Sewer Rat may not taste like Pumpkin Pie, but...

Guinea Pig does taste a lot like Chicken. So I finally got to do it. My host family cooked me up a Guinea Pig this week. In Spanish it is called Cuy, and it isn´t that bad. When I found out the day before that we were going to have i, I immediately flashed back to third grade at St. Dominic Savio. I may have some of this wrong, but I remember our teacher, Mrs. Brawn (?), having a pet Guinea Pig named Poquito. The thought that I was going to to eat a classroom pet was very disconcerting for the 24-hours before dinner, but the whole thing was actually anti-climactic. I was served the ass-end of the Cuy. It looked the color and texture of baked turkey, but with little paws on the end. After pulling open the stomach skin, I pulled out some of the thigh meat and ate it with a little cucumber. It tasted and looked like dark meat chicken. There wasn´t a lot of meat in it too. It seemed like a lot of work for a little bang. Kind of like eating Crawfish, but without having to suck out the brains.

Since I´m on the subject of food, I´ll go over the rest of the Ecuadorian Sierra food that I´ve had...

Breakfast
Every breakfast that I´ve had comes with the same basic components.
1) Bread - Usually some sort of roll
2) Eggs - Hard boiled with salt on the side or scrambled with tomato and onion
3) Juice - One of about 15 different kinds that are all great (I like piña and tomate de árbol the best)
4) Hot Chocolate or Coffee - Even though Ecuador grows great coffee, they only have instant down here.
5) Every once in a while we´ll have yogurt

Lunch/Dinner
I put these together, because they have been pretty much the same. First you get soup. From cream of asparagus to chicken noodle, you can always count on getting soup. It is usually pretty good too. The interesting thing that we do is to sometimes put popcorn in our soup. It doesn´t add much, but it is different to see a handful of popcorn floating in you tomato soup. One soup incident occurred the other day. My host mother put a bowl of soup in front of me and said, "Sopa de ___ de borrega". I didn´t get the middle word, but when I spooned up from the bottom of the bowl half a brain, I figured she said "Ram brain soup". I had a couple of bites, but one lobe was enough to realize that I´m not a fan. As I was eating my brain soup, I tried to explain that In St. Louis that have brain sandwiches. I said that we needed brains in our sandwiches because we didn´t have any in our heads. I don´t think the humor translated though.

After soup we will have a big plate with rice and boiled potatoes. These are the staples of Ecuadorian Highland diet. Sometimes they put broccoli, cauliflower, fried egg, or noodles on the side or have french fries of potato pancakes. I´d say 19 out of twenty meals are some variation of the potato/rice combination with chicken too.

After dinner I´ll have a glass of tea or some tap water that I added a water purification tablet to. I think that I have actually gained weight since I got here because of all the carbs and the altitude has kept me from jogging at all.

That is the news for now. I hope you enjoyed the culinary tour.