What I Ate in Costa Rica

For “What I Ate Wednesday,” I’d like to share some of the meals I had during my recent trip to Costa Rica. The food tended to be simple, healthy, and flavorful, featuring a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Breakfast

A typical Costa Rican breakfast featured rice and beans (pinto gallo) with eggs and toast. A slice of cheese would also often be included.

Huevos chilenos

Lunch

A typical lunch choice found everywhere was a casado, which translates to “married man.” It was the traditional meal that married men would be served at home. The basic ingredients would be rice and beans, salad, and a choice of chicken or fish. There would often also be plantains and corn tortillas, as well as a variety of vegetables and a slice of white cheese.

This lunch at the Don Juan Educational Farm included salad, corn, papaya root, plantain, yucca chips, talapia, rice, and beans. Almost all the ingredients came from the farm.

This lunch at a coffee plantation tour, El Trapiche, featured chicken, potato, beans, salad, squash, corn tortillas, breaded green beans, cheese, and rice.

A simple casado of chicken, salad, beans, and rice

Dinner

If I had a big lunch, a nice light dinner that was widely available was ceviche, fish or different types of seafood pickled in lime juice.

Ceviche

A wide variety of foods were available for dinner, including a lot of seafood.

Whole Red Snapper with Salad and Fries (and an Imperial, a Costa Rican beer)

Chicken Curry Crepe

Snacks and Drinks

At one hotel, I saw a man grinding fresh corn and a woman cooking chorreadas, a Costa Rican corn pancake. They were gracious enough to let me take their picture as I tried to speak to them in my few basic phrases of Spanish. They then brought a delicious one over for me to try, hot from the griddle.

Chorreadas at Hotel El Atardecer in Monteverde, Costa Rica

Coffee is grown in Costa Rica, and it was delicious.

Coffee and coffee beans

Latte frio

Sugar cane is grown in Costa Rica also. In the above picture, a guide is using a machete to cut my group pieces of sugar cane to chew as a snack.

We also had a beverage made from sugar cane. In the above picture, people are pressing sugar cane to get the juice out. We then had a drink of fresh sugar cane juice with guaro, a liquor made from sugar cane.

The Food Traveler’s Handbook

You may also like:

• What I Ate in Greece
• Slow Food and the Hunger Challenge
• 5 Great Vegetarian Recipes

Costa Rica posts:

• Pura Vida! Traveling Alone to Costa Rica
• Whitewater River Rafting on the Rio Balsa
• Rappelling Down a Waterfall
• Catamaran Sunset Cruise of Doom
• Zip Lining Like Superman Up in the Clouds
• The Week of Man: What Happens When Mom Goes Away?

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