Fire the Coach!

Brazil is in the early days of a general election and everything has just been turned upside down by the tragic death of one of the presidential candidates. The neighboring states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais are in a Water War over the few drops left in the Paraíba do Sul River basin due to the worst drought in 70 years, and no authority has yet had the guts to mention rationing. An Ebola outbreak in several African countries threatens to explode into a world-wide epidemic, if it hasn’t already. There are wars brewing and/or ongoing in the Gaza Strip, the Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan — so believe me, I do know that there are many important issues to discuss these days. But I find myself bogged down in the last dregs of the World Cup, trying to understand why — even after the embarrassing display put on by the Brazilian soccer team — Brazil’s soccer commission thinks that the solution to the problem was to fire the coach.

I’ve seen this for all 12 of the years I’ve lived in Brazil. Doesn’t matter if it’s the national Seleção, as they’re called, or one of the state A teams, or even a state B team. If you’ve had a bad soccer season, what do you do? You fire the coach. And sometimes, you dump the whole technical team as well. I think what I find most astonishing is that nobody here questions the move. For Brazilians, it seems to be the obvious answer. But for me, coming from an upbringing of "it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game," firing the coach seems terribly knee-jerky. It’s like changing accessories on a dress that doesn’t fit — change the belt, change the buttons, change a scarf or change shoes — the dress is still not going to fit.

As far as I can remember, if one of the baseball leagues in the States had a bad season, they just had a bad season. Period. And it’s not that managers don’t move around from one team to another, they do. But constantly? Hardly. Lou Piniella was manager of the New York Yankees for three years, win or lose, and of the Seattle Mariners for 10 years before that, win or lose. Mike Scioscia managed the Los Angeles Angels for 14 years, win or lose. And that’s just to name two major league managers. How many coaches have I seen lead the Brazilian Seleção in 12 years? I’ve seen four coaches (Felipão, Carlos Alberto Parreira, Dunga and Mano Menezes) be moved around six times, as if they were peas in a shell game.

Look, as the entire world now knows, Brazil has a serious problem with its Seleção, one that goes far, far deeper than the coaching level. Even if they kept the same coach for more than two or three years they probably still wouldn’t have a coherent, winning team. But there may be a lesson to be learned from Brazil’s two screamingly successful volleyball teams. The male volleyball team has been led for the past 13 years by Bernardo Rocha de Rezende, or Bernardhino, and they have 26 international wins to their credit. The female volleyball team has been led for 11 years by José Roberto Lages Guimarães, or Zé Roberto, with 24 international wins. Given the number of years each team has played together under each coach, you can imagine the bonds they have forged, the closeness, the respect they all have for each other, win or lose. Would that the soccer powers-that-be could pay a little more attention to one of the criteria that makes a winning team.

Bernardhino, boy's coach

Zé Roberto, girl's coach

Dining Areas

"Where shall we sit tonight?" is not usually among the questions a couple or a family put to each other when they’re eating at home. Much more likely they ask, "What shall we have for dinner?" or "White or red?" or "Stay in or go out?" As for where you sit, well, what are the usual choices? The kitchen table is fine for informal meals. For a holiday, or company dinner, you move to the dining room. And for those summer barbecues, a backyard picnic table is the answer. At least this was my experience growing up in suburban America.





The first apartment I rented after college was an Upper East Side L-shaped studio. Best, if not only, solution to the dining table problem in that small space was the drop leaf table shown in this picture.












From there I graduated to a larger space in Hoboken, NJ, where I had my drop leaf table in the kitchen. Here, at least, I had room to open the table up for five or six people, something I was never able to do in the studio!









And when I moved to a Hoboken condo, the table came with me, and took its place in the living room’s so-called "dining area."















After I met and married Mark, I knew it was time to ditch the drop leaf and do something worthy of a Manhattan loft. We decided to set the dining space up as in a restaurant, with three tables, six chairs and a set of genuine restaurant tablecloths. And, even when we had dinner guests, we kept the tables apart, just as in a restaurant. Some people thought we were nutty, but I think most people got it.





You might have noticed that in each of my last four apartments, unlike the suburban house I grew up in, there was one place, and one place only, to eat one’s meals. Búzios has been different and disorienting. Here we’ve wound up with five — count them, five — distinct places to eat our meals. So, "Where shall we sit tonight?" is a real question, and a compelling one.





This "formal" dining room table was where Mark and I ate most of our meals when we first came here. Took us a while to understand that in Búzios you eat outdoors whenever possible. You eat inside only if it’s too chilly, too rainy, or too windy to eat outside.











