Hamburgers are Home. And Colombian Hamburgers are Love.

There are comforts of home that one craves while traveling.  While I am often able to feel "at home" while on the road, I still fall victim to the cravings of my usual comfort foods, like pizza, tacos and the one thing that is as American as it gets, the hamburger.

While I often enjoy the different interpretations other countries have of things like pizza, I've been known to say that only the United States can make a proper hamburger.

Europe, I'm sorry.  I love you, and you've done my tastebuds proud in many, many ways.  Your bread is incomparable, your produce is divine... But stop trying to make American-style burgers.  You just can't.

Central America... Don't even try it.  I'm not even sure they use real meat in Costa Rica.  They called that stuff beef, but it tasted like bean paste.  Also, I've seen their cows.  I'm pretty sure you couldn't scrape enough meat for one burger from ten Costa Rican cows.  It's just sad.

I'd basically given up on foreign attempts at burgers before I came to Colombia.  But COLOMBIA.  You, Mi Amor, can make a burger.  It's not American in its style by any stretch of the imagination, but you won't want it to be.  You'll go back to the good old U.S. of A. and judge them because there are no crunchy potato sticks and they only use two or three types of sauce, which are all totally identifiable.

A Colombian burger consists of, from what I can tell, one or two thin patties of beef, a slice or two of cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, probably pickles, one or more optional forms of pork (bacon, ham and chorizo are all possibilities), a sauce that may or may not be mustard, other miscellaneous sauces (one source says pink sauce, pineapple sauce and aji sauce) crunchy potato sticks, sometimes onions, sometimes not (I prefer not).

Too big to fit in my mouth OR my arteries.  Oops!

The Colombian burger I had last night was a special creature of its own, like something that came directly from the annals of ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com:  Two beef patties, cheese, chorizo, ham (there might have been other meats, but I'm not even sure.  I could barely keep my eyes open after one bite.  I'm surprised I lived to write this blog post after eating that burger), lettuce, tomato, all the sauces and, of course, crunchy potato sticks.  I had no idea what was coming when I ordered this.  I just knew that a person from the United States had given me the unsolicited advice that if I had not eaten this burger yet, I had to do so immediately.

I mean, I'm not one to turn down unsolicited advice about food, unless it's from my doctor and pertains to cholesterol, and this is a decision I shockingly did not regret hours later, as my arteries did not, as I expected, shut down in my sleep last night.

In addition to the joy of killing yourself slowly with fatty meat, there is the additional pleasure of all the ingredients coming out the sides, onto your face, your hands, your clothing... pretty much everywhere.  This makes the burger a two-course meal, as you then get to eat all the pieces that did not make it into your mouth on the first go-around.

So, in summary, burgers in Colombia are a major win.  For your tastebuds, that is.  They're probably a pretty big loss for your heart's longevity and your waistline, but hey, at least you enjoyed your first heart while you had it, right?

Because, contrary to popular belief, I don't exclusively eat junk food when I travel, here's a post about Colombian fruits!

This is one of the prettier cups of mango and
papaya I bought in Cartagena.  I eventually
stopped photographing these and started just
eating them, like a normal person.

Junk food is great and all, and it's important to try the local junk food specialties when visiting a new place, but I'm a huge fan of fruits and vegetables as well.  Besides, fruit is basically nature's candy, right?

Colombian produce is beautiful.  Buying and cooking vegetables here is a pure joy, as is finding those special fruits that you just can't get anywhere at home (at least not without taking out a second mortgage on your home to pay for their "exotic" nature at your local Whole Paycheck or similar "Sell us your first born child in exchange for this single organic strawberry" type store that exists in the center of most major American cities and caters to yuppies)...

Some of the fruits are familiar.  Mango, sliced, in a cup, sometimes with papaya or watermelon, is a popular snack in the cities.  The gringo price is usually around $2,000 COP, now about $0.65, and once I got a guy in Medellin to sell it to me for $1,000 COP.  It might have been the greatest moment of my Medellin experience.  I try to convince myself that he thought my Spanish usage and accent were better than a typical tourist, but I think the more probable explanation is that he was just being nice.  (You'd probably agree with this if you heard me speak Spanish.)

It's hard to go wrong with mango, and, while I don't LOVE papaya, I ate it a lot in Guatemala with my host family, served with the seeds, which add an interesting peppery flavor that I am quite fond of.

Some of the less common fruits (at least for us deprived Americans) include the following:

Sapote (Zapote)

This is my favorite tropical fruit.  I was introduced to this five years ago when a friend in Guatemala

I am a sapote.  I don't look nearly as delicious as I taste, but eat
me anyway.  You won't regret it.

described it as a fruit that "tastes like sweet potato pie"... I bought my first one soon after, and ate them as often as I could find one at the appropriate ripeness.  A sapote is brown on the outside, and you determine its ripeness the same way you would an avocado.  You want it to be soft but not too soft.  It not only tastes like sweet potato pie, but also, if it has reached its perfect ripeness, it has the same texture as well.

I found out that they also have these in Colombia when a European guy with obvious taste bud deficiencies came up to me on the street and said, "I just bought this fruit and don't like it.  Do you want it?"  I answered with an obvious yes, and delved into the sheer joy of the sapote once again...

The fruit dish featured above features: some seriously awesome
large blackberries, strawberries, and uchuvas (the orange things).

They're hard to find in Guatape, but are among the things I look most forward to upon returning to city life!


Uchuvas

The uchuva is a member of the same family as the tomatillo, which was a completely unsurprising thing to read after tasting these weird little sour orange fruits.  I wouldn't call the uchuva a sweet fruit, but I definitely enjoyed a few of them in a dish with assorted berries, drizzled with arequipe (dulce de leche goodness) and sweetened condensed milk.  I guess that's kind of cheating, but don't hate.  You would have done the same (and if you wouldn't have done the same, I'm left wondering why we're even friends).


