As always, feel compelled to photograph what we eat…
We stopped on the highway on the way to Cali for breakfast and ate Juan’s preferred breakfast item: changua. Changua is basically hot milk with lots of cilantro, cheese, and a whole egg that’s dropped in and cooked in the milk. Then you put some bread in it…it’s a lot better than it sounded to me at first, but I think to really love it you have to be like Juan’s whose grandmother made it for him when he was little.
In our tour of Valle de Cauca we had a giant sancocho de gallina lunch – it was delicious. Sancocho is a chicken soup – the broth is also made with yucca, plantains and potato (ratio depending on the region of the country) and is always brought out with additional chicken, yucca, plantain, rice, etc.. and you add as desired to your bowl of soup. A little hard to see there, but you can see our giant platter of chicken and platanos.
Our travel diet involved a large number of empanadas – in Popayan we ate tasty, tiny empanadas de pipian, which are made from little yellow potatoes and peanuts with additional peanut hot sauce added when you eat them. We then had an in-depth comparison with some very good meat empanadas from Cali, at traditional empanada consuming spot:
The fruits were mostly the same as what we can get in Bogota – although there are lots of concord grapes in the area, so we drank a lot of delicious fresh grape juice (and sampled some fairly bad local wine)…I did try zapotes - I didn’t love the flavor, but it looks great when a big pile of them are for sale on the side of the road because they’re a very dull, bark-looking brown on the outside and an outrageous bright orange inside. (here’s a photo – even though it doesn’t quite do justice to the extreme orange). Also tried these delightful, tart, little berries whose name I have totally forgotten:
