Brazil 🇧🇷

Brazil is the 24th country in our “Gura’s Global Grub and Armchair Travels“! Coincidentally it took us a year (minus 1 day) to cook meals from 24 countries. The Global Table Adventure site we have been using as a starting point for our meals lists 195 countries, so only 171 to go! At our current pace this will take about 7 more years! 😂

Our Brazilian meal was Feijoada Completa (Black Beans with Assorted Meats), Red Kale, Rice, Mocha-Cola (Brazilian Iced coffee), and Brigadeiro – (Brazillian Fudge Balls). I didn’t rinse the black beans after they soaked so the meat was stained black but it was still very tasty! Another cooking lesson learned.

The Mocha-Cola was different, but good. It is 1 cup double strength coffee, a can of coke (we used Pepsi) and 3 cups of chocolate milk with whipped cream on top. At first it made us go “Huh”, and then “Wow this is really good!”. Then the caffeine kicked in and we buzzed around the house and took down a bunch of Halloween decorations at top speed.

Rio Carnival (Carnaval in Portuguese) is a several day celebration of food, alcohol, and music held annually in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil before the start of Lent. Here is a link to the top 50 Rio Carnival floats. Spectacular! I particularly like the corn and cotton harvesting float about 4 minutes in.

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world. Sixty percent of the Amazon forest is in Brazil. From Wikipedia,

“One in ten known species in the world lives in the Amazon rainforest. This constitutes the largest collection of living plants and animal species in the world.

The region is home to about 2.5 million insect species, tens of thousands of plants, and some 2,000 birds and mammals. To date, at least 40,000 plant species, 2,200 fishes, 1,294 birds, 427 mammals, 428 amphibians, and 378 reptiles have been scientifically classified in the region. One in five of all bird species are found in the Amazon rainforest, and one in five of the fish species live in Amazonian rivers and streams. Scientists have described between 96,660 and 128,843 invertebrate species in Brazil alone.”

The below snippets were taken from https://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/brazilian

“There are about 305 tribes living in Brazil today, totaling around 900,000 people, or 0.4% of Brazil’s population. The government has recognized 690 territories for its indigenous population, covering about 13% of Brazil’s land mass. Nearly all of this reserved land (98.5%) lies in the Amazon.”

“Many Brazilian Indian tribes like those of the Xingu Park, the Yanomami and the Enawene Nawe live in malocas – large communal houses – which shelter extended families, who string their hammocks from the rafters and share food around family hearths.”