Brazil Unit

Hi, Future Ticia 2023 here, we went back and studied Brazil again in high school and it was a more thorough study, since it wasn’t just cooking lots of food. So, I’m combining the two posts to create one uber Brazil unit that is perfect for your geography lessons. And of course, you can find all the countries in our South America Unit.

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Back to 2012 Ticia:

I have to admit I went into this trip for cooking around the world mainly knowing about Brazilian food from going to Fogo de Chao’s, which means my impression of Brazilian food is it involves lots of meat, yummy bread, and delicious cheese.  So I did some research and found a few ideas I thought would work for my family. It was a fun bit of a geography lesson for me.

First the main dish: Churrasquinhos

Churrasquinhos

(loosely based on the recipe above)

• about 2 pounds of steak
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• a generous sprinkling of basil citrus rub (Superman got a little enthusiastic)
• half of a minced onion
• 3 cloves garlic minced
• salt and pepper

• Chop your onion into quarters, and then mince it.  I used a food chopper, and we chopped that thing into itty bitty pieces and then scraped the juice and those miniscule pieces into a Ziploc bag.
• Cut up your steak into 1 inch cubes.
• Get a spoonful of garlic and add it to the ziploc bag. Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil to your bag. Add your citrus rub seasonings to the marinade.
• Shake that bag of marinade so fast the camera can’t see what you’re doing.  Let marinade for an hour.
• If you’re not suddenly short on time, make it into shish-ka-bobs and grill it.  We however got home late for dinner, so we pan-fried it with a little bit of oil on high.

SIDE DISHES: homemade potato chips and pao de queijo

A popular side dish in Brazil is homemade potato chips, so we made some.

Superman helped me peel and cut the potato into chip-sized pieces, then we cooked them in a deep fryer.  If you don’t have one, pour some olive oil into a pan and that will cook them as well.  When they’re done to your level of crispiness take it out and sprinkle them with salt.

Pao de Queijo

• And this would be where my natural bent went wrong………  Sometimes you do need to follow the recipe, and I ……  didn’t.
• 1 cup milk
• 1/4 cup oil or butter
• salt
• Yuca (cassava) flour 1 pound (and that would be where I went wrong)
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup parmesan cheese (I mixed in manchego with it, waste of some good cheese it was)

• 1.  Add the milk and oil together, and stir as it comes to a boil.  Make sure to make funny faces as you add in the oil, that adds to the charm.
• Slowly stir in the flour after removing it from the heat.  Again cheesy faces are a big help to this.
• Add in the eggs.  Once the eggs are fully added in, then add the cheese.  At this point, it might be easier to mix with your hands.
• Make little balls of the dough and bake in the oven 15-20 minutes at 375.
• Carefully watch your oven to see what is happening.  Eventually, get bored and wander off to torment your sister.  Take it out of the oven and put in a basket to serve when golden.

Dish up and enjoy!

Future Ticia 2023 is wildly amused because today, when I’m checking on this post I had some of this cheese bread at a farmer’s market, and still love the flavoring so much.

The meat and the chips got two enthusiastic thumbs up.  There was nothing left and the boys were not so subtly hinting they wanted more.  Because of my flour mistake, the bread wasn’t as enthusiastically eaten.

Brazil Unit notebooking pages

Back to Future Ticia 2023, we filled out our South America notebooking pages.

Brazil is obviously early in the alphabet, so I didn’t have quite as many fun facts as I do later in the alphabet:

• The capital used to be Rio de Janeiro
• They have a flooded desert! How?
• Brazil has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan, I’m really curious about that one
• There are theoretically 80 uncontacted tribes in Amazon

Sigh, now I really want to make the pao de quejo bread again, seriously it is an amazing bread.

More great learning fun

• Age of Exploration Unit
• Beauty and the Beast Book Club
• California Unit
• How to write a research paper
• How do stomach acids work

First published November 5, 2012

Gustavo Facci from Argentina, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons