Food and drink and things

My blog wouldn't be my blog nor Jay Bil-approved if I didn't talk about STREET FOOD.



Which I haven't been hitting up too much. On Sunday I indulged in the tipico breakfast buffet, which included beans, fried plantains, fruit, crepeish things, and this weird concoction with a fried egg baked into bread, all of which constituted both breakfast and lunch and a great (full disclosure:) hangover cure.







After which I did peruse the bustling SF scene outside La Merced. I was too full to partake and it was mostly meat stalls anyway, but I did hit up this mango stand.



Got this pupusa for lunch today, a corn tortilla filled with cheese, covered with avocado (peeled and pitted without any utensils, impressive), cabbage and hot sauce, + d. coke for < $1. We jam econo.



On Saturday, though, I hit what will probably be the highest note of Street Food '09: Hugo's Ceviches. This is bizarre. It's a pickup truck that drives fresh seafood up from the Pacific coast, only two days a week, only for a few hours on each of these days, which, along with the location of the truck, remain undisclosed until the day of. It's mostly local patronage. If you're hesitant to eat raw seafood from the back of a pickup truck, chances are you won't plumb the local rumor mills to go out of your way to find it.

And the fact of eating raw street fish isn't even the weirdest part about Hugo's. That honor goes to the "cerveza preparada."



1. Get a beer, take a few sips, return for salt and lime. So far so good.



2. Things start getting weird when they add the "salsa secreta," a brown sauce with a secret recipe that tastes to include fish oil, worcestershire and sugar.



3. Add green salsa and onions, why not? You already lost me with the brown stuff.



4. Equals this. Discretely brown-bagged to circumvent open container laws.



The sketchy meal in total. The sauce in the ceviche is the same as in the beer, so it works together with this completely mind-bending complementarity. And the cerveza preparada is great. I went back for another on Sunday.


Some things:





Antique scale and book press from Casa Herrera.





Some rather "modern" assemblages from the Hotel del Carmen.



Icon



Bonus round: projector from the planetarium at the Boston Museum of Science. I just found these pictures from my trip there last Fall, which somehow eluded upload until now.





Well, 4 more days in Antigua. What to do?