Before I came to Ecuador in 2008, I would never have imagined sitting down to a bowl of soup accompanied by a bowl of popcorn. In most of the countries where I have traveled, soup is served with either bread (Europe & Middle East) or rice (Asia). In Latin America, soup comes with popcorn. I mean, popcorn is just for watching movies, right? You curl up on the sofa and switch on your streaming service, click “play” on the remote, and shovel handfuls of hot salty popcorn into your mouth. Or you buy overpriced buckets of freshly popped buttered popcorn at the cinema and let some of it fall on the floor as you watch the good guys and bad guys shoot at each other. Isn’t that how it’s done?
Nope. It’s also for soup, and it’s surprisingly good! If you think that’s a little weird, we also eat our soup with banana chips (chifles) and toasted corn kernels (maiz tostado). It might be a little out of your comfort zone, but I do recommend you try it at least once in your life. Seriously, you can’t honestly say that you don’t like something you’ve never even tried.
The first year I lived in Mompiche, I saw people eat all kinds of strange things and wondered how they would taste. One time, I watched a friend eat her fried fish with a ripe banana. Each bite of fish was accompanied by a bite of banana. Not cooked plantain, just a normal banana. It looked weird. Even so, I tried it. It wasn’t for me. Eating bananas with our food isn’t weird in itself. We eat plantain bananas with everything, ripe or green, grilled or fried. They’re delicious.
The sweet banana and the savory fish weren’t compatible on my tongue. It wasn’t terrible. I’ve had worse flavors in my mouth. Even so, my tastebuds went through a whole “WTF?” experience. But, having tried it a couple of times in a couple of different settings, I could definitely say it wasn’t a flavor combo that interested me. I’m a foodie. I’ll try (almost) anything once. Here’s the thing, though: trying it doesn’t mean I’m obligated to like it, but as a foodie and a traveler, I’m obligated to try most dishes at least once.
There’s a soup called Fanesca that is only served in Ecuadorian restaurants during Easter and Lent. It’s not on the menu at any other time of the year. It’s made from salted cod, butternut squash, cabbage, and twelve grains which include corn, chickpea, broad beans, mote, peas, lupins, and varieties of fresh and dry beans. These twelve grains are meant to honor the twelve apostles, according to the Ecuadorian tradition. This thick, rich soup is garnished with boiled eggs, sweet plantain bananas, fried dumplings, fresh farm cheese, empanadas, and avocado. And it’s horrific. I did give it a fair opportunity to please my taste buds. I hated it. Once was enough. Other people love it.
The same goes for guatita, a stew made from tripe cooked with potatoes and peanuts. YUK! In one of those random “point and shoot” moments, I ordered it by accident from a menu I didn’t understand before I learned to speak Spanish and was not pleased at all. It’s my own fault. The waiter had no way to clearly explain what it was. In my view, offal is awful. But I do know a number of people who can’t get through the week without at least one serving of it. Each to their own. At least I can say I’ve tried it.
One thing I have never tried anywhere in the world is insects. They’re touted as the new protein; the food that will save the planet. Maybe that’s true. Maybe I will have to adjust at some point in the future. However, I’ve never been so hungry that I wanted to eat bugs. I have played with the concept of eating locust flour cookies… I’ve heard they taste like nuts.
Even in my own culture, witchetty grubs are on the menu. They’re the large, white, wood-eating larvae of moths. I’ve never eaten one. In Cambodia, there are entire food stands with every kind of insect you can imagine, including fried tarantulas. I have no idea if I like them or not because I’ve never tried them. It’s probably the idea of eating bugs that’s more repulsive than the food itself.
In Ecuador, chontacuro (palm tree worm) is served marinated in spices and barbecued over hot coals on wooden skewers. These are the worms that get into the coconut trees and kill them by eating the hearts of the palm trees. I have them in my own garden and have lost a couple of coconut trees as a result. Maybe one day I will try it. I mean, how bad could it be?
One thing I do love is achocha (slipper gourd). I’d never heard of it before I came to Mompiche. It’s a vegetable shaped like a pepper, hollow with black seeds inside. It grows on a vine and can be prepared and cooked in many different ways. I’ve stuffed them, stir-fried them, added them to soups and stews. They don’t have a long shelf-life, so they have to be cooked within a day or two. And they’re delicious. When they’re super fresh, I’ve even added them to salads. Achocha is on my shopping list every week when the vegetable truck drives past my house on Saturdays.
Finally, while I could talk about food all day, I can’t leave without mentioning the fabulous babaco (champagne melon). Endemic to the Ecuadorian Andes, the seedless babaco fruit is pentagonal in shape, earning it the scientific name of Carica pentagona. The fruit looks like papaya, but it tastes completely different. The flavor is mild and sweet and the flesh is succulent and juicy. It’s mostly chopped up and blended to make fresh tropical fruit juice around the country, but it can also be cooked.
In my food experiments over the last decade or so, I’ve discovered I can use the flesh of a ripe babaco exactly the same way I can use apples: pies, crumbles, tarts, cobblers… I’ve found numerous ways to cook them so they resemble apple so much that only a real connoisseur could tell the difference. One of my secrets involves ishpingo, an Amazonian spice that resembles gum nuts and tastes like a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. Of course, I’m always so delighted with how my babaco desserts turn out that I shout from the rooftops that it’s actually babaco and not apple.
Once you get used to it, most of the food here isn’t that weird at all. A lot of it is excellent. Our vegetables taste like vegetables. Tomatoes are not perfectly round and bright red, but they are delicious. Bell peppers are small but packed with flavor. Pineapples are sweet. Melons taste amazing. And freshly made popcorn with soup for lunch is definitely worth a try. I hope you do.
Apart from the fabulous weekly podcast, Mompiche? Yes, Mompiche! all paid subscribers have access to exciting chapters from my current non-fiction work in progress, Ya Mismo: Thirty Minutes North of Zero every month with the good, the bad, and the ugly stories that are part of life in a remote corner of northwest Ecuador. There’s also my upcoming cookbook Going Freaking Bananas and we’ll discover some of the delightful treasures hidden in those pages…