Tag Archives: food

Belize

Day 4 – Food!

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Day 4 started in Flores, Guatemala. We stopped at a farmers market just outside of the island. Lots of food to look at!

This was a local cornbread cooked on a BBQ-thing on the side of the road. Delicious!

Kerry and Dayl and I bought an avocado. I stopped to look at something. I walk around the corner and the two of them are ripping into it as though it was the last avocado on earth. I had some. It was pretty amazing :).

We bought some local fruits. I bought tomatoes.

This was the second most disappointing meal on the trip. We went to a Chinese place in Belmopan…think it was called Golden Trunk or Golden Sea. We’d arrived early at the Jungle Dome, and they only stock food for when you say you’re coming, so we had to drive back out to town to find food. Nothing looked good, and we ended up stopping here. They had some really tasty pastries though, and we bought donuts and donut holes for later.

This is the remains of some rice and a breaded chicken and some salad. This is about when I started forgetting to photograph my food and ended up with remains :P. You have been warned…

This meal was excellent! Dinner at the Jungle Dome – two massive pieces of chicken, bean soaked rice, a salad.

Oh, a story I forgot to tell about getting to the Jungle Dome. So all we have on how to get there is a tour book that is giving directions. But as we’re driving, the directions start getting vague…as though they could really mean “this left, or that left?” There are signs to a place called Banana Bank, but no Jungle Dome. Some panicked minutes later we find a tiny little Jungle Dome sign, right next to a giant Banana Bank sign. Someone had neglected to mention that the Jungle Dome is in an area called “Banana Bank” 🙂

Day 5 is our trip to the zoo! Later!

Belize

Day 3 – Food

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Apparently I failed badly at photographing food this day :). This plus side is, that the food failed pretty badly as well.

We had breakfast at some place 2 blocks from our hotel. If someone remembers the name, you’re welcome to write it in the comments for me. Food was mediocre and slow. I think I had eggs and toast or something.

Lunch was worse. We’d just finished off a long walk through Tikal and everyone was pretty hungry. Rather than drive for a bit, we decided to have some lunch at the restaurant at the site. It’s open-air, nice tiles, not a bad looking place. The menu was in Spanish however, which caused some issues. Sean and I ordered burgers – they were alright. I think others ordered “plain rice”, “plain fries”, “plain tortilla”, etc. Really lackluster food. Worse, it was relatively expensive compared to other food in the area. Just avoid the on-site restaurant.

Here’s a photo of some beer and a water bottle instead :P.

Dinner, on the other hand, was easily in my top 2 meals of the trip – it could even be number one, but I have a special place in my heart for ribs (they are several days away now).

So Sean and I got fairly drunk at this restaurant. We finished our game of Agricola and pushed our table over to the girls table. They had already ordered while were finishing, so their food arrived well before ours.

I feel a little sorry for Dayl – Sean and I were looming over her meal the entire time because it looked sooo good. We both ended up ordering the same thing. It was a grouper caught that morning, cooked in what was probably a cajun sauce. The entire fish. Head to tail (entrails removed). Pull the spine out yourself when you finish with the top layer. Potatoes with garlic butter. A little salad, a cucumber, tomatoes.

But the fish, was absolutely amazing. Again, if I could remember the name of the restaurant, I’d be highly recommending it _right now_.

Belize

Fried Jacks

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Two recipes for fried jacks that I found on the internets. Seems really simple:

INGREDIENTS

1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup milk
1/8 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking powder
METHOD:

1. Mix together flour, salt and baking powder.
2. Add milk and stir in.
3. Knead dough for 3 minutes until smooth. Cover and set aside for at least a half hour (1/2 hour)
4. Separate into balls (about 8) and roll out thinly into a round tortilla shape. (The thinner you roll them, the puffier they will be.) Cut in half.
5. Deep fry in hot fat, turning once until golden brown on both sides.
Ingredients:
1 lb flour
1 tb baking powder
1 tb shortening
1 cup water
Instructions:
Put ingredients in a bowl and mix well.
Knead for about 5 minutes until smooth.
Roll into pieces the size of golf balls.
Rest for 1/2 hour.
Roll it out and fry in oil.
Turn over once. When it floats, it finished.
Drain.
Belize

Day 2 – Food

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Day 2 started at 5 Sisters with tea. Dilmah is a brand you can’t get in Canada and which one of my tea-drinking friends raves about. I took this photo to show that I had it in Belize :P.

