On the day that The Netherlands played against Uruguay in the semi finals of the World Cup, Ellen's brother invited me to a barbecue that they would have at the studend-building in which he lives. Nobody older than 33-34 there, everybody goes to college and even another Brazilian in the middle of the crowd.
This was the first gringo barbecue that I ever went to, since this is my first summer in Europe and they refuse/are not able to light a barbecuer outside in the winter. A day earlier, me and Rob (her brother) went to the supermarket to buy things for the BBQ (but only our part, each one takes his).
But I've heard rumors about barbecuing in the Netherlands. I was cautious.
Her brother is a vegetarian of the fanatic type. He doesn’t eat meat or anything that comes from an animal. That is, derivatives as well: milk, eggs, cheese etc ... you get it... so at the supermarket he would buy things for barbecue that did not come from animals. In the end he bought potatoes, foil, sauce for potatoes, spice, banana, stuff like that. Nothing much.
Arriving at the meat section, it was exactly what I expected.
Those supermarket fridges full of meat, already cut and packaged, with the price tag. Normal. They have a "thing" here called gehakt, which is the cheap meat from the Dutch. Usually they mow it because it’s already destroyed inside the package anyway. It's good tasting, but it certainly is not very noble.
The gehakt is the matter of the whole meat-universe here. Sure, sometimes they change the name from gehakt to rundvless (beef), but that doesn’t change the fact that gehakt is gehakt no matter what hiccups you make to pronounce its name.
So for the barbecue, of course, they press the gehakt to make a big slice that they call a hamburger. They also make some cuts of meat for the barbecue, but you have to find a label BBQ (barbecue) on the package and the meat always comes already seasoned with some greasy sauce. And of course, so close to Germany, sausages for every taste (except, perhaps, the taste of Brazil. But it's not bad.).
I settled for buying two burgers (they are huge) and a package with a 7 sausages(which was not open til now).
Before all this, though, I used Google to find out what the Brazilian sufferers who live here have to do if they don’t want to hang themselves in the gringo barbecues. I found the blog of a Brazilian (Dri na Holanda, link on right side of this page) and there she posted a picture of a picanha, or at least the same cut of the picanha, but without the layer of fat and it’s sold here as "rosbif". She said she would try to barbecue it to see if it was the same, but I don’t know if she posted something about it ... but certainly in the supermarket I ended up finding a piece of "rosbif" with no layer of fat, 500 grams for 7.50 euros. When converting to real at 2.45, it’s 18.40 reais per half a kilo of steak. That's good, I guess... or not?
Anyway, arriving at the BBQ, I took the picanha out of the bag and the10 gringos around me started "oh, that’s big chunk of meat." And they laughed.
I opened the packet of thick salt (which was another journey to buy: here they call it zeezout- sea salt. Because their salt comes from salt mines, as well as the sugar which comes from beets, not sugar cane). I poured the salt into a bowl. More laughter, but now also frightened faces.
As the picanha here has no layer of fat, I decided to spend a rich layer of butter on one side to simulate the fat, so the meat doesn’t get hard. The foreigners were already about to call the TV to it, while the Ellen’s brother laughed at them, because he is more used to my brazilian "weirdness”.
After the butter, I threw thick salt on the picanha placed it on the grid, followed by 10 pairs of curious eyes. Once I cut it into slices and slapped the meat so the excess of salt would fall down, they couldn’t take it anymore and almost called the army on me.
But obviously, after two chewings and what I heard most was "I take the laughter back, it’s fucking good."
That's what I always say to them here: you may be better at everything than Brazil, but your food ...... go to fucking hell!
(And yet they are not better at EVERYthing...)
Continuing ...
Yesterday we went out for dinner at a restaurant to celebrate the end of Ellen’s studies. That by itself (eating out) is already a big event. Going to the restaurant is kind of... a World Cup final, almost.
On the way there, I, Ellen, dad and mom (hers) were walking through the vastness that is the city here, when we saw what they call a "alcohol shop". You imagine... whiskey, wine, liquor, etc ...
I walked to the woman at the counter, locked and loaded my Dutch and fired away.
- Hallo! Do you have cachaça?
- Ka ... kassasa?
- Ca-cha-ça, weet je wel (you know)? It's a Brazilian drink made from sugar cane.
- I don’t know that, but we have catjaca, if it’s the same thing, I don’t know... I think it's Mexican or something.
Something told me then that I had found the cachaça ... between Mexico and Brazil, the difference for them must be around 10 kilometers ...
- Can you show me?
And she goes away and comes back with a bottle of 51, with Pirassununga written pretty big up front.
- Ja - I said - it’s Brazilian. I’ll take it. How much?
- Are you Brazilian?
- Yes. How much is it?
- Wow. You can peak Dutch very well.
- Dank je. How much is it, please?
- (She's staring at me, stunned)
- (I wait)
- It’s 14.50, please.
EUROS?? WTF! This Caipirinha had better taste fucking good! In Brazil it doesn’t cost more than 5 reais, here it was 35! The label is all in English, but it has a note in Portuguese saying it is illegal to sell domestically. "The top selling drink from Brazil!"
But the daddy-in-law had his birthday on the 05th and today a lot of people are coming to have a beer with him and the caipirinha has already been requested. There’ll be gringos singing happy new year songs after three cups ...
Making the Caipirinha, incidentally, is yet another journey because 1. sugar here is thick and bizarre. Finding it refined is tough, but not impossible and 2. Green lemon is an urban legend. Some say they have seen it, others say it is an invention of the government to scare us. But in the end there are, yes, green lemons for sale, only that they come in packs of 4 lemons for 2 euros each. And to find it it’s worse than picanha, and 3. ICE! Damn, how FUCKING hard is it to get ice here! You'll even find ice trays, but you have to choose whether you want to freeze water or food: the freezer is half of ours. Doesn’t fit a crap in there!
In other words, to get ice, they buy some bizarre plastic bags with chambers that you fill with water and then stuck it anyway in the freezer and pray that you can get the cubes out later.
Never again will I curse an ice tray that won’t let the ice go.
The world is a bizarre place ...
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