Brazil

For our Brazilian adventure we took my parents to Rodizio Rico churrascaria Islington, a Brazilian meat buffet where they carve big slices off slabs of meat at your table.

Brazilian buffet

Having been to Brazil, I remember their national dish being perfectly nice beef inexplicably smothered with a sort of inedible grit and then covered in a barely more palatable black bean sauce. All of the unpleasant grit and sauce is made authentically available at Rodizio Rico, but happily it being a buffet means you can simply avoid putting it on your food. So one is left with excellent cuts of succulent meat, plus some sides of vegetables and potatoes. All very nice. Oh, and for some reason also skewers of chicken hearts which I guess everyone should try once.

Botswana

Botswana is apparently best known at the moment as the setting of Alexander McCall Smith’s Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, though it’s better known amongst economists as one of Africa’s great success stories – an anomaly of free elections and competently-managed infrastructure amidst a sea of murderous dictatorships and suicidal civil wars. In fact the place has “a standard of living around that of Mexico or Turkey” – no mean feat for a landlocked African nation on the doorsteps of total basket-cases like Angola and Zimbabwe.

As for the staple diet – according to multiple sources the big deal food is “Seswaa“, a shredded meat dish served with polenta (or more authentically still some sort of porridge we had no chance of finding) and green veg.

Bosnia

Last night we cooked Bosnian sausages, more authentically known as Ćevapi or ćevapčići. In true B country fashion, finding a restaurant has been near on impossible which, in this instance, I found slightly surprising. I have obviously over-estimated the impact of Eurovision on London’s restaurant offerings. Anyway. With no Bosnian eatery to be found, we decided that mixing some mince and spices was within our culinary capabilities and also an ideal meal for a beautiful late-summer’s evening.

Most of the recipes for Ćevapi contained a mixture of meat but, as I was just cooking for two, a packet of minced beef seemed more than enough and probably would have worked even better had I remembered to cut down the other ingredients in equal measures. Ooops. Turns out that adding an egg white to a small portion of meat leaves it slightly gooey and adding half a cooked onion to the goo isn’t conducive to roll-able sausages. All good learning and, as it turned out, we didn’t get food poisoning.

While a little dry, the Bosnian national dish was not dissimilar from a kebab and quite pleasant to eat. Apparently it’s served with some mixed up cheese thing that doesn’t exist outside Bosnia and flatbread, for which we substituted pitta. With a side salad of mixed cucumber and tomatoes, it was, however, quite a decent meal. One to make again – in the correct proportions.

Here’s a map for anyone that’s as geographically-ignorant as me and yet another national anthem:

Image: By TUBS [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Bolivia

I’m going to be honest with this post.

We ate Bolivian a couple of months ago with some friends and a couple of bottles of wine, and I’m having trouble remembering exactly what it was like. This is a lesson in the importance of writing posts at the time of eating. Or not consuming two bottles of wine.

Unfortunately, the lovely but inauspicious restaurant (or late-opening cafe with wine) that we tried Bolivian at does not have a website – a good thing (low overheads equals cheap food and all that) until you need a bit of a memory prompt.

Eeek.

I guess I’m going to have to rely on the few stand-out features that have survived time and alcohol, these being:

Bolivian food comes in generous portions and there’s none of this meat, two vegs and a potato thing that I have come to regard as normal. You get a plate full of meat and carbohydrates, often topped with an egg, and there’s not a lot of anything green. Or at least there wasn’t in the dishes that we ordered.

Bolivia is yet another one of these countries that insists on ruining potentially tasty samosa-type things by coating them in cinnamon or sugar. This is an acquired taste that I am yet to develop. In this case, the pastry/samosa also included yet another egg. Eggs are also something which seem to feature dominantly in Bolivian cuisine.

For those not crazy about sugar-coated chicken, there was a great and surprisingly spicy prawn starter which was stand out. Bolivian food comes in quite surprising combinations, and compared to the main courses, the prawns were brilliantly flavoured and had quite a kick. This variety make a little more sense if you refer to Wikipedia which probably offers far more insight into Bolivian food than I’m able to: “Bolivian cuisine stems mainly from the combination of Spanish cuisine with traditional Indigenous Aymara/Inca ingredients, with later influences from Germans, Italians, Basques, Russians, Poles, and Arabs.”

Bhutan

Bhutan – after Tibet, probably the most remote and inaccessible place on earth, a place so keen to limit tourism that it costs $100 a day just to set foot in the country and famously measures its national success in terms of happiness rather than economic output. I once met the guy who designed their botanical gardens and who happened to be in the country the day the first mobile phone mast went up – he watched the people there go from the middle ages to the always-on chatter of the C21st in front of his eyes. Bhutan is distant, other, almost legend. Bhutan is, not to press the point, proper remote.

