In search of unknown fruit

  I love fruit and in Costa Rica I've tried quite a few that were new to me. Let's start with what is a favorite fruit and one I've only seen in Costa Rica: caimito. It's a sphere, purple on the outside and shading from purple to white on the inside. I like to eat it with a spoon as the texture is a bit like custard. A lot of Costa Ricans don't like it because it has some latex which makes your lips sticky. A tip I haven't had a chance to try yet: after eating caimito rub your lips with some oil to remove the latex. I find the flavor so beguiling that I don't mind some stickiness.

   Did you know that the cashew nut we eat grows on the outside of a fruit? Every nut represents a fruit, perhaps explaining what cashews are so expensive. Native to Brazil, Ticos and other Spanish speakers call the fruit and nut marañón.  People make a juice of the fruit and it's one fruit I just don't like. It smells bad to me. I'll stick to eating the delicious nuts.

 

   The following photo shows two fruits: the red manzana de agua or water apple and mamón. Water apples, originally from the Malay peninsula and nearby areas, are quite bland and juicy. I guess they would be really good to quench a thirst on a very hot day. Not a frequent need in Monteverde so I don't eat them often. Mamón, a South American native,  has a crisp shell around a large seed. In between the seed and the shell is a small layer of tart flesh. It's fun to peel the shell off with your fingernail and pop the insides in your mouth so you can gnaw the fruit off the seed. The fruit doesn't come off the seed easily so it's a good way to pass some time.

 Here's another picture of water apples, a grenadilla and some green jocotes. A fruit from the cashew family originally from Central America, jocotes are now also cultivated in Asia. You eat jocotes whole, skin and all. Perhaps I would like them better if Costa Ricans let them ripen but here they are sold while still green so they are tart. I think maybe people sprinkle salt on the them, the way they do with unripe mangoes.
  Grenadilla is a fruit related to passion fruit. The outside has a crisp, papery layer. Inside the many small seeds are each inside a small packet of juicy fruit.  I scoop the insides into a blender and run at top speed briefly. Next I use a sieve to remove the seed particles. The seeds are edible so a few bits of seeds getting through isn't a problem. Then I make a smoothy with some yogurt, sugar, and ice. It's very aromatic and quite similar to passion fruit.

 The following fruit is the one that inspired me to write this post. One of my English students brought some as a gift for me from her family farm. It is called rose apple or manzana de rosa. I've never seen this fruit for sale. It's  peculiar in that the seeds are inside a hollow space. The fruit is a bit crunchy and has an astonishing perfume like roses.

The shock of the large

   Many things are big in the U.S. Consider the size of this strawberry from California. The egg is the standard large egg. It's just this kind of thing that sends me into reverse culture shock as I readjust to being in the States.

I used to scorn large strawberries as being generally hard as rocks and devoid of flavor. It seems, however, that there has been a lot of progress in strawberries and this strawberry had quite a bit of flavor. It was slightly on the crunchy side which helped it make it's trip without damage.
Happily, we are now in the very brief local strawberry season in Wisconsin. This is one of the average-sized, locally grown strawberries I bought today with the same size egg. (To be fair, I should have probably photographed the largest berry in the box, but it wasn't much bigger.)

The flavor: extraordinary.

Lessons from my Costa Rican kitchen

Cooking isn't radically different for me in Costa Rica. It's easy to get many of my favorite ingredients such as pasta and olive oil. The fruits are fantastic and the vegetables, while limited in kinds, can be very fresh—although many of them come to market larger than I would prefer. (The average beet is the size of a large grapefruit.) However, certain ingredients are impossible to find—such as grapefruit. The fun part of the adventure is that some things are really different. These are some of the important things I've learned cooking in Costa Rica:

1. My gas oven has the numbers 1 through 4, indicating the size of flame.  Acting as the human thermostat, I check the temperature often, but fluctuations happen. It turns out that the exact temperature of the oven doesn't really matter as much as cookbooks say. And by the way, having the gas tank run out in the middle of baking something isn't necessarily a disaster. I even had a cake survive a massive drop of temperature when the tank ran out.
   I bake all of our bread because I like it a lot better than bread I can buy here.

2. Fresh home-made tortillas are great, especially when you can buy them at the near-by store when they are still warm. Make a cheese quesadilla, cut up an avocado and have a juice like watermelon and it's a fast and easy lunch.

3. You can make great brownies and cake with cocoa instead of baking chocolate. See my post about brownies.

4. Use what's available. Don't head to the store with a fixed idea of what you want; get what looks fresh or good. There are lots of good ways to cook carrots if that happens to be what you can get.

5. If you have a smaller fridge things don't get lost and don't spoil.

6. Instead of maple syrup, watered down guava jam is really good on pancakes.

7. I really miss tofu. I know it has almost no flavor but I still miss it. Best substitute for the tofu craving: texturized vegetable protein cooked with ginger.

8. Enjoy the fruit and try all the new ones you can. The fruits in this photo are sapote and grenadilla. Sapote is the only fruit I've had that I actually thought was too sweet. Grenadilla is similar to passion fruit and its juice makes a heavenly smoothy with yogurt. Just put the center part in the blender including the seeds, liquify and then strain through a sieve. The seeds are edible so having seed particles go through the sieve isn't a problem. They are ripe when the shell is dry and the seeds move around when you shake the fruit.

Shopping at la feria

Every Saturday since a year ago there has been a farmers market in the high school gymnasium. It's a great place to get fresh fruits and vegetables and see lots of friends. It being such a small town we always see people we know, like we used to at the Madison farmers market before it got so huge. However, the produce is quite different from what we get in Madison! There is a fruit vendor that brings up lots of fruit from lower altitudes. His papayas are much riper and sweeter than anything I've found at a regular store in town. I have to be careful carrying home so they don't get smashed.

This week I found something unusual--flowers of yucca quatemalensis. They are called flor de itabo. A young tico friend told me they are "old people's food." That could be because they are very traditional or perhaps because they are quite bitter. The vendor told me to boil them and then fry them with either eggs or tuna. I've had them at Marcela's house and they were delicious so I called and asked Marcela for instructions. My big question was whether to take out the center parts-the sepals--like the vendor said I should, or not. It's pretty time consuming to take them out and fortunately Marcela told me it was OK to leave them in. They are the more bitter part and we liked them.
These fruit are fresh passion fruit, maracuya. The vendor said they would be good in cake. I got further instructions from a tica friend who is a chef that I saw at the feria. I'll be trying to make something with them today. Meanwhile, they are filling our house with a heady aroma.
Life in a different country often presents mysteries. What is this huge pile of lastre (mixture of dirt and rock) doing in the parking lot of the school? I'm sure it will go on some road in the area as fill but why are they piling it up? Are they putting any on the street near our house?
I finished the first sock of this pair. I love the way the colors change in this yarn. These socks will be fraternal--I didn't start the second one with the same color.