My Five Favorite Foods in San Juan

Puerto Rico fully merits the name "Isla del encanto."  I love the rainforest, the beach, and all the rest of the lovely island, but what really gets me excited about visiting is the food.  It is seriously some of the best on the planet.  If you go to San Juan, here are a few things you must try:

1. Mallorcas and coffee from La Bombonera.  The coffee is fabulous, and incredibly inexpensive.  The mallorcas are a sweet roll (like a cinnamon roll without the cinnamon), drenched in butter, pan toasted and sprinkled with powdered sugar.  Melt in our mouth yumminess like you wouldn't believe.  My five year old remembered these from a whole year ago and couldn't wait to go back.

Mom, please don't interrupt my blissful munching for a pic.

2.  Quesitos con guayaba.  A flaky croissant, filled with a combination of sweet cream cheese and tangy guava.  I would include a pic, but they seem to get gobbled up before I have time to pull out my phone.  Yeah, they are that good!  My favorites are from the Repostería España in Isla Verde.

3.  Mofongo.  This is the ultimate comfort food.  Take buttery, garlic-smashed plantains, add your favorite meat (mine is churrasco--flank steak--but the chicken and fish are delicious, too).  Soak it all with an amazing salsa criolla of tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro and sweet peppers.  This is like steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, island-style.  Heaven.  You can find mofongo everywhere, but the perfect ratio of sauce to meat to plantains, IMO, is at Barrachina in Old San Juan.  The meat and plantains are both tender, and the flavor is rich and satisfying.

4.  If you are at Barrachina, you must have a piña colada.  This is the restaurant where they were invented!   You won't be disappointed.  It is the perfect balance of sweet, creamy coconut and refreshing pineapple.  A bonus--little ones with you get their own sample size virgin versions.  :)

Can you see that creamy goodness at the bottom of the plate?

5.  Pastel de tres leches.  If you are a cookie-dunker or you like ice cream on your cake, this one is for you.  Take a delicious, rich cake, then soak it in three milks, and you wind up with an incredibly moist (like dripping!) cake.  It tastes like cake that has been sitting in melted vanilla ice cream.  Yum!  If you are looking for the very best, check out Metropol, a Cuban restaurant in Isla Verde.  The mofongo is very good there, the beans and rice are out of this world, and their pastel de tres leches blows the rest of them away.


I haven't even mentioned that across the street from our hotel is Piu Bello, a gelato shop that we visit at least once a day.  My favorite is their coquito gelato, a fabulously decadent combination of coconut and rum.  However, I haven't had a flavor that I didn't like.  The blood orange is excellent, the limón is the best I have tried, they have nutella gelato with chocolate cookies crushed into it...  If I can gather enough evidence, I just might give it its own post... ;)

As you can guess, the reason I haven't been online too much the last week or so is because I have been stuffing my face researching some of the best foods that San Juan has to offer.  I will continue each day to seek out more yumminess for me you.  Wish you were here to share a cup of extraordinarily good Puerto Rican coffee and some yummy snacks with me!

Aventuras Boricuas

We have been having such an awesome time in Puerto Rico! I admit, I was a bit apprehensive about taking a ten day old baby on a trip out of the country, but the idea of staying home with all four kidlets *without* Carlos was far more frightening. It has worked out so much better than I anticipated!

Amaya is thriving. She is wearing all 6 month clothing, size 2 diapers, and is bigger than a two-month-old here at the hotel! Her cheeks are fully inflated again. :D Amazingly, she is sleeping through the night! The other kids didn't do that for months (or years). I'm getting more sleep than I did before she was born!

I remember sharing with Heather during labor a comment I had heard about giving birth naturally along the lines that birth without meds got the pain out of the way before the baby was there and that birth with meds was less painful during labor, but had a longer and more painful recovery. That has certainly been my experience. I've felt great, even on our very active days. Today I carried Elena up and down the streets of Old San Juan without a second thought. To be sure, she only weighs about ten pounds more than Amaya, but it was still cool.

