Sunday, June 28, 2009

Day 8 or the Real Churrasco

Notes on Friday, June 26, 2009

Breakfast today was a revelation. A soup (soup?) made with farm fresh cow's milk (they have to boil the milk!), clove, cinnamon, roasted peanuts and hominy. Who in the world thought this up? Is there a special Betty Crocker prize for creating the homeiest, christmas-y tasting, sweet and hearty soup ever? I could eat a vat of it everyday in winter. I realize I am living in a restaurant with a master chef who started cooking at the age of 11. You never know what is going to be put in front of you and so you taste slowly, cautiously with just the tip of your spoon, until the tastebuds explode with pleasure and you think "And I didn't even pay $15 for this!"

It was good we had the super soup too, because today's outing was a trek up to the same spot we were last night, high above town, to visit the shrine of Agua Santa (Holy Waters). It didn't take long climbing the steep cobbled streets of Iuna before Rachel and I start feeling the sweat beads forming on our brows and our breath coming harder. Rodrigo pointed to an old woman walking up the same hill. We look over and this 70 year old woman's mouth isn't even open! She is breathing entirely through her nose and great! Rachel and I have now gotten smoked by a crusty old lady. This is embarrassing. Muito embarrassing.

But once we cleared the edge of town, the dirt road opened to vast hills rolling with coffee and banana trees. The coffee bushes drape the sides of the mountains like those netted christmas lights. During the walk Rodrigo pointed out different plants. "When I was a kid we used to take this berry, see the spikes on it?, and we would use them in sling shots to pelt each other. See this plant? You can make tea with this." It seems like everything green has a use here, culinary, military or any -ary.

At the shrine, there is a molding display of molding pictures of people and pets who have been cured by the waters. There are bits of clothing from the faithful cured dangling from a clothesline, there are statues and prayers and the shrine is enclosed in a locked rusty iron fence that makes the whole thing look more depressing than miraculous. Still, the shrine is interesting, even if the sacred pool is full of stagnant green water. There is a spring of holy water you can drink from, which I did and I wonder if it the holy waters can cure you of an over active appetite as well as breast cancer. A little further on the trail is a fallen boulder that leans against the rock face of the mountain. Local lore says if you pass through the impossibly skinny opening between boulder and rock three times all your sins are forgiven. I figured I already did my penance last year on the pilgrimage, but why not attempt this just for good measure. So I squeeeeeeeze my boobs and booty and all the other junk through the crevice three times. And then it is Rachels turn. She gets about an eighth of the way into the opening, backs out and says, "I like my sins."

Back home in the afternoon, preparations were being made for that evening. Beer is delivered here like milk or soda used to be delivered to my house when I was a little kid. Long before everybody drove to Kroger for everything. I watch as Ze gives the beer delivery guy a shot of cachaca for his trouble before he leaves.

And at long last it is time for what I have come to Brazil for, churrasco (pronounced shur HA sko), brazilian barbeque. This particular cut of beef we are going to feast on tonight is called picanha and it is beef with an outer rim of fat marinated in rock salt, nothing more, and grilled over an open flame until deeply rich in flavor, with a salty crust, and addictive. The beer comes out, The rum (pronounced "hoom") and coke, the cachaca, the olives.

Back home in Atlanta there is a restaurant called Fogo de Chao and it is like $60 a person for sheer carnivorous hedonism. They have good looking gouchos in billowy pants serving the meat on skewers until you are full to bursting. But here everyone passes the cutting board around and takes a slice of beef, passes it on, and then waits for the next piece of picanha to get crusty and charred, when anyone who happens to be near the flame will slice it and pass it on again.

Then the musicians showed up. Not hired musicians though (unless you count payment of beer and beef and cachaca). These musicians are friends from the town. An old guy with a cerveja belly and his son. The old guy sat next to me with a bongo drum and his son strummed a baby guitar and everyone sang the songs of Brazil and drank and ate picanha. And everyone here is a musician or a singer. Rodrigo plays guitar and sings, Diego (Rodrigo's brother) taught himself to play drums. More than half of the people in Rodrigo's circle grew up playing some manner of device that makes a tune. And if someone doesn't have an instrument in their hands they are keeping time with a fork against a plate or knife on a bottle.

They switched to some English songs (the Beatles, Credence Clearwater, Elvis) and now Rachel and I could at least join in on the refrains (embarrassing that we don't even know the verses to Have You Ever Seen the Rain and Brazilians do). No one here knows the actual words though, they all sing phonetically like we sing La Bamba and have no idea what the actual words are. It is pretty amusing to hear the lyrics to Proud Mary sung as "bih wee kee on tornee, prow mary kee on bournee, holih, holih, holih ona reeeva." At some point during all of this merry making I got the notion that I could sing and felt an urgent need to regale them all with my rendidtion of Bridge Over Troubled Waters by Simon and Garfunkle despite the fact that I didn't know all the lyrics and the fact that people wouldn't pay me the gum off their shoe to hear me sing. But noooooooo. I wanted to sing damnit. It was about to get American Idol up in here. So I quickly copied the lyrics from Google on Lolita's computer (that's Rodrigo's sister) and returned for my duet with the old bongo player. I sang in my clunky alto, occaisionally switching to my blood curdling mezzo, only to be marginally kept in tune by bongo man. Between the two of us (he sang the words phonetically but at least he was in tune, I was flat but I had the lyrics in front of me) we made a halfway decent go of it. And when the end came I howled like a dog at myself, which made everyone laugh.

And then out came a curry goat that made me squeal with pleasure. Spicy, smokey, oniony. OMG, this was a carnivores dilemma: the goat, salty and spicy and juicy? or the beef, salty and crusty from the grill. I was already nursing a serious food baby by the time the goat came out. But I couldn't stop myself (apparently the holy waters from Agua Santa do not cure an obscene appetite).

Two more friends showed up with guitars and cowboy hats and now they started singing the haunting, lonely Brazilian country music of the western ranchers. Their harmony was beautiful and aching and my belly was aching too and we all swayed to the acoustic strumming and let it wash over us as we digested the large land animals in our stomachs. I guess Brazilian cowboy music is appropriate for cow digestion. At 12:30 I could not longer keep upright and needed to retreat to my sanctuary to digest in horizontal fashion. But the party continued for a few more hours and I realized that this sort of impromptu gathering is the normal order here in Iuna, in Brazil. This is the real churrasco, and a million times better than Fogo de chao.

Hey come on over! tell so and so to come too. and so and so. we'll throw a cow on the grill. we'll get the beer delivered. we'll sit around, drink, eat, play. sing. laugh. live.

1 comment:

rach said...

Dude! We have hominy breakfast soup here. It's called grits! :)
This post made me very hungry...

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