Cuban Menu

I saw a cuban cookbook in a store today and laughed.

We had heard that the food wasn't very good in Cuba. It is good (in our opinion), it's just very, very limited.

For breakfast, we eat white bread with butter, sometimes accompanied by eggs, jam and/or cheese (usually goat cheese - yuck!). There is usually a plate of fruit as well, sometimes just bananas and sometimes (on a good day), an array of tropical fruits including pineapple, papaya, mango, and starfruit. There is also always coffee with milk and lots of sugar.

For lunch, we eat what we can find in the small stores in cities. This always involves white bread (it's always nice, fresh bread, but it feels like an awful lot of white bread!), with butter, honey and/or jam (but we just found a jar of peanut butter that we are VERY excited about!).

Dinner is always a choice of meat (usually pork, fish or chicken), with rice, more white bread, and salad. Salad is usually avocadoes. Sometimes with cucumber or cabbage, but NEVER includes lettuce.

The other lunch or dinner option in cities is pizza. At 5 cents each for a 6-incher, it's hard to go wrong at a street-side pizza vendor. At a pizza restaurant, the pizzas are a little bigger and the selection a little better, but it is still just a choice of meat to add to your basic cheese pizza and never includes vegetables of any kind. Delicious, but not exactly nutritious...

Pure fruit juices are a real treat and we find them sometimes in small shops on the side of the road when we ride through towns.

All in all, decent biking food, though I sure do look forward to a big spinach salad when I get home!!

Christine