It does not make a lot of sense to dream of a white christmas when in Colombia, but there are many other reasons to look forward to Christmas and New Years here in Cali. Did you know that we danced salsa on the street the whole night? Did you know that the presents here are brought by Niño Dios (little God Child)? And that Cali celebrates her big Feria de Cali between Christmas and New Years?
Although, I do have to say that our Christmas celebrations became a bit of a mix between all kinds of different traditions. Since my love is Danish, and we celebrated it with our Danish/Venezuelan neighbours and friends, and the selection at the christmas dinner table definitely reflected that:
- We ate the traditional Venezuelan Hallaca dish, which is basically corn dough stuffed with a stew of beef, pork, and chicken (or soy meat for me as a vegetarian) together with raisins, capers, olives and wedges of fowl meat. They then fold it in plantain leaves, tie it with strings, and boil it. I can tell you, this whole process took our neighbour about a day, and for several hours we had many plantain leaves drying in the sun on the terrace. But it was definitely delicious.
- Of course I had my input in the dinner as well with, if I may say so myself, a delicious Brownie bottom, cookie dough cheesecake 😉 See here for the super easy recipe in case you´re interested. I also made some quinoa cauliflower ´meat´ balls, veggie style as always of course.
- Not so much a Christmas tradition in the Netherlands, but more of a Sinterklaas (which we celebrate earlier in December) I magically still had some traditional pepernoten left to share at the Christmas dinner
- Then we finished the dinner with the Danish tradition of almond rice pudding, Risalamande, in which they hide one whole almond. The one who finds this almond wins and gets a present.
We finished the evening inside as it actually started to rain a bit, but with my cat, a guitar and some wine, fun things can still happen.
