Spotted Rooster and Smooshed-up Lizards?

There’s a reason that people in the US aren’t familiar with Costa Rican cuisine. It’s bland.

Most meals here center on rice and beans, which is pretty normal for Latin America, but Costa Ricans seem – literally – reluctant to spice it up. Occasionally they’ll throw in some chopped sweet pepper or onion, some meals use a little garlic, but it’s very rare to ever find more than one spice in any dish. Apparently mixing them together has unpredictable and undesirable results.

To give you an idea, the traditional lunch or dinner is called casado, “married,” either because married people always eat it, or because it marries rice and beans together (haven’t yet figured that one out). Anyways, it includes plain white rice next to plain brown beans with a slab of meat. Then for breakfast you take the leftover rice and beans and fry them up together and serve them with eggs. Gets a little repetitive. Many restaurants advertise “delicious typical food,” but one of my friends calls this an oxymoron.

To add a little flavor to their rice – or anything – they’ve developed a mysterious all-purpose condiment called “Lizano sauce.” A little spicy, a little tangy, it’s a thick green mixture of … something. The label says it includes onions, carrots, cauliflower, cucumber and chili, but I’m pretty sure it’s made from mushed-up lizards. Mmmmmm.

If a meal doesn’t include rice and beans, it usually revolves around carbs. My host family was fond of serving pasta with bread and rice on the side, followed by cake for dessert. Whitest meal I’ve ever seen. Occasionally they’d do salads, but for some reason you can’t get good lettuce here so salads are based on shredded cabbage. Also white, but at least there’s a few nutrients in cabbage. Incidentally, the preferred salad dressing is oil and vinegar. Are you seeing a trend yet?

Us foreigners get a little desperate for something with a little more kick to it. One of my housemates managed to locate a little Asian food store, and came home with some weird pickled cabbage snack called “kim chi” in Korean. He loves it, even though it mostly tastes like vinegar. Anyways, he made our Costa Rican host mother try some, and she found it so spicy she immediately started yelling “Water! Water!” She was so desperate she actually yelled in English.

This doesn’t just apply to Costa Rica – I had a similar experience with my host sister in Chile a few years ago. I had picked up some Chex Mix, which I was reluctant to share since it’s my favorite snack and is terribly expensive at import prices. I gave my host sister a few squares, but I had nothing to worry about – she decided it was too spicy.

One final complaint: no cheese. For some reason, they prefer half-mature cheese in Latin America. Instead of a nice, hard cheddar, they leave the cheese half-cured so it’s moist and squishy (and therefore extremely mild). I’ve found this to be the case in Chile, El Salvado, and now in Costa Rica. Tastes like sour milk to me. Apparently I’m alone in this sentiment – my mother loved it when she visited. My main issue is that it squeaks on your teeth. That’s just weird. I’ve developed a major aversion to squeaky cheese.

Still, I have become quite fond of their traditional breakfast dish – the rice and beans deal. When they fry them together, they call it gallo pinto, spotted rooster, and usually serve it with eggs and maybe even some squeaky cheese (which I don’t eat). Done right – with some onions and peppers and maybe even some spices – it can actually be quite tasty. As a final bonus, spotted rooster goes especially well with lizard sauce.

– Published in The Worthington News, 6/14/06 –