Comida Paraguaya
Here is the meal we were first served when we showed up for our first day in Paraguay. The sell roast chicken everywhere here in little roadside stalls, it is really pretty good stuff. It is not Roasmary roasted Whole Foods deliciousness but I like it. The white blob on the left is rice salad, which is white rice mixed with mayo and vegtables, bean salad which is little red beans mixed with vegtables, and the ever popular tuber, the bread of Paraguay, mandioca on the right.


Chipa baking in the Tataqua, the traditional dome-shaped brick over. They build a fire in the brick oven and the oven and then sweep it out and the residual heat traped in the bricks bakes the Chipa. Chipa is mandioca flour, flour, water, pig fat, and cheese… unless it is fresh out of the oven I find it unpalatable; hard, heavy, and flavorless. It reminds me of the emergency biscuts we ate in Outward Bound. The stuff is incredibly popular here. There is a little old man that walks around the office with a big basket of chipa on his head to sell every morning. I don’t get it. The Paraguayans swear it is delicious. Oh, and it also has a double entant as the female organ, as mandioca (long hard root) is the double entant for the male organ. So if you want to make your neighbors laugh up a storm, just tell them when asked that you don’t like chipa because you think it tastes old and hard, and that you prefer eating mandio. I wish they would have tought us that the first week instead of the last week of language class.

Asado paraguayo, Paraguayan barbeque, I really like this, it is hard to beat grilled meat swimming in salt and fat. They sell off the best cuts of meat to the world market, so the asado is really tough, but I like knawing on the bone. It makes me feel like a man, even when my neighbors are laughing at me uncontrollably after explaining my love for mandica. The most covited bit is the fatty end, which is litterally a think\ piece of meat sandwiched inbetween two slabs of fat. I prefer asadito, which is your classic street meat, little chuncks of meat grilled kebab style on a stick, intersperesed with little chuncks of fat. That is the flavor country.
























Empenandas (fried meat pies), fideos (pasta, but not Italian style), salad, and tortilla Paraguaya (behind the empanadas, fried flour based batter with green onions, noticing the frying trend?) The photo on the left is tortilla Paraguaya frying away. Empenadas are really popular here. They are most typically stuffed with ground meat and egg, and can be made with a flour or mandioca dough. I like the mandioca dough. They have other varieties, chicken, Chilean, corn, and my personal favorite; ham and cheese.

The making of ham and cheese empanadas, you roll out the dough, and then put the disk into the little blue thing on the right where you stuff them with ham and cheese sauce (in the pot) close’m shut, and then of course deep fry them. I really like when they do empenadas in the oven, they are remarkably, and obviously, less greasy.









Tallerine, is the Paraguayan pasta dish, it is meat or chicken served with noodles, and an oily tomatoey sauce (the red stuff in the back pot), it is not like any pasta dish you have ever had. It is very filling, but nothing I would write home about, well, I guess I am kind of doing that now.

This is the famous “sopa Paraguaya”, which is not really a soup at all but a cornbread made of corn meal, eggs, pig fat, onions and cheese; but every mama has her own recipie. I really like sopa Paraguaya as much as I don’t like chipa. It is like a heavy cornbread.

The yellow stuff in the center and in the little dish is Chipa Gua’zu, which is nothing like regular Chipa. It is a type of corn casserole, much more similar to Sopa Paraguaya, but wit ha rougher gorund corn. I really like this stuff, it is a great side dish for when you get tired of rice with mayo. The brown stuff was asado al olla, or barabaque in a pot.

My favorite Paraguayan food: fresh, organic fruit straight off the tree. Fruit trees are everywhere, Paraguay is a very fertile country, and has delicious tropical fruit abundant. This is starfruit, there are other fruits that I had never even tried or heard of in the States. We have guava, mango, coconut, avacado, nispario, tangerine, grapefruit, limon, and orange trees growing in the back yard of my house. Needless to say we drink fresh fruit juice at every meal.