So now we always, always gravitate to the veranda table, particularly if we have guests. Day or night, it’s the most pleasant place to dine.

But if it’s just the two of us, or only one or two people are coming in the late afternoon, we move down to the terrace. Not in the summer, mind you, when it’s too hot. But this is the right choice in our so-called winter, when there’s enough sun to keep us warm in the winter breeze.










Let’s see — maybe it’s late, or the weather isn’t cooperating. Mark and I (with room for one or two more) park ourselves at what we call "the Hugo table," a table we inherited from a friend who now sits at that grand dining table in the sky.








And for very informal meals, or an occasional breakfast, we like to sit at what we call "the breakfast bar," with room for up to three (plus one standee).






And if Mark and I manage to put a table and chairs down in our quintal (July 28, 2014 post), my goodness, then we’ll have six distinct dining areas. I feel like the Queen of England.

Tapioca

Years ago, at a hotel breakfast in Recife, state of Pernambuco, I was offered tapioca as an alternative to eggs, and I declined. All I could think of was the tapioca pudding of my youth and, frankly, that flavor was never my favorite. (Give me butterscotch anytime.) But slowly, slowly I came to understand that tapioca here is so much more than that sad-looking glop sitting on the trays in the school cafeteria. Tapioca here, made from manioc (or yuca, or cassava — there are many names), is amazingly versatile. It comes in flour, in sticks, in flakes and in pearls, and it can be made into a variety of breads, puddings and porridges. Tapioca flour is the basis for the ubiquitous Brazilian cheese bread, or pão de queijo, and a mashed bean dish called tutu de feijão, both of which I’ve been eating and enjoying for years.

pão de queijo

tutu de feijão

tapioca pudding, brazilian-style

But the tapioca I was offered — and that I declined — was the grainy "pancake" that is most identified with Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, and that even many Brazilians outside of that state don’t know. It was only a few months ago, after a restaurant called Macaxeira — with the sign "Tapioca is our specialty!" — opened near us, that I finally tasted my first tapioca. I thought it was boring and bland and fairly pricey for what they offered. What’s the big deal? I thought. Then a friend of mine suggested with her wise smile that I try again, this time from one of the two street vendors here in town (if tapioca is known at all, it’s known as a street food). I couldn’t believe how good it was!

The tapioca cart in the center of town

Hurry, just a couple of bags left!

Then began the saga of our learning how to make tapioca at home, which included knowing what kind of flour to buy and where to find it. Again, not an easy task outside of Pernambuco. We learned that the special tapioca flour we needed was ready-made goma, but initial searches of the Búzios market shelves turned up empty. But we persisted, we asked around, and we finally found it in the one Búzios market that stocks it, Extra Supermarket (but even then it's hidden away in a corner of the store on a bottom shelf, as you can see from this picture).

Tapioca is absolutely the easiest thing to prepare, it’s good for breakfast, lunch, dinner and/or dessert. You can put anything, anything at all, in it or on it. Think crêpe, think tortilla, think arepa, think injera, think lavash — think tapioca! I don’t know if you can find the tapioca goma in the United States, or in Europe, or wherever you might be reading this, but if you do, here are the five easy steps:

1. Heat a small, teflon pan. You can put a little butter in the pan, or not.




2. Pour in about a half-cup of goma, or more, or less. (There are no rules.) Start spreading it out with a spoon until if flattens into a disk. It will start to "glue" together quickly.






3. Add your filling on one half of the disk. Hear we're doing banana with cinnamon.








           
       4. Fold the empty half over the filled half.







5. Serve.  (It does taste better, however, if you dish the dish and eat it with your hands.)






Here are some suggested fillings, but feel free to go wild:

For breakfast — plain butter, jelly, butter and cheese, just cheese, banana, banana with or without powdered cinnamon, any other fruit you want, scramble or fry or poach an egg, pour maple syrup on it, or honey, some fried bacon, or incorporate whatever you usually have for breakfast into the tapioca . . .

Lunch/Dinner — ham and cheese, other lunch meats or cooked leftover meats, strips of chicken, chicken salad, tuna salad, egg salad, make a BLT, tomato with mozzarella and oregano, roasted vegetables . . .

Dessert — chocolate sauce, nutella, doce de leite (dulce de leche up there in the States), shaved coconut, nuts, caramelized fruits, butterscotch sauce, whipped cream, ice cream, fruit syrups . . .

(Oh, and for those who care, tapioca goma is gluten-free!)

