12.09.17 - Tem caroço no angu

Tally ho wot wot,

As mentioned last week, I made my début as São Paulo Ambassador for Traveling Spoon on Wednesday, and Gaby and I were treated to a market-tour-slash-cooking-class-slash-meal-slash-review courtesy of Sofie, an affable Swede who lives near the Avenida Paulista.  She had us chopping rocket and grilling halloumi in no time, and taught us a mango-peeling trick which was worth the (figurative) price of admission on its own.  Fun was had, and veggie pointers were picked up, surely never to be used again.

The next day - a national holiday here, not that it spared me a full day's work, grumble grumble - we had some folks over for dinner and tried to recreate Sofie's avocado chocolate mousse with mixed results; the takeaway pizza, cachaça and "Uber wine" went over better, leading to extremely merry scenes and a late-night jam to Guns 'n Roses' greatest hits around 1am.   The weekend was spent mainly recovering, although we checked out a new burger place on Saturday with Andréia and Bruno, and discussed plans to stage our own Traveling Spoon host experience in the distant future. 

I've walloped together a new compilation, and today's phrase is a good'un: "caroço" is the pit of a fruit or an amorphous lump, and "angu" is a traditional dish of the common man, made from mandioca/cornflour and water.  So when you feel something is slightly off with a situation or proposal, you can say "there's a lump in the angu", roughly equivalent to "there's a fly in the ointment", or indeed a "floater in the bowl"...

Ciao for now,

Fred Lobster