A Belizean breakfast – refried beans, eggs with veges, a few fruits (watermelon seemed popular in the area, the white thing is a crisp and relatively taste-free fruit, papaya) and a wedge of a hard, slightly sour cheese in the back. A solid breakfast improved only by…

Fried jacks!! (or fry jacks)

These things are one of the two “tastes of Belize”. They are a slightly thick puff pastry served at breakfast. Usually found with honey, as here, but at the end of the trip I had one with a jam and it was similarly delicious. I ate 6 at this meal. >.> They are like…pancake sized. 6 is a lot. I was in love. <3

Lunch was in a little hole-in-the-road road-side burrito place in San Ignacio. The others weren’t impressed with their food, but I think they got unlucky in ordering. My burrito was a beef+bean+cheese and it was excellent. The things on the left are pamades – “something”, in this case fish, but beef/chicken/beans were also available, deep fried in a batter with sliced cabbage on top. I wasn’t in the mood for deep fried at this point, so they were a little disappointing. And the fish was little than exciting.

The lime juice in the background, however, was delicious. It caused me to attempt to order lime juice in other restaurants as well.

As you can see here with another glass of lime juice…

This was a great meal at some place called Benny’s Kitchen or similar in Benque Viejo Del Carmen (someone confirm my locations?). It was hidden amongst houses, with many signs pointing towards it.

This meal is called “Pibil” – it’s pork cooked “underground”, by which I’m told it’s slow cooked with hot rocks. There is a salsa and an avocado and I wrapped it all up in the tortillas on the left. Very tasty!

You can see a jar of “salsa” on the right. This is effectively a jar of onions and spicy peppers. BLAAAH.

A good day of eating and a good day of posting. I’ll probably get to parts of day 3 tomorrow – Tikal has a lot of photos and not a lot of writing. I’m taking off for the weekend again on Friday, so I want to try to get a bunch of stuff out before then.

Thanks for reading!

Belize

Day 1 – Food

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I think I’m going to write about the days food after I’ve done each day. I had originally planned to write about it all after I was done all of the days, but I think that will end up much to disjointed.

My first meal of the trip I didn’t get a photo of – it was a burrito in the Houston airport at about 6-6:30am Houston time. I hadn’t slept at all, and I wanted something easy to eat. I walked up to a BBQ place and ordered the exact same thing as the guy in front of me (a trend which Sean will recognize :P). This thing would have been laughed out of burrito school in Vancouver, but it was pretty tasty. Spicy sausage, egg, cheese and a tortilla. That’s it. Who does that?

Lunch happened shortly after I landed in Belize. I had a feeling that the folks would be hungry when I landed, so I didn’t bother with a big meal in Houston, and I was glad to be right. We stopped at some random side of the road tent somewhere between Belmopan and Belize City. They had a truck with a BBQ and a man hanging out near it, and a tent with what I assume was a mother and daughter team serving food. Jerk pork, rice with vegetables, an avocado, potato salad and a lettuce salad. I didn’t know it at the time, but this meal is almost the quintessential Belizean meal – meat and rice, just needed beans to be added and it was right there. The pork was spiced, but not hot, and was delicious. This was a great meal, and I didn’t get food poisoning :P.

Just before dinner, we had a couple drinks. They served us a rum punch thing that was delicious upon us first arriving, but when we got to the bar it turned out they were expensive so we ordered other things instead :P. A “Belizean Cocaine” – Kahlua, Bailies, …something else…and cream. Woah, potent.

Dinner was at the 5 Sisters, served at that great table set up I photographed the other day. I ordered the shrimp – it came with roasted vegetables, garlic potatoes and cheese on the shrimp. As well as a little butterfly thing on the side (Rebecca says it looks like an owl :P). This was a great meal, and at the time I was really impressed. Unfortunately, it was overshadowed by meals to come – we ate at some really fantastic places.

Dessert looks like it was some sort of cakey-nutty thing with a chocolate sauce on top. But I’ll be honest, I can’t for the life of me remember what this thing tasted like. Maybe someone can remind me in the comments? 🙂

Having written that, I wish I’d taken notes on the food! I’m making the assumption that these potatoes are garlic…and I wish I remembered what sort of sauce was on the shrimp. Ah well…maybe a travel journal next time?