Yum, Yum, Yum

On Saturday (last week) Lorena Mendoza (my friend from school) invited me over to her house for lunch. I also helped her study English for her final coming up. I was touched that they wanted to cook for me, and was excited to try some Ecuadorian cuisine. Well I helped Lore study, and then her mom called us down for lunch, we started off with Mote, which (I hope I can bring some back with me) is like corn, but much bigger kernels as you can see, and white. Ecuadorians eat it plain, with salt, or scrambled in eggs, or sometimes I like it in soup too. Well we just ate ours plain with fresh pineapple juice. (sooo yummy)


Now comes the fun stuff. I had smelt fishy smells all day, but figured it would be all right, I had tried many different fish dishes here in Ecuador and seemed to enjoy them so I just kept hoping it wouldn´t be anything too scary. I saw Lorena´s mom preparing rice, which is always a good sign since I LoVe rice, and I was getting really hungry. Well then she pulled the lid off of this big pot. Inside there was all sorts of shell fish, for example, muscles, oysters, crab, and many more. She piled all this on a plate of rice mixed with corn and peas. So it was kind of like ham fried rice but minus the ham and plus lots of different….things….
As I started picking through it, the smell overwhelmed me, and I silently started gagging before I even tried anything. First I had to de-shell all the little shell fish, which took a while…a LONG while. Then I started noticing these little round kind gummy looking things. I then asked Lorena what they were and she told me, Octopus!!!! Yup!!!!
Funny thing was is that of all the different fishies in the rice, the octopus was defiantly my favorite! I didn´t stomach the other things very well…the muscles were too chewy, like a never ending gummy worm, (but fishy) and the rest just tasted too fishy…haha.
But I did it! And I can defiantly say I ate all those things…at least once! haha