Chacao Market (or Electrolysis for Pigs)

Last Saturday one of our friends here took us to the Chacao Market which is a pseudo indoor market for meats, cheese and produce. I really wanted to take a lot of pictures but I was a little paranoid about sticking out like a tourist. It wasn't in the best neighborhood and it's just better to keep a low profile in these situations. I did take a quick video posted below.

It's your typical latin farmer's market with everything you can think of. The boys didn't like it at all and for the majority of the time they were trying really hard not to gag. The smell was pretty intense I must admit but the produce and prices were better than anything that was available at the grocery store. Kris and I actually enjoyed ourselves, we found some great cheese that tasted similar to Monterey Jack and another similar to parmesean. In this place that's a major find since cheese is scarce and expensive unless you buy the farmer's style cheese but we don't like it enough to put it over pasta or crumble it over tacos. We bought lots of mangoes, grapes, passionfruit, tomatoes, bananas, little stubby bananas, eggplant, huge avocados and I forget what else.

We also found a Brazilian butcher (I overheard him speaking to another guy in Portuguese so I asked if he was from Brazil and he was). I asked him if he had any sausage that was anything like linguiça (Brazilian sausage) and he told me he had just the thing. Well, he must have been mistaken because when we got home and prepped it for feijoada (Brazilian black beans and rice) it wasn't even close and it was rather disgusting. It made the house smell like B.O. and musty towels. We tossed it out and ordered pizza until I could get something else. When I say it wasn't anything like linguiça I mean it was full of big chunks of onion and what looked like rolled up herbs of some sort with very little in the way of meat product. At least this sausage (as revolting as it was) was better than the last package of chorizo (another spicy sausage) I bought from the grocery store that was full of WISKERS.....WISKERS!!!!!!! Not just a few either, bristly hairs, some dark, some lighter but just all over inside the chorizo...that means they used the skin! EWWWWWWWWWW! Lesson learned...don't buy sausage here unless it says Hillshire Farms or Jimmy Dean and just suck it up and pay the price listed.