by Wendy’s wouldn’t take too long.  Turns out, Wendy’s took forever making his spicy chicken sandwich – and “side” of fried chicken because, well, Panamá – so I beat him home by about 10 min.  We had given our key to a neighbor when he kept Addie for us last week and hadn’t gotten it back, so I was stuck in the hall for a bit.  No problem though.  I made a Panamá-friendly playlist on my phone in preparation for our upcoming dinner party.

When Eric let me into our house, we started cooking.  Eric was at the helm and I played sous chef, as usual.  We made Eastern Style NC pulled pork BBQ, Brunswick stew y cornbread.  It was amazing.  The plan had been to have Lourdes and Mono over, but they ended up not making it.  But no matter, our other friends Mahalia and Auri from capoeira and Elliott, our neighbor from Newcastle, came and gave our down-home country cookin’ a try.  We went REALLY easy on the spice b/c folks down here don’t typically like spicy food, but they really liked it!  They even took some leftovers to go, much to Eric’s chagrin.  I didn’t realize we didn’t have all that much left over and that I was not supposed to offer it to our guests.  Oops!  🙂

We also had some of our favorite newly discovered drinks.  They’re called chiladas.  Corona + lime juice + hot sauce with a salted rim.  It’s amazing.  I love it!

Anyway, it was my kind of night.  Spanglish spoken by all (and Eric did GREAT!  I was SO proud!), southern food, and fun friends.  Plus everyone here loved on my dog…an added bonus.  🙂

Okay, I told all the stories from Matt’s visit to our Spanish teacher today, so hopefully I’ll have them all in mind to share soon.

A Borojo, Addie, and a Stripper

We invited Dan and Sarah to join us in our produce-sampling game, and they drew the short straw.  This week’s pick was a borojo.  Borojos are brown, about 12 cms in diameter, and unsettlingly squishy.  Kinda like those balls filled with some kind of goo that were popular about the same time as Koosh balls were.  They are high in protein, ascorbic acid, calcium, and iron, and are often referred to as superfoods.  They are used in the preparation of jams, wines, and desserts and are said to have aphrodisiac effects.

Raw and plain, however, they are quite disgusting.  Extremely flavorful, bitter, squishy, almost sour at points…quite hard to describe.  I tasted it first and used the words sour, pungent, bitter, lemon, and sharp cheddar cheese.  I believe Sarah likened it to spoiled lemon Pledge, even after adding sugar to it, as recommended.  Dan said it wasn’t bad (with a 1:6 borojo:brown sugar ratio), but did not go back for seconds.  Eric wasn’t a big fan, but couldn’t quite find the words to describe it.

It was disturbing how easily a dull knife went through it.  Here are a few pictures…

It came packaged in seran wrap and nylon netting…otherwise it would squish out all over the place.
Notice the cracks in the surface of it. Gross.
Wiki says each one has between 90-640 seeds. Weird.
Not in love.
Meh.

In other mundane news, our dog has produced what appears to be the makings of another dog, or at least a sweater.  This is the fur Eric took off of her in only about 20 minutes of brushing her.

Then we did it again the next day.  On the upside, she’s looking awfully trim recently.

I also realized I forgot to fill y’all in on the bachelorette party I attended a week ago.  It was a surprise for our friend Lourdes, so we were playing it like it was just going to be a girls’ night.  Two nights before the party, Lourdes mentioned on our group chat on Whatsapp that we should go ahead and get a stripper for her that weekend at our “girls’ night.”  Shoot!  Was she kidding or did she really want one?  Did she know our plan for the party?  Did anyone know where to find a stripper?

First, I’ll say that this is a pretty naive and innocent group of ladies.  No one had any experience with strippers.  We did, however, have a prolific salsa dancer in the group, and she just happened to know a friend of a friend who had, ahem, entertained before.  Uncomfortable as we all were, we wanted Lourdes to be happy, so the hostess hired this guy:

Three comments I have to add here.  1) I already discussed this with Mom and I’m pretty sure she thought it was hilarious, so I don’t have to do my usual shoutout and apology to her.  2) I don’t know what the laws are regarding age in Panamá, but for the record, he IS over 18.  Not by much though.  EEK!  3) Yep, he’s serious with those poses and that face.  Haha.

So let me also add that none of the other ladies had ever been to a bachelorette party before.  I, however, have been to more than my fair share of them (not that they haven’t been lovely, if you’re reading this and I went to yours!!!).  I’m just saying that all the traditional themes and silly games were not old to them, so they wanted to do it all.  There was even talk of costumes by some, but luckily we got that shut down.  Whew.

The thing that was not shut down, however, was the cake in the shape of, well…you can guess.  And the woman who chose to make the cake…had never made a cake before.  In her almost 40 years of life!  So she came to my house to make it.  And Eric, precious sweet husband that he is, helped us with it since we were also preparing most of the other food for the party and getting ourselves ready too.  My friend was shocked, I think, that he was so comfortable with the idea of holding a cake in that particular shape.  No silly machismo keeps this one from helping out his wife in her hour of need.  🙂

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While we were preparing the food, we got a call that Lourdes would have to bring her two daughters, ages 7 and 10ish, to the party with her.  Now remember, she has no idea that there will be an inappropriate cake and a stripper there…so what’s the problem?  The girls hang out with us all the time!  Uhh…we scrambled for a solution…and finally decided that they would just watch movies upstairs and we would delay the entertainment a bit and hope they were asleep.  Oh jeez.  Brilliant.

