Farmers' market inspires a fantastic lunch

Twice a week there are farmers’ markets in our neighborhood. On Thursdays it is along a tiny side street a few blocks away. Cute, simple, fresh produce and a fish monger. On Saturdays it occupies a long street on the other side of the park and includes a cheese seller, several flower stands, fresh eggs, easily 20 produce stands, a basic kitchen utensils stand, a couple cookies/crackers sellers and that same fish monger.

Anyway, today we got inspired at the market and decided to cook up a fish and shrimp mouqueca with rice and pirão.

We bought veggies, shrimp and fish fillets, plus some apple bananas and strawberries for dessert. On the way home we stopped to buy coconut milk.

Luiz and I shared counter space in the kitchen, he de-veinied the shrimp, and I chopped all the vegetables (it is usually the other way around but this time I called dibs on the vegetables). Then Luiz went to work assembling the tasty lunch in one of our stone pots.

[That tall pot filled with pink stuff is all the shrimp heads/shells and veggie scraps simmering into an intensly flavored shrimp sauce to be used later to make the pirão.  Yum!]

OMG! I love it when food tastes this great. I could have eaten three plates of the stuff. But I was disciplined and stopped after a full plate of flavorful Brazilian-style seafood wonderfulness.