Dragonfruit

Dragonfruit. You can't see the awesome, bright yellow, spiny
outside that well in this picture, but you can imagine it (or look
it upon Google, because it's 2015).

I got one of these basically because they look cool.  That they are also delicious is a bonus.   The dragonfruit, which, according to Huffington Post, is quite good for you nutritionally, comes from a cactus.  You eat it by cutting it in half and scooping out the insides with a spoon.

The dragonfruit is also known in some places as the pitaya, but I personally prefer to eat something named after a dragon.  It makes me feel like more of a badass.

While this fruit is beautiful and delicious, it is neither as pretty
nor as delicious as the ice cream that bears its name (maracuya)!  

Maracuya


The maracuya, aka, passionfruit, is slightly more common to the American palate than the other three mentioned above, but I've never had one, and my desire to eat maracuya was inspired by ice cream, so I thought it should be on my list.

I have to warn you: fruit, while amazing, is not ice cream. Now that the disclaimer is out there, however, I will also admit that this is really good fruit. The weird seeds on the inside are encased in a skin (inside the shell) that has a bread-like texture.  I'm not sure if I'm actually supposed to be eating that part, but I don't care, because I like it.

So there.

Eat ALL the ice cream!!!

Because it's important to challenge yourself, and I'm in Guatape for awhile, and it's $0.50 per cone, I decided to eat every flavor of ice cream in one of the little shops near the square.

I've now come full circle, as there are no flavors left to try in this town.  Hopefully, I will be able to pick this up again elsewhere...

Here is a list of all the flavors I have tasted in the last two weeks:

Brownie.  This was pretty average.  Not bad, not great.  The brownie pieces were more like crumbs than chunks, and not particularly rich.  B-

Arequipe. (Colombian"dulce de leche").  Arequipe itself, in a jar or plastic container, is deadly.  Never try this because you won't be able to stop eating it.  The ice cream was just okay.  B

Chocolate.  Because chocolate.  It was rich, and decent, and satisfied a craving that day.  B

**Maracuya. This flavor reminded me of mango, but I knew it wasn't mango. I asked her the next day what it was and she said maracuya, which is passionfruit.  This was an amazing ice cream cone, and soon to be on my repeats list.  Also inspired me to try the actual fruit it is based on, which is pretty good, but not ice cream.  A+

Maracuya.  Hell yes!

Frutas Rojas.  I expected more from red fruits.  This flavor was completely and totally underwhelming.  C.

Caramelo. This was definitely one of the better flavors, but not the best.  Vanilla with swirls of caramel.  It's not like you can mess that up.  A.

Vainilla Mora. Cherry vanilla.  Good but not amazing.  B+

Ron Pasas.  Melissa ordered this one every time we got ice cream, so I was expecting it to be awesome.  As it turns out, Melissa just happens to like rum a hell of a lot more than I do.  It tastes too boozy for ice cream greatness, and the raisins were too bulky and not cold.  C-

Chocolate Almendras, with a view!

**Chocolate Almendras.  I saved the expensive ones until near the end of the experiment, because, generally, I am more likely to have $1,500 pesos in my pocket than $3,000 (which is still only about $0.95 at today's exchange rate).  This was definitely a "save the best for last" scenario.  The reason it's more expensive is because it's a Mimmo's brand flavor, and that's the good stuff around these parts.  For the record, chocolate almendras, in addition to meaning "ice cream greatness" also means vanilla ice cream with chocolate shavings and almond chunks.  A+

Nata.  This was also a Mimmo's flavor, so double the price, but unequivocally not worth the $0.95.  Nata basically means cream, and it kind of tasted like a lamer version of butterscotch to me.  My favorite thing about this cone was that some of the maracuya had been mixed in by accident.  I loved those bites.  D

Vainilla Mani.  This flavor was vanilla ice cream with teeny tiny bits of peanut in it.  For such an ordinary flavor it was mildly delicious. A pleasant surprise.  B+

Flavor profile, top to bottom: fresa, mandarina.  Also, look at
the pretty boats!

Mandarina.  This is basically orange ice cream, and it had a tiny hint of that kind of creamsicle fake orange taste that I happened to really enjoy as a child.  I ate this in a double cone with strawberry because I bought it from the expensive place that serves two flavors per cone, and also because I told Billy I'd get a double cone for him if he drank an extra beer for me.  #priorities. A.

Fresa.  Strawberry has never been my favorite ice cream flavor.  This one was pretty good, not amazing.  Tasted a little more fake than past strawberry ice creams I've had, but I enjoyed it anyway, unlike nata and frutas rojas.  B.

Not ice cream, but similar, delicious
and adorbs!

Having basically tried all this town has to offer in the ice cream department, I have two options: I can stop eating ice cream until I get to a new city (6 days), or I can just eat the chocolate almendras and maracuya until I explode.  Option B is the answer, obviously.  (You didn't honestly think I'd stop, did you?)

Bonus: coffee smoothie for $500 COP that I got with my pastry at a place called Donde Willy last weekend: Tiny, but delicious.  An A for coffee smoothie not quite ice cream effort, especially since she squirted the top with sweetened condensed milk!

A week from yesterday, I head back to Cartagena, where the goal is to find such deliciousness as sapote ice cream to take pictures of in front of scenery for my next blog post.  Until then, I'm going to go do some pushups and crunches to prepare for tomorrow's cone.  (Just kidding.  I'm gonna sit here and read my Facebook.  I had you there, though, didn't I?)