What it turns out they eat there is a sort of spicy yak’s cheese (“Datshi”) on red rice, both of which are so beyond re-creation in London that even the attempt is farcical. Yak’s cheese is not for sale even in the odder independent supermarkets on Turnpike Lane, so instead we scoured the web for the closest equivalent people had managed to find and discovered it was Dutch feta. Unable to secure that either, we resigned ourselves to bog-standard Greek feta. So far, none for one. Then we looked for the red rice that forms the other half of Bhutan’s national dish. Alas – none for two. Which meant in the end we found ourselves making probably our least authentic facsimile of a national cuisine so far – perfectly ordinary Greek feta over perfectly ordinary long-grain rice.

Benin

The Bs have been quite a challenge so far and Benin was no exception. Not only is there no restaurant serving Benin cuisine in London but it seems that Beninese cuisine is not massively accessible. For a start, the national dish demands live crabs which aren’t that easy to come by in Turnpike Lane. And, as if that wasn’t enough, it turns out that peanut sauce is a staple for a lot of the other dishes. Bleurgh.

Fortunately, hidden among the peanut sauce slathered food, we found a recipe for Dahomey fish stew.

Dahomey fish stew is basically white fish in a slightly spicy sauce. Not massively exciting, I’ll admit, but far more palatable and far less dangerous than the other options. Plus, it used up the Tilapia that had been lying around in our freezer since the Bahamas experiment. Result.

It turns out that Dahomey was an African Kingdom from 1600-1900 in what is now known as the Republic of Benin. The Fish Stew that is named after it is pretty simple and consists of lightly battered white fish cooked in chopped tomatoes and onions with a sprinkling of something spicy. Easy.

Also, totally forgettable.

Roll on Burkina Faso.

Belize

Last night we ate curried goat, crab with coriander and Jamaican popcorn at a Caribbean-themed supper-club in North London. Unfortunately, the otherwise excellent menu lacked a dish from Belize so, tonight, with the memory of some rather impressive flavor combinations (think chili and sugar, for example), we attempted to create something equally exotic at home.

This was the result.

Belgium

It may be a little unexciting but there’s really only one place where you can go for Belgian food in London. Belgo. There’s also really only one thing that you should make sure that you eat when you’re ticking off Belgian food: moules and frites.

Nom.

There is a reason why Belgo has conquered the moules and frites market.

We headed to Belgo Noord for some traditionelle moules cooked in white wine, celery, garlic and onion. While there were, admittedly, far more exciting options on the menu (think Thai moules with Lemongrass, chilli, ginger, kaffir lime, coconut and coriander, or Navigator moules with Belgo garam masala, cinnamon and ginger cream with coriander), the mussels actually didn’t need that much dressing up to taste good and the remaining sauce was perfect for dipping frites in. As I said, nom.

The other Belgian must-have is obviously a good beer so I left Seamus with the challenge of knocking back a bottle of 8.5% Delirium Tremens. I guess it’s going to take me a few more Belgo visits before my tolerance is up to Belgian beer levels.

Belarus

The Belarussian drankini, a sort of potato pancake thing

For Belarus, we cobbled together four things. Drankini, the Belarussian national dish; some sour cream with chopped, marinated herring and raw onion to accompany it; red cabbage, always a good accompaniment to anything from the Russias; and for authenticity some neat vodka to wash it all down.

Drankini is pleasantly and surprisingly easy to make. A shallow-fried pancake comprised of finely-grated potato and onion with an egg and a little olive oil, it’s not wholly dissimilar to the Andorran trixnat we cooked a couple of months ago. We fried up half a dozen of them and ate them with our various accompaniments. The drankini – the ostensible purpose of the whole exercise – didn’t really make itself noticed against the herring, onion and sour cream.

So that’s Belarus; a pleasant, but not terribly noticeable, sort of potato pancake that sits as an adequate accompaniment to the main event. Next up – Belgium.

Barbados

Barbados food came to us pop-up style in the form of Street Feast London, a street food market in Dalston. Result. After our difficulties with the early Bs, it felt like karma. Apart from the rain. Once you’ve tried street food in English April, you kind of get why the most authentic street foods come from far better climates.

Anyway.

Street Feast London is a food market that comes to East London in what I’m sure used to be Spring / Summer. If the weather was anything other than torrential rain, it would be a pretty awesome Friday night. There are loads of different stalls (from English cup-cakes to Mac-and-cheese via Jerk Chicken and sherbet) enclosing a relatively large half-tented, half-open-air area opposite Haggerston station. The music is loud, the smells are intense, and the smokey atmosphere hits the back of your throat in a surprisingly pleasant way. It’s a great place to try out new foods and, possibly, get a more authentic take on them. Luckily for us, the 2013 line-up includes Barbadian.