Our days have been full of fabulous food, interesting excursions, swimming and relaxing. I've feasted on quesitos con guayaba (amazing pastries filled with cream cheese and guava), mallorcas from La Bombonera, mofongo and the incredibly decadent Cuatro Leches cake from Barrachina, all washed down with Puertorrican coffee. We went to the Yunque and the kidlets hiked the rainforest and played in the waterfall. We've explored El Morro, a fortresss from Colonial times, and shopped in the largest mall in the Caribbean. The kids have drunk fresh coconuts from the beach and been all over the cobblestone streets of Old San Juan. They have made friends with the wonderful students who joined us this year and Ariana woke up one morning eager to tell me about "the best dream ever" with all of her new friends. :)

Thankfully, we've never had to deal with the sibling rivalry scenario where the older child is mean to the baby. Still, I could tell that Elena was feeling a little lost the first few days after Amaya was born. She would start crying for no apparent reason. So I held her close and began singing her favorite little baby song from Yo Gabba Gabba, and she just burst into tears and held me as tightly as she could. It was so clear that she needed to still be our baby, too. Having Carlos give her lots of undivided attention (or hold the baby while I do) has been wonderful. She has been in a good mood pretty much the whole trip!

The weather has been about fifteen degrees cooler than home, which is really nice. It has rained nearly every day, but we love rain so that hasn't been a disappointment. We've had enough sunshine to enjoy the beach. :) Another nice surprise is that we get to go to Ponce, an excursion that we hadn't originally planned. We have family there and are excited about getting to see them.

I had expected this trip to be a lot more stressful, but it is very nice to be wrong!

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

Puerto Rico has been amazing! We are already excited about next year. So far, nearly all that we have seen has been beautiful, so there isn't much ugly, but here is the breakdown for the other categories:

The Good: The hotel. It is really nice, and the staff is super-friendly. The kids love the pool and hot tub, we have a nice king bed and the AC is very strong. The weather. It is about 15 degrees cooler here than it is at home. Nice breezes. Just warm enough to appreciate the beach. The food. Oh, the food. Mofongo, which is the ultimate comfort food. It is mashed yucca or plantains with garlic, filled with your choice of steak, chicken or seafood, and topped with an awesome criollo sauce. As a kid, I adored mashed potatoes with lots of gravy and roast beef--this is similar, but even better. The coffee--what more needs to be said? Dairy-free passion fruit sorbet. MMmmmmmmmmm. The adventure: today the kids hiked through the rainforest (el Yunque) and swam in waterfalls. They love the beach and were begging to live here forever.

The Bad: All three kids have had hives and an assortment of other allergic reactions, part of the hazards of eating out every meal with their allergies. Elena has been a little congested, and vomited 8 times today. :( We were on a twisty road, and we are hoping that it was just motion sickness. With the activities during the day and lectures or exams in the evenings, as well as the numbers in our group and the culture here, dinner doesn't finish till late. Last night, we got in around 11:00PM. And naps are impossible. So, we have some exhausted little kidlets, and it is hard to help them get all the rest that they need. They've coped well with all the changes, but are very sad that Carlos has been sleeping in the sofa bed because of the lack of room. They are very concerned that he might be sad or lonely or scared. Joelito talks about it every night. He came up with a solution, though: We need to turn the TV to Iron Man, and then, we can break the glass so that Iron Man can come out of the TV and protect Daddy! :)

The Beautiful: Everything, really. There are flowers everywhere, the gorgeous water. The smiles on the faces of the kids. The old forts, hundreds of years old (the US is such a young country). Inside the Capitol building here, they have gorgeous mosaics on the ceiling of women personifying Wisdom, Health, Justice, etc. Most of them are bountifully endowed and topless. Joel looked up and his mouth dropped open, and he said, "Mami, I bet they could give me LOTS of leche!" Last night, he offered to nurse Elena, but warned her that his leche (breasts and milk are interchangeable in his mind) was very small, "like a mouse. Or more like a pebble. Not much would come out." She declined.

We have several days left here, much to our delight, and then several days at Disneyworld. Wonderful fun, and I am so, so grateful for the opportunities, but it will be nice to be home again, too.