Chicken with Rice or Rice with Chicken - A Varied Diet

Lots of people have asked me about the food here. Well, rice is the staple diet and appears at two of the daily meals – midday and evening. Normally the rice is white but it can be a different colour (and flavour, even though the flavour doesn’t always come through). This evening, for example, the rice had a faintly green colour which was due to it having been cooked with celery. It was grand but I would not, personally, be in any particular rush to have it again. However, I have had rice here cooked with coconut which was quite nice; with chilli which was lovely; and with roasted almonds which was really delicious. However, no matter how you might colour it, rice is always rice. After one month here I could do with a break from it. I did have one day since I came when I ate no rice, but only one.

Potatoes are served sometimes – in small amounts, as mash or as chips, but they are still accompanied with rice. They don’t seem to consider potatoes to be in any way, a substitute for the omnipresent rice.

Maize (Corn) is also very popular here. I don’t tend to eat it as I find it to be very hard on the tummy. Most of the time it is not eaten as we would eat it – either on the cob or as kernels. It is most often ground and made into a sort of hard pancake which people here eat with great gusto.

Another thing made from corn is Chicha. Chicha is a word which in Panama means fruit or vegetable juice of any kind – in other parts of South America it refers only to a drink made from maize. Here, in Panama, that maize-based drink is called Chicheme. Traditionally, and here I warn anyone with a sensitive tummy, it is prepared in a most unusual way – the women of the family chew the maize kernels into a pulp, then they spit the pulp into a bucket where it is allowed to ferment. Once it has fermented the pulp is passed through a sieve and the liquid that remains is the drink that people here enjoy so much – Personally, I wouldn’t touch it with a  barge pole.

The other, almost daily item on the menu here is chicken. Dinner is normally either rice with chicken or chicken with rice. These are not the same thing!!! Rice with chicken is rice with pieces of chicken mixed through it with some vegetables and seasoning; chicken with rice, on the other hand, is a piece of chicken served on top of a bed of rice.

I’ll try to get some photos of the different dishes here and share them with you.

By the way, it was so hot today that I was sweating even in the air conditioning!!!