Festival Gastronômico

Voltaire, in the toque & beard, voted Best Chef Sensation

In about our second, or maybe third, year in Búzios, the powers that be decided to resurrect a once popular, but then-defunct, event called Degusta Búzios (Taste Búzios), a gastronomic festival designed, among other things, to spur tourism in the low season. Participating restaurants would prepare small portions of either an appetizer, main course or dessert, and offer them at promotional prices for people to get a little taste of what the chef could do, and maybe like it enough to return to the restaurant for a real meal. (To give you an idea, appetizers and desserts cost a mere R$5, about $1.50 at the time, and main courses R$10, about $2.90. At those prices, a person could really go to town!) Event organizers even held competitions, you know the type, Best Chef, Best New Chef Sensation, Best Appetizer, Best Main Course, Best Dessert, Best Presentation, and there was probably even a Miss Congeniality in there somewhere.

Well, I remember going to that first (for us) tasting treat. Now called simply the Festival Gastronômico, the event was, and still is, held in July, when there’s enough of a nip in the air for me to wear my still chic (I hope) men’s tuxedo jacket over jeans, with my gorgeous YSL scarf thrown around my shoulders in that studied-yet-casual way that I learned from watching Catherine Deneuve movies. (You can take the girl out of the city, etc.) The event took place in a fairly contained area in the center of town, so it was really easy to stroll from restaurant to restaurant, tasting, enjoying, talking to the chefs, meeting old friends; in those years the festival was not very well publicized and it really was just a great big private party for Búzios residents.

A glimpse of the 2014 version

But then, as inevitably happens, the festival got taken over by an outside event consultant, and the town’s business community saw a great opportunity to make money. Hotel restaurants got into the act, as did people who merely have informal catering businesses. The number of participants increased three-fold, better publicity brought in thousands of tourists and visitors from neighboring cities, and the festival spread to four distinct areas of town; strolling was out, need for transportation was in. Promotional pricing? Out the window. Instead of the R$5 and R$10 of previous festivals, we were now confronting R$10 (now $4.50) and R$15 ($6.80). For those of us who in the past enjoyed tasting many dishes, this actually made a difference. Say you tasted four appetizers, five main courses and two desserts at the earlier festivals. That would set you back a mere R$80, or $24. The tightwads among us now had to decide whether spending R$135 ($62) — mind you, this is still not dinner, it's just a bunch of little tastes — was worth it.

I admit that Mark and I boycotted the Festival Gastronômico for several years running. We were grumpy about the new prices, and we never found any dish so irresistibly creative as to drag us out of the house. But this year we decided to give the festival a whirl. It took careful, strategic planning. We selected the few dishes we thought we’d like to taste days ahead of time. We decided which night we’d go to which part of town. And you know, we had a great time! Here’s the dish that we thought was the single most creative and delicious of this year’s festival, from Zuza Restaurante — cocoa-flavored agnolotti with duck filling, with a sauce of saffron, cointreau, orange zest and cupuaçu (a chocolate-like fruit from the Amazon) — complex, textured, and scrumptious!

Back in Our Own Backyard

"You'll find your happiness lies
Right under your eyes,
Back in your own backyard"*

Part of the NJ backyard

I grew up in a New Jersey suburb, in a house with the proverbial backyard. The backyard was the place where you could run around to your heart’s content or lie in the grass and contemplate the clouds; it was the place you mowed in the summer, raked in the autumn and shoveled in the winter; it was where you could picnic and party, or read and nap. In later years, it was where my mother grew her vegetable garden. It was our private little piece of nature.






Our new house in Búzios had something akin to a backyard, but then again, it was nothing like what I thought of as a backyard. We called it our quintal, which means backyard, among other things, but that was just to give it a name and distinguish it from other parts of the property. Our quintal stood about 8 feet above beach level, and about 17 feet below our terrace, which is the lowest level of the house. It was steeply sloped, many-leveled and, though fairly compact, it was full of trees and bushes and weeds and (I was convinced) snakes and other creepy-crawlies. You can reach the quintal in one of three ways: via a gate at the beach, which we had early on nailed shut to stop people pushing their way in and using the area for — um, for their needs; via the "service" side of the house, a steep series of ramps and steps used by the caseiro-caretaker; and, on the opposite side of the house, via a more civilized set of 68 stairs. (The very stairs we just had to have rebuilt for reasons explained in the post of June 23, 2014). Because the area was something of a jungly mess, and because 68 steps down and 68 steps back up seemed daunting, I rarely went down to the quintal.

