In this article we focus on some of the top Portuguese foods and their Portuguese recipes. Traditional Portuguese cuisine is mainly based on seafood, meat(especially pork) and fish which they grill, fry or cook in casseroles or stews. Their customary side dishes are rice, simple salads and potatoes. Portugal is also well known for sweet and rich desserts. Below are top foods with recipes that you can try.

• Arrozdoce

The Portuguese are known for having a sweet tooth and their local pastry shops and bakeries are always stocked with delicious delights. Many local desserts are based on eggs and are creamy sometimes nonetheless they are sweet and rich. Enjoying desserts based on eggs after meals is quite common. Watch out for leitecrème: it is an egg custard that has a hard topping of caramel just like crèmebrûlée. Another one is the Arroz Doce which is a pudding made of rice. It can be made using condensed milk or even eggs but must always be flavored using cinnamon and lemon.

• Bacalhau

This national dish is made of salted and dried codfish which normally gets soaked in water or milk before it is cooked. Bacalhau has been a meal for Portuguese ever since their fishing boats brought this particular fish from Newfoundland in the 16th Century. This fish is so popular that it is referred to as fiel amigo (faithful friend). Bacalhau has many variations like; Bacalhau com natas (baked in cream), Bacalhau com todos (cooked with carrots, potatoes, egg and cabbage), Bacalhauà bras (stir fried with eggs, onions, shredded potatoes and black olives topping.

• Caldoverde

Soup dishes are a common addition to Portuguese meals. While bread, cold tomato and fish soups are common, Caldo Verde is the most popular. It comes from Minho Province in North Portugal. This green soup only traditionally has five ingredients ;onions, potatoes, chorizo sausage, olive oil and thin slices of kales. Not only is it cheap, it is also the best comfort food. This beloved national food is easy to find in almost every part of Portugal. This soup goes well with broa which is Portuguese cornbread that has a crusty exterior and a very soft interior.

• Catalpana De Marisco

This is a famous sea food stew which gets its name from clam shaped pot made of copper known as Catalpana. This dish was introduced by the Moors when they arrived from North Africa to Portugal in the 8th century. Catalpana is the regional dish for the Algarve. Although ingredients may vary around the country the dish normally have shellfish, white fish, chilli, red peppers and onions. All these are combined in the Catalpana then it is closed firmly before ingredients are steamed to perfection. This stew can be served with a side of fries, crusty bread or rice.

• Cozidoà Portuguesa

This rustic stew is a definite try for all meat lovers. There are many variations of this meal in the country but it commonly has; pork, beef and also an assortment of smoked sausages like; alheira, farinheira, morcela and chouriço. This meal may also consist of various bits of animal like a pig’s foot or ear with carrots, cabbage and potatoes added in it. All these ingredients should be cooked in one pot with ingredients being added at various times.

By and large, I think it's fairest to say "I didn't mind" the books we read in school. 

A few stood out as instant favorites: Shakespeare's Macbeth which, together with Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet movie (which we watched in class) laid the groundwork for my lifelong love of Shakespeare; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (which the rest of my class hated, but I instantly loved).

Some that I found OK without being enthusiastic about them still inspired me to take a closer look at their authors and discover works that I ended up liking much better -- e.g. Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers and Intrigue and Love (aka Passion and Politics), which eventually led me to his Don Carlos, which in turn became an instant favorite.

Some I rather disliked in school (at least in part, because of the way in which they were presented in class), but I reread them years later and they suddenly made a whole lot more sense -- such as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Albert Camus's The Stranger (though I still liked The Plague, which we never read in school, better), Max Frisch's Homo Faber and The Firebugs; and, perhaps most surprisingly, Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician (surprising because Mann was already a favorite author of mine at the time, so this should have been a no-brainer favorite from the start).

There were only a few books that I positively hated in school, but those I hated with enough of a vengeance never to have looked at them again -- or at anything else written by their authors: Peter Handke's Kaspar and Alfred Andersch's Sansibar.

