Vegan on Cape Verde

I'm not doing much cooking (or eating, for that matter) at the moment since that bug is still plaguing me. My husband (who, fortunately, can cook really well) makes himself the most delicious meals and then I sit there, drooling over his food and munching away on my dry toast. Fun fun fun...

So, to get another food-related post in here a quick account of feeding yourself on Cape Verde as a vegan. The people on Cape Verde mainly eat vegetables, corn, and squash. The most popular dish on the islands is cachupa: freshly ground corn, beans and vegetables (sweet or white potatoes, tomatoes, squash) cooked together. Unfortunately, in restaurants they only serve this cooked with meat though I'm sure in their homes it is mostly prepared vegan. On every corner there are women selling veggies, but we hardly ever saw people selling meat. Not because they are all vegetarians, but because they simply can’t afford to buy and eat much meat.

This is the how the women and girls carry their produce to the market and home. We even saw a women carrying a stove on her head...

Fortunately, the hotel devoted an enormous (and I mean ENORMOUS) portion of their breakfast buffet to fresh fruits. Fully-ripe, aromatic bananas and sweet, deep-orange papayas (both local) as well as kiwi, apples, oranges and so on. And then there was always bread, margerine and jam. For lunch we usually snacked on the nuts I brought and fruits and bread we took from the buffet.

The hotel also offered buffet-style dinner. They always had a huge plate of steamed veggies, then bread, rice, salads and - again - fresh fruit. I must have eaten a ton of papayas in this week. Maybe what I have is not your ordinary diarrhea but a more serious form of papaya-poisening? Who knows?