Leaving it to the Brazilians
Today I ate well thanks to an end-of-class group dinner at a delicious Brazilian restaurant in Astoria. I haven't had much in the way of Brazilian food since my year in Brazil ended in 2015, and even then, I wasn't very adventurous, and besides, I was vegetarian, a waste of a year abroad that I can't get back, alas.
I had a plate of feijoada to begin; feijoada is basically just beans and pork in a stew, kind of. I don't think I had ever had it before. I would have it again. Unfortunately the restaurant didn't label much of anything in Portuguese so I couldn't correlate this chicken-y lasagna thing to anything I had heard of before in Brazil. It was good, though.
Then I had---a bunch of meat, the star of the show. It was as delicious as it looks. Most of it was good and rare. On the plate you see picanha (the best), tri-tip steak (can't tell you where that comes from but it was also good), skirt sirloin (ditto), and something else I forgot. I'm such a dummy with meat cuts; I knew I wanted picanha (famous for having a huge cap of fat on top) because I had heard so much about it, but I told the guy who cut the meat off the spit, basically just give me things that are on the rarer side and that you think are good. I couldn't pretend to strongly desire one cut or the other because I mostly don't know the difference.
For desert there was a "mousse de maracujá"---I remembered "maracujá" from Brazil but I never remembered that it was passionfruit. My Portuguese professor, present today at the dinner, reminded me. Brazil has SO MANY FRUITS that you never know if an unknown name you hear that refers to a fruit refers to a fruit you know, or a totally new fruit. I don't think I've ever had "passionfruit", in any country, in any case.