Far and away the biggest impact on my reading preferences, though, was wielded by my final English teacher, who not only taught that Shakespeare class mentioned above and introduced me to sonnets (EBB, Shakespeare and otherwise), but who also gave me a copy of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park as a gift ... and thus inspired yet another one of my most lasting instances of book fandom -- because come on, if you fall in love with Austen's writing when reading Mansfield Park, everything else is just bound to fall into place completely naturally.

(Task: Did you love or hate the books you had to read for school?  Looking back, which ones (good or bad) stand out to you the most?)

For more reviews, check out my blog: Craft-Cycle

I really enjoyed this lovely collection of poems. Despite its age, so many of the emotions expressed still resonate today. The language used is phenomenal and the descriptions overall have the power to inspire the reader. I especially enjoyed Browning's pacing and rhyme schemes. A wonderful book of poetry.

I wasn't planning to write a review of this book, but since I already voiced off in a PM, I might as well copy my thoughts into a post after all.

Long story short, I'm finding, once again, that a combination of art- and purposefully deconstructed speach and a virtually plotless description of drab lives -- or A drab life -- just isn't my kind of thing. Fortunately it's a short book -- picked deliberately because I had a premonition Lispector and I wouldn't get along -- but all the time while I was listening all I could think was, "OMG, and this is what they preferred to Barbara Pym in the 1970s ..."

There were moments when I thought, if only my Portuguese were sufficiently up to snuff for me to be able to read this in the original; maybe I'd be able to pick up on some note or subtext that just got lost in translation.  But if the translator's afterword is to be believed, the reverse seems to be true -- according to him, while people with only a limited understanding of Portuguese may actually be able to make some rudimentary sense of the book, it's a seven-times-sealed box to the average Portuguese mother tongue speaker.  This has to be the first time I'm hearing it's actually harmful rather than helpful to be fluent in a given language in order to be able to understand a book written in it. 

(The translator, who also wrote a biography of Lispector, goes on to describe that the original passages from her works that he quoted in his biography did not pass the muster of several copy editors in the Portuguese edition of that biography ... they all insisted on "amending" what they believed to be his own (flawed) sentence structure and punctuation.  So, he tells us, much to Lispector's fury also did the French translator of Lispector's very first book, in an attempt to make the book more palatable to French readers.)

And if Lispector's prose is, though no doubt highly artistic, also so construed and littered with sentences devoid of any meaning as to make it impossible to follow (especially in the first roughly 1/3 of this book), the audio narration made it even worse. Note to self: If encountering Melissa Broder ever again, run, don't walk away. Obnoxiously squaky, reading as if by rote, and with no sense of intonation -- and also clearly zero feeling for the text she was reading (which is partly down to Lispector herself ... but not entirely).  I was seriously tempted to DNF and quite honestly only finished listening to it in order to be able to check off Brazil on my world reading map chart -- though I do hope I'll find a better representative of Brazilian literature after all.  (Hopefully even a woman writer: I'm currently looking at Dora Doralina by Rachel de Queiroz, which MR reviewed a while ago IIRC, as well as Lygia Fagundes Telles, and, on BT's recommendation, Patrícia Rehder Galvão.  Further recs most definitely welcome.)

If Hölderlin did it why can’t I do it too? Here it goes:

Yes, we need some good poets
And I think we all know it’s
Something we’re lacking….
My mind I am fracking
But still failing to see
how wishing makes it be.
They fuckitup,
We suckitup.

When I was young, appendectomy was done under local anaesthesia. I was so afraid, I might end up in a situation like that, that I memorised some of Hölderlin's poems in a Portuguese translation by Paulo Quintela, as ways of coping with my fear. I never had an appendectomy as a child, but I still recite in my mind some of those long ago learned Hölderlin's poems when I have to sit in a dentist's chair...

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.