"brazil" news and stories

As it gets ready to host the 2014 soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, Rio de Janeiro is cleaning up its beaches by forbidding the sale of coconuts.

The city decreed that coconut husks, tossed aside on beaches by locals and tourists alike, are a nasty eyesore and as of Dec. 1, sale of the fruit is banned on the sand, AFP reports.

"Go on Ipanema beach at the end of the day and you'll see a mountain of coconuts that people have left on the sand. What attracts rats most to the beach are coconut husks," Jovanildo Savastano, the official in charge of the beaches, told AFP.

He said up to 30 tons of empty coconut shells are found each day.

Since writing about the Pea and Mint Soup found on an Italian blog the other day, I've been finding an endless stream of amazing food blogs from various locations around the world. This recipe for (what translates to) Cassava Cream with Crab is from the beautiful website Mixirica in Brazil, and though it is written in Portuguese, the picture itself is worth a thousand words regardless of which language you happen to speak. Again, translators, we can use your help. Please feel free to write the recipe in the comment section below.

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Not headed down to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival this year? No worries - you can still have a little taste of the Brazilian festival at home with the Caipirissima cocktail. The drink is a simple, but delicious, combination of rum, lime juice and sugar. It is a take on a cocktail called the Caipirinha, which is sometimes referred to as the national drink of Brazil and is made with a liquor called Cachaça, which is distilled from pure cane syrup.

Cachaça is just finding its way around the US and is not as easily accessible as it eventually might be, given the increasing popularity of Brazilian drinks, so the rum alternative makes getting the flavors of Brazil into your glass much easier for the time being. Use white rum, for a lighter flavor and a cleaner looking drink. You'll also need a muddle to get the full flavors out of the lime.

The recipe, after the jump, gives directions for making a martini-like cocktail, but you can simply muddle the lime and sugar at the bottom of a regular glass, top with ice, rum and lime juice, and drink it that way, too.

One of the most refreshing tropical drinks in my book is Brazil's national cocktail, the caipirinha, made from cachaça, fresh lime juice and sugar. I don't know about you, but whenever I've tasted the white spirit distilled from freshly pressed sugarcane I was always disappointed to find that it scarcely resembled a premium rum. Not that anyone said that cachaça was supposed to resemble a small-batch rum, but I always had my hopes. God knows a premium rum is a beautiful thing.

So I was quite intrigued to learn from our sister blog, Luxist, about the launch of Cabana Cachaça, a double-distilled premium cachaça. The makers of this small-batch cachaça say it has a citrus nose and a smooth, round finish. What sets it apart from other cachaças is that is double-distilled in pot stills as opposed to column stills.

Apparently the 2006 San Francisco World Spirits Competition thinks its pretty good. Cabana Cachaça took a silver medal there. I've a feeling that once I taste I'll be having it straight up instead of mixed.

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Square watermelons (and even pyramidal ones) have been around in Japan for several years, and now grocery stores in the UK will sell them, according to the Daily Mail. Tesco will start selling the melons in October for less than £5 (approximately $9), far cheaper than the cube-shaped melons usually retail for in Japan. The melons, which are shaped by the clear plastic boxes they're raised in, will be imported from Brazil.