Aero: David Whitt – Costa Rica 2016 – Food and Dining

Creative Commons Image via The LEAF Project

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I am generally viewed by most of my family as a fairly picky eater. I don’t typically like to try different things and I usually eat just the basic food (meats, vegetables, fruits, etc.) With that said, the eating part of the trip was one part that really worried me. When we got to our host family’s house, I was pleasantly surprised that they were quite “Americanized”, and ate a lot of the same foods. Maria had lunch cooking when we got there, and much to my surprise, it was pasta, which tasted quite like that in America. Even the sauce tasted almost the same. Personally, I am a huge pasta fan, so that was a big win for me!

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David Whitt

Most days, for breakfast, we had fresh fruit and toast. I eat toast a lot at home, so that was good for me, but the fruit was amazing! I have never really had fruit that fresh, and it was quite surprising that every single piece of fruit I ate at Maria’s tasted extremely fresh, so that was awesome! I definitely ate out the most amount of times in a two week span than I ever have in my life, for sure! Most of my restaurant meals included chicken. Whether it was chicken breast, chicken in a tortilla, chicken in rice, fried chicken, whatever type of chicken, it included chicken! I have always had chicken a lot at home, so this was kind of a fall back option for me. Again, I don’t typically try a lot of new foods, so a meal that included chicken was kind of a safe gate for me, so I knew that I would at least eat something in the meal.

Rice. In Costa Rica, they eat a lot of rice. That is new for me because I don’t eat rice at home. I don’t know what it was, but I don’t like rice at home, but there was rice in almost every meal I ate in Costa Rica, and it was good every single time, so I definitely want to figure out how to make rice at home where I will eat it! Another thing I ate that I don’t eat at home is broccoli. One day, at Maria’s, we had small pieces of broccoli in rice and some kind of meat, I can’t remember, but I think it was chicken. Either way, that was the first time in a very long time that I had eaten broccoli, so that was really good. The other time on the trip that I ate broccoli was at the coffee plantation. Before the coffee tour, we ate lunch there, which was a buffet-style meal. One of the foods was a salad that they put broccoli in. The broccoli was in some sort of sauce, and I think the sauce gave it an extra flavor that helped me like it.

David Whitt
LEAF Contributor
ML@FLCC: Costa Rica 2016

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