A trip to Brazil

We learned about Brazil in our usual way, learning facts about the country, listening to Brazilian music like samba, bossa nova, and forro, and studying about the Amazon rain forest. Our dinner was a virado a paulista platter with couve refogata (sauteed kale), beans and rice, and fried eggs with hot sauce.

Here’s what it looked like:

Floppy wasn’t too sure he liked the idea:

After he tried it, though, he decided it was delicious, especially with hot sauce, which he had never had before (and to my surprise he agreed that a bit of tabasco punched things up in a delicious way). The recipes, which came from here, helped us with our Portuguese — they’re written in both languages.

We watched a really neat video series to learn about Carnaval, and looked at pictures of rainforest animals like sloths, toucans, and vampire bats. Finally, we made dessert to explore the fruits of the rainforest. Here we are cutting up an Ecuadorean mango:

And here are our two finished products: the fresh fruit salad, with pineapple, mango, papaya, coconut, and I forget what all. Also a tropical trail mix, with papaya, pineapple, mango, hazelnuts, Brazil nuts, candied ginger, cacao nibs, and I can’t remember what else.

I didn’t get a shot of Floppy’s passport, but he drew a picture of Carnaval and wrote “We visited Brazil and learned interesting things about the instruments, words and food. We learned about carnaval wich is like the 4th of july only betr. There are fire wokes and you get to dress up and there is pradse (parades).”