Brazil - Feijão Tropeiro and Sonho de Creme

Wow, this post is veeery late, I seem to be getting worse. In fact, I'm writing this as I take a break from writing some midterm papers, so hopefully I can find some more time soon. Oh well, two posts for this week I suppose! At least the cooking is on track, in fact I made this Brazilian dinner on February 13, in honour of Mardis Gras! And compared to my last post, this dinner went incredibly well!

This week was particularly fun, as we had a friend over to help us eat the huge amount of food these Brazilian recipes make. Both the dinner and dessert were delicious, and fun and quite interesting to make!

For the dinner portion, I made "Feijão Tropeiro", which translates to "Cattleman’s Beans", which makes sense as this dish was very hearty and filling, which would be a perfect meal after a day of working hard driving cattle. Feijão Tropeiro is a mix of beans, bacon, sausage, collard greens, eggs and manioc flour, all fried up in a skillet, and the end result is absolutely delicious. It was quite time consuming, and involved quite a lot of steps, but it was certainly worth the time it took.

For the dessert, I entered an entirely new territory, as I decided to make "Sonho de Creme", which is a kind of Brazilian doughnut whose name aptly translates to "Dream of Cream". These were simply amazing. Not only were they incredibly delicious, but I was very surprised how easy they were to make! The scariest part of this dish for me was the fact that the doughnuts need to be deep fried, which I have never done before, and was honestly very scared of being burned by the oil. As it turns out, I had no reason to be so nervous, as the oil didn't splash at all and all the doughnuts were cooked in a matter of minutes!

This dinner was absolutely delicious and very successful, and I would definitely make both recipes again! For this week's second post, depending on how much work I get done on my midterms, it should be up in the next couple of days.

FIRSTS THIS WEEK:

• Learned what collard greens are and how to cook them
• Learned what manioc flour is
• Toasted flour
• Made something deep fried

RECIPES I USED:

• Feijão Tropeiro: http://www.oliviascuisine.com/feijao-tropeiro/
• Sonho de Creme: http://www.oliviascuisine.com/brazilian-cream-doughnuts/