Life in Guatemala: food

Many of you have probably heard us describe our meals here. Lots of beans, carrots, and corn. It's hard to get too out of the box because our kitchen is super simple and our food options are pretty standard.

We mostly shop at the local outdoor market. It's a bright and colorful experience, but it doesn't always smell good thanks to hanging dead chickens, raw beef laying around, and piles of fish. But I think it's much more fun than normal grocery store shopping. Women in colorful traje offer you the best of their products, and even sometimes offer you taste tests! We usually buy carrots, potatoes, green beans, zucchini, cucumbers, and broccoli. There's no option to find out of season foods, so we enjoyed avocado season while it lasted and are now enjoying mango season!

We also go to The Dispensa, the biggest grocery store in town - the only one with a parking lot, to buy our meat. It appears to be the most hygienic place to buy meat because it's refrigerated and comes in plastic baggies. As opposed to the market where meat hangs in the open air and they chop off whatever amount you want. However, The Dispensa is actually owned by Wal-Mart (I know, it's everywhere!) so we try to shop local as much as possible.

There are lots of little tiendas all over town that sell basic products: beans, cereal, crackers, powdered milk. There are also 3 small stores that specialize in importing some of our favorites: brown rice, whole wheat pasta, whole wheat bread, tahini, chickpeas, and canned peas. It's more expensive, but we're grateful that we can even get these products!

Cooking is often a longer process than normal. We have to sanitize most of our veggies by soaking them in a Clorox solution for 5 minutes. Then you rinse them in pure water before eating. For this reason, we hardly ever eat salads (so sad). Salad takes a lot of time to disinfect and even then it's the most high-risk food to eat since everything is wet and raw. It's a lot of work to go through for "rabbit food" as my husband would say.

I think I have branched out with a few things though. My favorite dessert is cookies, but we have no oven so I've made a few batches of no-bake cookies and no-bake cookie dough dip (thank you Pinterest!). I mash chickpeas with a fork to make hummus, but it's still super thick. My newest venture is veggie burgers. A co-worker was a vegetarian for years so she gave me some yummy ideas. I mostly stick to black bean, chickpea, garlic, carrot burgers. My dear husband, who would never eat veggie burgers in the States (how I miss Morning Star) actually approves and asks for me to make them!

And a huge thanks to the many of you who have mailed us seasonings, sauces, and ways to flavor up our meals. Thanks to you we have had some great, flavorful meals at home!

I don't know why I'm making the same face in the above 2 pictures

Two foods that we've really grown to love here are pupusas and empanadas. Pupusas are larger corn tortillas stuffed with beans, cheese, and meat (or whatever you want). They are delicious, cheap, and relatively safe street food. We have developed a tradition of eating them every Friday night. Mmmmm.

A co-worker made great empanadas from scratch and invited us over to teach us. I took notes. ( : We will definitely be making those when we have access to an oven back home!

So that's a synopsis of our food habits here in Guatemala. It's been a different diet for us, and we've learned to get used to the same dishes over and over, but we're thankful for the little variety that we do have. But we've already decided the first place we want to go when we return to the States is Arby's. ( :