Grocery stores and Brazilian cooking

There are a variety of grocery stores here, but nothing familiar to me. Two of them are like Superstore:

Large stores, but I've noticed that they don't have much (if anything) in the way of bulk foods. Everything is prepackaged. In one store I saw a bulk section for nuts but that was it.

The store closest to me is more like a large corner store: Metro-Plus.

One thing that they do have in their grocery stores that we don't, however, is a selection of beer and wine. You can buy the ingredients for dinner and then decide what you might want to drink with that....

The wine in the center is called "Bodacious". I might try that.

There's a couple of beer brands we don't have back home:

I love walking through the stores and seeing what is different from what we have available. It gives me ideas for what I might want to cook next: Mahi-Mahi, Blue Marlin, Swordfish, Tuna steaks...

or wild boar sausage... I'll have to Google recipes for those. I saw lots of tourtiere in the freezer. One of my instructors says you can also buy 'cheval' but I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet.

There is an international food store close by that has all kinds of specialty foods. I bought red palm oil for a Brazilian dish I want to cook: Acaraja. Shirlei told us about it in class - how much she is missing it. It is sold by street venders where she comes from in Bahia - an area in Salvador, Brazil. Shirlei thinks it is not possible to make it here because some of the ingredients are hard to find, but I'm not giving up. I just need to find smoked shrimp (or dried shrimp as a substitute).

Shirlei came over to make a different Brazilian dish: Moqueca de Camarao (Shrimp stew).

I bought the ingredients - including a fresh coconut. How do we break it open?? The stick I found in the apartment didn't do the trick - the coconut won out.

I ended up going outside and breaking the coconut on the concrete step. Shirlei took out the meat and I chopped it as per her instruction.

When she found out I didn't have a blender, she thought all was lost. Turns out she was going to use the coconut to make fresh coconut milk. (I thought she was going to shred it or toast it.) Thankfully, I had a can in the cupboard along with the red palm oil.

Shirlei cooking away. We used Google Translate a lot over the course of the morning!

Shrimp, onions, green peppers, tomatoes, garlic, cilantro, lime juice, small hot chili peppers, red palm oil, coconut milk.

 

Stewed together and then served over rice:

 

 

It was delicious! I will definitely try this at home.