Paraty - Cooking Brazillian Style

---

Neil:

Having dragged ourselves away from the tropical paradise of Ilha Grande we made our way along the coast in the direction of Sao Paulo. Before we hit the metropolis of SP, we have dropped into the small colonial town of Paraty.

Paraty is one of the local holiday destinations of Sao Paulo residents, and is a picturesque seaside town with cobbled streets, 300 year old buildings and beaches all set in front of huge mountains cloaked in tropical rainforest.

The highlight in our trip was our Brazillian cooking lesson (see Nicky´s description below) but its a really pleasant place to spend a few days - be it taking in some of the 300 beaches by boat or strolling sround the shops and restaurants that line the pedestrian streets.


Nicky: Discovering the food around the world has been a really exciting part of this trip for me. In every country we have been to the food has been different and linked to its culture, religion and history. Unfortunately all the cooking courses we have found have been really expensive - until yesterday.
In a little back street in Paraty Yara Roberts, a Brazilian chef who was taught by her mother then trained in America, and her husband (a businessmand with a lethal recipe for Caipirinha) have a cooking school. We were the only ones booked in for the evening of Bahia cuisine in their beautiful colonial home. Bahia is the region in the north east of Brazil most heavily influenced by the African slave trade. Yara was brilliant at telling us about the origins of the foods, how they were intergrated and updated when they were bought to Brazil and how the dishes are all inexplicably linked to religion.
We made fantastic bean fritters with shrimp sauce, a kind of chicken casserole which was served with polenta and brilliant salad full of nuts and fresh fruit and a pudding of cocunut custard tart. It was all washed down with copious amounts of cachaca and chilean wine. The evening felt more like a dinner party with friends than something we had paid money to do.
I cant wait to get back and try to recreate the dishes and use some of the little tips Yara taught us - my favourite was while we were waiting for the oil we were going to use to cook the fritters in to heat up she put a mactch in it. She said we would know when the oil was hot enough because the match would light, and sure enough after 5 minutes the match caught light in the bowl of oil!! Very clever, if a little risky!!
She also has a book coming out next year with all her other recipes in it and lots of the historical information so it will be really interesting to read that after spending the evening discussing her career, the couple´s travels etc

---