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Hortifruti – great store, brilliant adverts!

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Sooooo, today is my last full day in Brazil for 2 months. Such mixed feelings – it’s going to be great to see my family and friends, start my new job, eat proper cheese and drink proper beer again (in that order). But I’m leaving Brazil! For 2 months! There are so many things I’ll miss that I’m trying not to think about it too much right now. Instead I’m throwing myself into last minute preparations

One of the things I need to do is harvest my beloved chillis and turn them into hot chilli sauce! This time round I’m going for a genuine Trinidadian hot pepper sauce recipe and I’m also going to experiment with a chilli infused oil in the style found in many of Rio’s snack bars and Pé Sujos.

Yesterday, in preparation for all this peppery-cookery, I took a trip over to my favourite food shop in Rio – Hortifruti.

If you can afford it, this place is great. I love it!

 

Hortifruti (sounds like ORtchee-FROOtchee) was such a revelation to me the first time wandered in. The displays of fruit and vegetables are amazing – it’s like they have some kind of beauty contest for fresh produce and only the really sexy ones get through.

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A handful of magic beans

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Ah! We had gorgeous weather today – finally some weekend sunshine. I got up early and decided today I would do things. A half-built trellis has been taunting me for weeks and so today I thought I would finally put it in its place (up on a wall). I set to work and everything was going fine until I realised that I needed a thicker drill bit. This trellis has been an ongoing saga for so long now that it seemed only natural that there would be another hurdle. I wandered off into Catete (an nearby neighbourhood) on a long-shot mission to find a shop selling drill bits open on a Sunday.


I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to hear that after an hour and a half of wandering I found my drill bit in one of those shops that sells a bit of everything. I was delighted and probably overreacted a little – no one should be that excited about finding an 8mm masonry drill bit…


On my triumphant way home I stopped in on the Glória street market and picked up a few things. One item I really didn’t need but couldn’t resist was this:

 

Cacau – where chocolate comes from.


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The Best in the World?

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I love cheese. Seriously, I’m a big fan, it’s one of the main reasons I don’t have one of those svelt, uber-bodies that you see on television (one of the reasons – there are others, like weaknesses for butter, paté, wine, beer and aversion to exercise). But anyway, please know that I love cheese. And I miss cheese from England – real Cheddar, Stilton, Blue Wensleydale, Stinking Bishop… drool. 

 

Stinking Bishop – not a classic name, but a seriously good cheese.

 

 

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Casas de Sucos – Juice Bars

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Where I come from ‘Juice Bars’ conjure up images of weird, rich people sipping wheat-grass and beetroot juice. These joyless health obsessives have just come from an ayurvedic flotation tank session and are on their way to an organic coffee and yoghurt colonic. Here in Brazil I’m happy to say they have a very different feel to them.

Casas de Sucos are sprinkled all over Rio. They are basic and unpretentious – open to the street with huge and colourful displays of (real) fruit behind a simple stainless steel counter. Ordinary working people will prop themselves on a stool and have a freshly blended fruit juice and perhaps grab a snack before heading off to work.

A typical Rio juice bar

 

An average sized juice bar menu – I have seen some twice this size.

On my first visit to one of these juice bars I was taken aback by the size of the menu. There were more than 20 different fruit juices and half of them I had never heard of.

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