Costa Rican Food

Eating is one of my favorite activities, so when it comes to traveling to new places, one of the things I am most curious about is the food. Sadly during my trip around Europe, in an effort to keep costs down I limited my visits to restaurants to almost zero, and since I only stayed in each country for a short period of time, this meant that I missed out on experiencing the food in many places. But not this time! When I was in San Jose, I decided to make more of an effort to try the typical foods, and my hosts helped out by suggesting things I should try. So, without further ado, here is a sampling of the Costa Rican dishes I have eaten up to this point. 

Gallo Pinto

From what I can tell, Gallo Pinto (which means "painted rooster") is the most typical Costa Rican food you can find. It is a simple dish consisting of a mixture of rice and black beans cooked with some spices, onion, and I think bell pepper. It is very commonly eaten for breakfast, and is one of the foods we serve for the breakfast buffet here at the lodge. I keep forgetting to take a picture of it at breakfast time so I can show you, but it's so basic that as long as you can imagine rice and beans, you've got the right idea. :)

Fried fish

One of the first meals I ate in Costa Rica was fried fish at the Pesca de Trucha (trout fishing) place that my hosts took me to, which I wrote about in my previous post about San Jose. After we caught the fish, we dropped them off to be cooked, and they were returned to us like this:

The fish was cooked completely whole, and was served with a lemon (this particular lemon confused me at first because the skin looks like a lime and the inside looks like an orange, but it tasted like a slightly less sour lemon), a type of potato, and what I think was plantains in a sauce. It was all delicious, and it was hands down the freshest fish I had ever eaten. One of the guys I was with ate his entire fish, including the head and tail, but I was not quite that adventurous, preferring to dissect it and pick out the meat. 

Pan Árabe de Pinto

I'm not sure how traditional this is, but it was very good nonetheless. It is a breakfast dish that I ordered at a restaurant in San Jose, and it consisted of a tortilla filled with eggs and Gallo Pinto (hence the "pinto" in the name), served with sour cream for dipping.


Chifrijos

This was a dish my hosts suggested I try the first time we went out to dinner, and it did not disappoint. It had rice, beans, cubes of pork, tomatoes, and a simple sauce, and included chips for dipping. The picture doesn't quite do it justice, but I really liked it! As you might be able to guess by now, rice and beans seem to be very commonly eaten foods here in Costa Rica. 

Arreglado

I ordered this at a restaurant in San Jose called Soda Tapia. "Soda" is the name for the local restaurants that serve typical Costa Rican food, so I knew I had to try at least one in my search for sustenance during sightseeing. The arreglado was basically a sandwich, but the bread was more like a thick tortilla cut in half than like the fluffy bread we eat in the U.S., and it had refried black beans, ham, lettuce, tomato, and a sauce. I also ordered a papaya smoothie. I think it was made with just fruit, water and ice, so it was simple but delicious, and exactly what I needed after walking around int the sun on a warm day. 

Casado

Casado is a very traditional food, like Gallo Pinto. The word means "married" and according to my research the name comes from the fact that it is a typical lunch that women would make for their husbands to take to work in the fields. The casado pictured above is one that I ordered in a restaurant I went to with my hosts in San Jose. My impression is that traditionally casado is a little simpler than this, but mine had beans, rice, corn salsa, chicken cooked in a sauce, cabbage salad, plantains in sauce, and a cube of fried cheese (I think it was cheese curds because it squeaked when I bit into it). 

Other foods

That concludes the meal section of my post, now here are a few more smaller food items that I have had since being here.

Another smoothie, also simple and delicious. This one is mango and pineapple, and I got it at a cafe in Puerto Viejo.

Coconut water doesn't get any fresher than this! That hole in the top is just big enough to fit a straw and drink the water right out of the coconut. I bought it at a market in Puerto Viejo, and I loved it. I will definitely be buying more of these during my time here. 

One of the guys at the lodge showed me to how to break open the coconut and take out the "meat," and this was the result. Pretty cool!

This is a popular Costa Rican sauce called Salsa Lizano. It's great on Gallo Pinto, and probably on other things too, although I've yet to find out. 

And so far that concludes the overview of the foods I have tried since I have been in Costa Rica. Now that I am at the lodge, I haven't eaten much Costa Rican food, except for Gallo Pinto, because the people who do most of the cooking are not Costa Rican. The owner of the lodge is German and he cooked dinner for us when he was here (so we had lots of meat and potatoes), but now he is back in Germany visiting his family. Since his departure, Silvia, another volunteer from Austria, has been cooking dinner, so her food is mostly inspired by Austrian recipes. I don't mind though because I figure I have plenty of time to experience more Costa Rican food, and Silvia is a great cook! 

For those of you who might be asking yourselves, "isn't Lindsay vegan? I see a lot of meat mentioned here"...it's true, I dove headlong back into eating meat when I got here, same as I did in Europe. Mostly because I wanted to try everything new that was offered to me, but partly because of convenience. I knew before I got to this WorkAway job that it would be nearly impossible to maintain my vegan diet, so I decided to not even try. When I make lunch for myself, I still cook vegan dishes, but it's turned out that I don't need to do that very often because I usually just eat dinner leftovers. For the most part I'm fine with eating meat again, and luckily my digestive system had no problem making the adjustment, but there are times that I wish we ate less meat here. After being vegan on and off for about 2 1/2 years, I just don't find myself wanting meat or dairy anymore, and sometimes the sight of meat sort of grosses me out. So I will still eat meat when it is offered to me or is the only option, but I will continue to choose vegetarian or vegan options whenever possible, and I will definitely go back to being vegan when I get home from this trip. It's such a habit for me now that it's not at all difficult to eat vegan when I am shopping for my own food, and I just feel better about my choices when I don't eat animal products. 

I hope to try even more typical Costa Rican dishes as my travels around the country continue, so it is very likely that I will have a second food-related post in the next few months. I hope you enjoyed this culinary tour, and maybe are inspired to try to find some of these dishes in your area or make them yourself. Which ones would you most want to try?