Luckily, all went according to plan.  Lourdes was surprised.  Blown away even.  None of her surprise guests (friends from her Portuguese class) ended up coming (punks!), but our capoeira group had a great time.  And although we were all nervous about it, the stripper was as tasteful as I imagine something like that could be, and stayed comfortably decent through the whole show.  I think we could safely call him a dancer instead.  Phew!  Also, since he was a friend of a friend, he just had a beer and chatted (fully clothed) with us for a few minutes afterwards, which alleviated any weirdness from the previous few minutes.

Mostly, it just ended up being a fun night with a group of close girlfriends!

Lucero (our 18 year old friend – she keeps us young)
Lucero, Jessie, Me, and Auri
Paola and Me
Lourdes, Jessie, Paola, and Mahalia
Auri

Food! Or so they say…

We continue to try new fruits as we find them.  The latest is a pitahaya, not to be confused with the yellow fruit of similar spelling.  This is also a cactus fruit, and actually I’m quite confused about which one is actually the true dragonfruit.  I thought it was the other one, but now I’m reading that “‘Pitaya'” usually refers to fruit of the genus Stenocereus, while ‘pitahaya’ or ‘dragon fruit’ always refers to fruit of the genus Hylocereus.”  I’m sure you’re super intrigued.  The main point?  This time we tried the pink one; last time we tried the yellow one.

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Before I had any say in the matter, Eric peeled the poor thing naked, leaving it looking like this:

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Sad.  We were excited though, to find out that it looked like the yellow dragonfruit thing, but with more pulp.   Still like a giant kiwi.  Sadly, it was less sweet and just plain not as good as the yellow one.  Womp womp.  Still worth trying though.  Eric also learned a valuable lesson.  You don’t strip these things down because you can use the outside pink skin stuff as a bowl.  Otherwise you just have a giant slippery kiwi sliding all over the plate.  Luckily there were two of us, as eating it became a team effort.

We also tried a zapote.  This was my find.  I picked it up on a solo trip to the grocery store.  So when you get produce, you have to have it weighed and bagged and labeled in the produce section so that the cashiers don’t have to bother with it when they check you out.  Not a bad system actually.  So I was in line to have my zapote weighed and the old man behind me asked me what this thing was that I was buying.  I told him I had no idea and he laughed.  I then got into the checkout line and the bag boy asked me the same thing.  The cashier kinda laughed when I said again that I didn’t know.  She said it was a fruit (whereas I thought it looked kinda like a squash) and that she didn’t like them.

Zapote

 

Turns out a zapote looks and feels like a pumpkin inside – it’s slimy – but it’s sweet.  Not my fave, but worth a try.

Zapote insides

So…here comes the…er…interesting part.  I decided to actually look at the meat section at the grocery store rather than just going immediately to the chicken and hamburger meat and ignoring all the gross.  If you are a vegetarian or in anyway opposed to gross meats, you might not want to see this.  Look at all the weird things they sell in our normal, rather upscale (think Harris Teeter) grocery store!

Pigs’ Feet
Liver
Kidney
Tongue – it’s HUGE!!!
Pig’s Spleen – according to one translation…although that must’ve been a HUGE pig!
Bull testicles. Yep.

 

So yeah.  There’s that.  I’m sticking to the fruit sampling.  There are plenty of challenges there.  Check this out, for example:

Rambutan

Rambutan

I mean, that’s a fruit that’s trying not to get eaten.  I thought it was a sea urchin of some kind.  I’ll keep you updated on that one.  Might wait until our next guests get here to bring them in on the fun.

Another comment on food here.  These dear folks do a lot of things right when it comes to food.  If you want anything fried, they know how to do it.  They know their seafood.  They have weird fruits to try and will cook any part of any animal that you want to try.  However, don’t try to get what you think of as a salad.  If you order a salad, you will end up with a potato or pasta salad…something held together with mayo.  If you ask for a green salad, you will get closer.  However, there’s a good chance it will be this size.  And of this quality.  I can’t wait to visit the US to get a good crunchy bowl full of lettuce.

 

We also finally visited the Kosher market!  We always manage to think about visiting on Friday evening around sunset or on Saturday.  Oops.  That doesn’t work.  The size of the place and the selection were pretty impressive, however some things were obviously not to be found there.  Eric, for example, noted that he supposed they wouldn’t have the ham that he wanted.  I know I’m a horrible joke/story teller, but the way he said it just cracked me up.  Ah, cultural insensitivity!

Here are a few products that we found.  The kosher dino nuggets are by far my fave, although Eric’s attempt to fry some potato cigars did later result in a huge grease explosion in my kitchen.  Luckily he thought to grab Addie as he dove out of the line of fire, so I didn’t have to kill him.  He did, however, have to mop the whole kitchen.  I’ve resorted to hiding the oil and turning off the gas when I leave him alone.  He’s still allow to fry my favorite corn tortillas though.  🙂

Eric noticed at one point that there were amazing looking already prepared shish kabobs in one of the cases in the meat department.  They were not made of pork.  However, he was disheartened when he saw that there was no one nearby to help us get to them.  Luckily, his wife’s keen sense of observation kicked in and recognized that there was no glass standing between us and the kabobs.  I just waited there for a minute until he too figured it out.  He’s a smart man, but gosh this one took awhile to set in…

No glass!