First+Dishes

=**Potaje Canario (Canarian Vegetable Stew)**= Potaje (pronounced po-TAH-hay) is a multi vegetable stew very typical in the Canary Islands.There are lentil potajes, watercress potajes (look for this one soon), corn potaje…the limit is your own creativity, much like soups and stews everywhere else in the world. It can be shattered (called "puré", a the most common in diary life) or with the whole vegetables (a more traditional version).

Normaly everybody eats "Potaje", but nobody likes it; Is a very common food, and here we usually eat it, maybe not everyday, but many times a week.

=Ropa Vieja (Literally "old clothes")=

The ropa vieja is a first plate, but it is normaly eaten as a starter, and, I think, people normally don´t do it at home, only in restaurants. It's basically a dish of chicken and beef mixed with potatoes and garbanzo beans, again it is one of those dishes that can taste better cooked the day before, so that all the flavours mingle. It's a heavy food, so you can eat it, and don't eat anymore. Iff you want to cook it, here you have the instructions in english: http://en.petitchef.com/recipes/ropa-vieja-canarian-stew-fid-564524

= Sopa de pollo (Chicken Soup) = I think here we eat Chicken Soup, like people all around the world... but we must add more dishes, so here it is, you know what a soup is, so a chicken soup is a soup made with chicken.



=Caldo/Sopa de Pescado (**Fish Soup)**= This kind of soup makes more sense here, beacause we live in an island, and we eat a lot of fish, also in the soup: It is called fish soup, but normally it has more rice than fish.

Don't mistake fish soup for seafood soup! They are both delicious but different things, here is a seafood soup:

= = = **Rancho Canario (Maybe Canarian Mess Kitchen, don't mind me... )** = A Canarian Rancho is a dish that can't have an accurate description, because it depends on who makes it, and every family adds the ingredients they want. It usually has macaronis, chickpeas, beef and chicken, noodles, potatoes, different kind of condiments and spices, oil etc. I really can't describe it better. Maybe you can imagine it better seeing some pictures.



You can see they are very different, as I said, it depends on who makes it.

=**Puchero/Cocido Canario (Canarian Stew)**=

Probably one of the most famous canarian food, the Canarian Puchero is a traditional stew made of pork and beef with chickpeas, ñame (yam), batata or boniato(sweet potato), gofio, pumpkin, corncob etc. It's a very traditional dish, and restaurants that have it in their menu are very appreciated, and usually also expensive, because nowadays it isn't a very common dish and you can't do it quickly.