Guayoyo o tetero, flaco? - Venezuelan coffee glossary

You can credit Starbucks for the annoying coffee snobbery that turns seemingly normal people into seething wrecks of a morning if they can't get hold of their usual "grande, half-caf, non-fat, sugar-free, double-shot, extra-foam, no-whip, pumpkin-spice latte - with extra cinnamon", or whatever over-frothed, over-priced muck they drink in place of regular java.But all the Starbucks snobbery in the

I Love Arepas - Ñum Ñum

I really like this cool graphic so I thought I'd share it. What's the point of having a blog if you don't share.

Venezuelan cacao back on TV as Willie "Raises the Bar"

Venezuelan chocolate sales in the UK are expected to get a boost after funky new logos were unveiled recently for William "Willie" Harcourt-Cooze's 100 per cent cacao products. The launch coincides with a new three-part Channel 4 series called "Raising the Bar: Willie's Chocolate Revolution" and his brand new chocolate bars, which will be sold initially in Selfridges from 1 April.It's all about

Arepa & Co - Authentic Arepera in Camden Market

Arepa & Co is one of the few authentic Venezuelan areperas in the UK and a gastronomic experience that global food junkies just cannot miss.

Tucked away in Camden Lock Market, the hippest market in the capital, Venezuelan entrepreneur Gus's small food stall has been turning on Londoners to the true tastes of his native Caracas for four years with the catchy slogan: "Venezuelan Food with a Pinch

La Reina Pepiada - The Curvy Queen of Arepas

The "Reina Pepiada" is one of the most popular arepa dishes in Venezuela: a lip-smacking combination of shredded chicken, mayonnaise and petit pois stuffed into a grilled cornmeal arepa with slices of soft avocado.

Like the doner kebab in Britain, the Reina Pepiada - or Reina Pepeada in some places - is a firm favourite with drinkers and ravers who flock to late night areperas after the bars

Arepa de Maiz Pelao: Making arepas the hard way

Edelmira Jimenez from Cojedes State makes her arepas the old-fashioned way by pounding shucked maize kernels in a large wooden mortar called a pilon.

The pilon is believed to have been brought to Venezuela from Africa with the slaves who worked the sugar, cacao and coffee plantations. Before that, the indigenous tribes of Venezuela used stone metates for grinding their maize, similar to the

Recipe: Carne Mechada - Venezuelan Shredded Beef

Shredded beef is a key dish in Latin American cooking, from Cuba's rather unappetizingly named but utterly delicious "ropa vieja" ("old clothes") to Venezuela's national dish Pabellon Criollo, where the beef is typically accompanied by white rice, black beans and slices of fried plantain.

It is also used as a filling for empanadas and arepas.

The name shredded or pulled beef comes from the