How we Eat

Now that we're no longer feeding off the hostel breakfast and going out to eat as a way of checking out our surroundings, this is how we eat:

Breakfast
At a restaurant, hostel, and supposedly at home, the typical Ecuadorian breakfast is as follows:
Tea/Coffee
Juice
Several pieces of bread w/butter and marmalade

If you want more than that, you'll probably be ordering the Desayuno Americano, American Breakfast. It usually comes with eggs and meat.

We eat breakfast at home since it's cheaper and have a variation of the Ecuadorian breakfast.
Tea/coffee
Bread w/butter/marmalade/honey
& a piece of fruit. Usually banana or mango

Lunch
Lunch is the best. It is the biggest meal of the day for most Ecuadorians, and we read that most people go out for lunch since it's the cheapest way to get it. We always go out for lunch ourselves.

Our main spots serve lunch for 1.50 - but for a nicer dining area, and slightly better flavor you might pay as much as 2.50.

Lunch usually comes with an appetizer, popcorn, dried platanos (big, starchy bananas), and spicy, watery salsa.

It always includes hot soup (we don't go when places serve cold soup which is called ceviche). The soup is either split pea, random vegetables, or potato onion. Sometimes there is chicken or pork skin in it. Bert says it's good, and I spoon mine over to his bowl.

The main course is always a serving of rice, various protein (fish, chicken, spiced beef in sauce), and some kind of vegetable. The vegetable is either beets and carrots, lettuce and onion, or some variety of beans.

Lunch also comes with a glass of juice. The juice might be cantaloupe, watermelon, banana, pineapple, fruit punch with fruit pieces in it, naranjillo (which is a sour type of orange, and makes better juice than anything I've ever had), along with several other varieties that we have yet to identify.

Dinner

Most Ecuadorians eat dinner late, 8 or 9 pm is not uncommon. Unless we're craving pizza, we eat dinner at home. Going to the local market, we get two days worth of dinner vegetables for about 1.50. So it's either pizza bread (yes, we have a pizza problem), tuna melt, or rice and whatever we have - veggies, beans, cheese, and/or fish - all of it spiced with the hottest hot sauce we know of.