Juayua, El Salvador has this amazing food festival every weekend and this is exactly where we spent our entire weekend. The food and energy that comes from this little village is the best. We arrived to the city later in the day on Saturday to find that about half of the stands surrounding the central plaza had already been closed. There was still more than enough to eat and we came back for much more on Sunday.
First off was fried yucca root served with a topping of pickled cabbage. Delicious and similar to the flavor of a french fry. Next stop was the stand selling chicken tomales for 25 cents. This is the second tomale that I´ve had here in Central America and I´m starting to notice that they like to leave the chicken on the bone when they put it in the tomale. Extra flavor I guess! I didn´t find out until after I devoured it, but my first tomale even had a chicken foot in it, but that´s a whole different story. Lol. As we strolled under the tents, past the hundreds of stands set up for the market, we passed by a girl eating chocolate covered strawberries from a kabab stick. I knew this needed to be our next sample.
The man with the strawberries had a cooler full of frozen kabobs of strawberries and bananas and for topping you could choose from crushed peanuts, shredded coconut, cocoa krispies and multi-colored sprinkles. There was a pot of melted chocolate that the fruit was dipped into and as soon as the warm chocolate covered the frozen fruit, he would dip it in your topping of choice and you would end up with the most perfect chocolate covered strawberries.
People from all over El Salvador and from surrouding countries come out
to enjoy the food, music, streamers, dancing, balloons and energy of
this festival. One of the performers was pleased to see Brett and I
sitting in the front row during his act. He came up to us with us the
microphone asking all sorts of questions, getting us to kiss in front of
the crowd and followed by serenades from him at our table.
After dessert, we figured it was time for a main course, but there were so many selections that it made it almost impossible to decide what to eat! We ended up deciding on the whole tilapia fish plate. You can´t go wrong with this option and I really wish more restaurants in the States had this as an option.
The next day we wanted to experiment a little more. In one of our pictures, you can see the menu of one of the stands we visited whose specialty was frogs and serpents. Because the snakes were really pricey, went for a grilled frog. A little hesitant, we pulled the white meat from the tiny arms and legs and were surprised to find it wasn´t much different from chicken and quite good.
After huge coconut shrimp, shrimp and beef kabobs, pork ribs, fried dough covered with a syrupy glaze, fresh fruit punch and a reptile petting zoo, we decided we´d had more than we could eat and rolled back through the rain to our hostel. Satisfied and ready to relax.
-Sophia
