Category Archives: daily food project 2012

It’s a bit of a shock to the system to be back in cold and grey Manchester after the (mostly) gorgeous sunshine of Cuba but it’s always good to be home!

We had a great time and I took masses of pictures which I’ve just started to work through but what I did manage to do which I was very pleased with was stick to my Food Daily project and did indeed shoot some food every single day.  Being Cuba which doesn’t exactly have a reputation for the best food in the Carribean there is a certain similarity to the pictures, but some have a story behind the uninspiring appearance and I’ll start to post them now, in batches of a few at a time.

Daily Food 11/365

We (mum and I) were finally on the plane to Havana for the holiday which had been booked way back in August last year!  We travel together very often and never eat airline food and it’s become a bit of a tradition that mum always makes our food for the plane and usually for the airport too if it’s an early flight, but this was a very civilized lunchtime flight and we’d had a good breakfast at the hotel at Gatwick where we had stayed the previous night.  This picture is our lunch which consisted of bagels with smoked salmon (bought from home, frozen, the day before) a bag of rocket, spinach and watercress from M&S at the airport, a nice gin and tonic from Virgin Airlines and lemon from home.  All very tasty and certainly smelled much better than the hot food served up  to the rest of the plane.  We were convinced that this would be the last edible thing we’d see for the next 10 days as our expectations of food in Cuba were pretty low, but as the following photos show, we didn’t do too badly!

Daily Food 12/365

I know that this is a lousy picture, but it was really spectacular hot chocolate!  It was our first day in Havana and we headed straight into the old town and one of the places we had marked to see was the Museum of Chocolate.  Not so much of a museum, more of a cafe with some display cases containing chocolate making paraphernalia, a small shop area which was thronged with school kids buying individual chocolates in a massive range of shapes and an open area at the back where the chocolates were being made.  The smell was the first thing which hit us, rich and sweet and delicious and then the gloriously cool air conditioning.  We both had the ‘regular’ hot chocolate which was utterly divine, rich, not too sweet and hot, served with two very nice and slightly spicy biscuits.  Drinking hot chocolate did seem a bit contrary in the midday heat of Havana, but it certainly revived us and gave us the boost we needed to carry on for the rest of the afternoon.

Daily Food 13/365

On our second day in Havana we started out at the spectacular Necropolis Cristobel Colon in the area of Vedado.  It covers an epic 56 hectares and is a vision of white marble, laid out like a mini city with a very well organized grid design with narrow roads running throughout.  There are a million people buried here, from the average general citizen to the movers and shakers and history makers of Havana.  We wandered around for a couple of hours before catching a cab (an ancient Ford Zephyr with a Lada engine as we were informed by it’s proud owner/driver) further into Vedado by the Museum of Decorative Arts and walking from there.  Back to the photo.  It’s a relatively new thing in Cuba that farmers markets have been allowed, they are called Agropecuarios where farmers can sell their surplus products after selling a set quota to the state.  You can find good fresh, raw food and sometimes there’s a cafe selling rice, beans and pork but even better you can shop in Cuban pesos rather then the tourist CUCs.  We didn’t have any Cuban pesos but paid in CUCs and got pesos as change and you can get an awful lot of fruit and veg for your pesos.  As we were walking we didn’t want to cart too much with us, just something for a lunch along with the oatcakes, nuts and dried fruit we had with us for emergency non-edible food situations.  So we bought some lovely tomatoes and some of the small, sweet bananas we had become familiar with at our breakfasts in the morning.  The sellers were very friendly and spoke as little English as we did Spanish, but it all worked out and it was good for them to have our CUCs as they are worth a lot to a Cuban.  We also found some lovely nut brittle on a stall with nougat and honey, but there were too sticky to carry with us!  We walked on and on and on heading towards the famous Hotel Nacional where we made ourselves comfortable at the welcomingly breezy garden bar with a sea view and revived with a couple of mojitos (you can see mine at the top of the photo).  The tomatoes and bananas were delicious as we furtively ate them along with our own supplies and it all made a very good lunch.