Costa Rica....la comida tica de los ticos

Our trip to Costa Rica  was similar to our trip to Italy in that, with very few exceptions, everything we ate was fantastic.

Anything with macadamia nuts or coconut was an easy choice for me. 

The main ingredients used in costa rican dishes are red pepper, cilantro, onions, garlic, and beans.   It was an amazing combination with rice, potatoes, eggs, and curry.  

So much juice, juice, juice, juice!  Juice is a strange word when you say it four times.  Mango,  melon, blackberry, strawberry, carrot, watermelon, tamarind, pineapple, passion fruit, guanabana to name just a few.
We aren't big juice drinkers, but some of them were divine.

Emmy told me that she would actually eat breakfast if it was like this every day.  I told her to look around the room and find a new mother.  

Savanna  isn't that picky and doesn't complain if she doesn't like something.   BUT....if you mention anything akin to pastry, her eyes light up, her posture straightens, and she beams, "pastry?  did someone say pastry?"  And yes, this was our breakfast one morning.  

Ansel found a way to fit spaghetti into many of his costa rican meals and then he teased the girls about their inevitable starvation in 'Pad Thai Land' (a hopeful future destination) because they hate pad thai and there won't be anything else to eat.   

Plantain chips

Corey had a thing for walking into a convenience store and finding the most rejected and least appetizing items which were edible about half the time.  The dried and salted plantains were his favorite.  These corn cheese ringy things were very peculiar in taste and hue.

Ansel ordered this "slushie" because he thought would be come from 7 eleven and be full of artificial coloring, flavoring, and sugar.  He was disappointed when he discovered that it was fresh mango.  More for me. 

We fight over bites of cheesecake wherever we are in the world.  

Ansel wants you to know that the fresca in Costa Rica was way better than in America.  I want you to know that the Coke in Costa Rica tastes like Pepsi and the two words should never be used interchangeably as they so ofter are.  I guess I should have tasted the Pepsi to see if it tasted like Coke.  

The song Horchata by Vampire Weekend is so catchy that it would get stuck in my head every time I saw it on the menu.

 In December, drinking horchata
I'd look psychotic in a balaclava


Now it's stuck in your head too.

This looks like meal straight from the states, but not so.  These are yucca fries, which were really quite yumma.  

Our last meal was one of the best and we are still craving this salsa.  I loved everything but the fried plantains.  These are served at almost every meal and I could never wrap my taste buds around them.  

Corey thought the beef tasted a little funny and blamed it on the type of cows grazing throughout the country.  He thought they were bony and awkward and is opposed to awkward hamburgers.  I think he may be a cow grazist.