breakfast with friends

‘Ingraçado’ I have spent my Sunday cleaning the house so that I do not have mountains to do before leaving for Scotland, as you can expect living here the plastic sacks of opened rice and haricot beans were full of small insects and I sifted them all out and squashed the beasties, I apologise to those Buddhists reading this, put the rice and beans into sealed tubs and thought that’s that. Ha but today I poured the cereals into the breakfast bowl and caught a glimpse of several insects hoping around, they look uncannily very much like tiny grains if they stay still, this is what they have learnt to do if you start fishing around with your finger trying to find them.

I have had some success with not being invaded by the tiniest ants which love things sweet and that may well be because I do not have a great likeness for sugar as such. Rubem and Mirian’s house have problems with these tiny ants as does Graça’s seventh floor apartment. I had got used to eating ants with everything when I was first here and it was when Edneide and her family tribe left, that I realised it is very much to do with lifestyle and not a permanent problem.

I was once not only fond of cooking but also a good cook, even when living with Susie I kept trying to cook meals that were above the norm, Susie and Joe however were hamburger and chips in front of the TV types and did not like me cooking up a full Indian meal that was then placed on the dining table, hell, how could they watch the latest East enders episode if they were stuck eating their meal in the kitchen, no way. They did however like Chinese cooking and I had some experience of this in London, David’s wife Billy was Malaysian Chinese and her father had been a chef, she gave cookery lessons to which Jacky attended and so then I learnt some techniques, she being the far superior cook by a long way.

I am starting now to re think my life and part of this is to find a renewed interest in cooking, I have in fact always been thin but am even thinner at the moment, I lose weight rapidly and could do with eating more to be visually better, here most people walk around with not much on, close to the beach and constant temperatures of 30 degrees, 21 degrees at night, good do you not think. Winter is determined by the on coming of more rain and the rain tends to make the temperature drop.

I have done my good turn the other day in that I drove into Salvador to collect and pay for a small shipment of Guarana, Arrembite, capsules for John Falconer and Lucia, they have the Brazilian Sensation restaurant in Edinburgh. John met Lucia in Brazil more than 24 years ago, do not remember how long they have been married, they have been running the present restaurant for the last 15 years or so and surprisingly it is John that does a lot of the cooking, although Lucia is any match for him. Lucia to be honest does not like restaurant life and has a small Samba dance class that she takes every week, this is her love and she dances well. The restaurant is a juice bar during the day and serves food by appointment in the evening. It has aweb site and can be found there for information over their fruit pulp and freeze dried fruit products.

http://www.braziliansensation.co.uk/Restaurant.html