Summer jungle

Winter jungle

However, when we hired a young man by the name of Sandoval as our new caseiro-caretaker, things started moving fast, quintal-wise. Sandoval, who grew up on a farm in the northeastern state of Bahia, took one excited look at our quintal and before we knew it he was cleaning and pruning and weeding and chopping. All of a sudden, we could actually see the area clearly. Sandoval rescued the baby shoot of a banana tree, which now towers over me, soon to bear fruit. He planted other fruit trees (pitanga, passion fruit, avocado, fruta de conde) and hopes to plant more. We’re putting up a new, more solid gate so that we can actually go in and out our own back door. At long last, we are taking possession of our backyard! I mean, it turns out it’s really nice down there, so close to the beach, so peaceful. It brings a completely new dimension to our house. And it turns out that Sandoval, who is going to law school at night, uses the quintal often, to read and to study. One thing that Mark and I mean to do right away is put a couple of chairs down there for all of us. Beyond that, we’re waiting for inspiration. Any ideas?

*With a tip of the hat to songwriters Billy Rose, Al Jolson and Dave Dreyer

On the Subject of Whether or Not Brazil Could Handle the 2014 World Cup

Well, there were plenty of naysayers. They said the stadiums wouldn’t be ready, but for the most part they were. They said the airports wouldn’t be ready, but for the most part they were. The worst airport problems were weather-related. Brazil’s glorified golden team had its embarrassing "senior moment," but by now most Brazilians have gotten over it. Yes, Brazil pulled it off. And Brazil did it the Brazilian way, which means that they did it at the last minute, they were a bit disorganized, but they did it with tons of good humor and warmth and caring and creativity. And style, lots of style. Brazil really showed the world a good time, a better time, I’d wager, than anyone has ever had at a World Cup before.

I’d also wager that nobody, but nobody, thought that the one place Brazil would really shine would be in Law & Order. I’ve written many times that Brazil is world-famous as a country where lawbreaking fugitives can hole up in peace, but that image may well be near to cracking. An impressive number of internationally-wanted criminals were captured during this World Cup, thanks to super cooperation between Brazilian police and Interpol. Let’s see, they arrested an Argentine "Dirty War" torturer and murderer; they arrested a long-sought after Mexican drug trafficker; they arrested a German tax evader who fled to Brazil two years ago; and all of these crooks, and more, now await extradition. Amazing how soccer arouses such passion that the bad guys are willing to risk their freedom to watch a game!

Gang that led to Copacabana Palace, FIFA's HQ

The Brazilian federal police also managed to do what no police force has had the balls to do up to now. They caught an extremely high-level gang, some of whose members have ties to FIFA, which has been selling tickets on the black market for the last four World Cups! FIFA is furious, and not because such high-level people are involved in black marketeering. Oh, no, they’re furious that the Brazilian police have been relentlessly investigating this crime, and are naming names and making arrests! Ironic, isn’t it — so many people thought that Brazil wasn’t ready for the World Cup, when it turned out it was FIFA that wasn’t ready for Brazil.

The great and all-powerful FIFA had little good to say about Brazil’s preparedness before the games started, but ultimately it was FIFA that failed in many of its responsibilities. Stadium security? They blew it in the first week, when groups of Argentine and Chilean fans without tickets crashed stadium barriers. Food service? Non-existent the first week or so of games. And even so, FIFA continued to prohibit fans from bringing their own food to the stadiums. Alcoholic beverage service? FIFA insisted early on that Brazil temporarily suspend its very sound law which prohibits the sale of alcoholic beverages in sports stadiums. Then halfway through the games Jérôme Valcke, FIFA’s general secretary, announced that he was shocked, shocked, at the amount of alcohol sold during the games and the level of drunkenness of the fans! Oh, Mr. Valcke, who was going to give whom a kick in the ass a few years ago?

　

Wake me when it's over . . .

And let’s not even mention that opening ceremony — bland, colorless and way below Brazil’s talents and capabilities. It was FIFA that insisted the event be contracted out to a third party, under the aegis of a Belgian choreographer. Nothing at all against Belgium, but — booooooring! Okay, it’s all over, and in the balance I think Brazil (the country, I’m speaking of now, not the team) was a winner. Even so, we can’t seem to stop the infernal countdowns. Get out your calendars! It’s 76 days to the presidential election; 746 days to the 2016 Olympics; and 1,423 days to World Cup 2018!

The Heartbreaking Semifinal Loss

Confidence was high last Tuesday --

But within minutes, all one could do was look on in shock and disbelief --

Or not look at all --

You could pray --

Or cry --

And console the children --

The winners were to be congratulated --

And the losers consoled --

And then we could all  --

Because it’s just four years to World Cup 2018.