blah...blah...blah... Ginger!

The other day I posted a picture of my favorite fruit vender. He and his wife are from Veracruz and they sell on the corner of Colon and Reforma. They have the sweetest juice oranges and pineapples I’ve found. It’s also easy, which I admit is important, I drive by there a lot and if I pull over he comes over with my usual bag of oranges.

One day, another guy was there with him selling aluminum squeegees with a long handle.  As Gabi had showed me ours that morning and pointed out that it was held together with duct tape, I bought one.  It’s a great squeegee, not that I use it much but Gabi seems to like it and it hasn’t fallen apart yet.  Now, I always scope out anyone on that corner for interesting or useful things to buy.

Ugly and Sweet

Back to fruit and juice which has become about half of my diet these days.   Almost as important as that first cup of Chiapan coffee in the morning is my fruit smoothie.

Fresh orange juice plus whatever tropical fruit in season and that I have, right now I can’t stop eating mangoes so it’s usually mango and banana and maybe some guanabana.   Soy protein powder from GNC and some plain yogurt completes it.  Into the Magic Bullet and it is pure joy.

You can’t judge an orange by its skin, the sweetest oranges are often the ugliest.  They don’t have to be orange either, green is the more common color for these ripe Valencias.

Baddog Bench Press

My new juicer is great, I had been looking for one of this type.  I’ve seen a lot of them but the cheap ones were flimsy and I couldn’t imagine they would last long.

The Italian kitchen store on Paseo Montejo has a beauty of stainless steel but I don’t have enough Euros for it.

The other day I saw this one at Sam’s club for a reasonable price.  Smaller than the Italian one but sturdy and stainless steel.  It’s been working hard since I brought it home.

If you think that we down here in the tropics are eating any kind of delicious fruit whenever we want, you’re sort of right.  We too have seasons and while there are some things that are here all year, mainly oranges and papayas, there are others that have definite seasons.  There are a lot of different kinds of mango and the earliest ones start to show up in March, but my favorites, the Paraiso, are just starting to come into season.  In the winter I have to survive on papaya so I never buy it in the summer.

Like up north, they are available in the supermarket all year but also like up north the taste is not worth it.  Most of the out of season fruit in winter comes here from Chile, the sea voyage doesn’t do much for it or perhaps it is the need to pick it before it is ripe.  Right now, mangos are sold from people’s backyards on every corner and they are often the best.   Only a few hours from tree to you and perfectly ripe before picking.

Ugly Fruit and Cute Kitteh

I think we should have a best-tasting, ugliest-fruit contest.

My candidate is the Guanabana.  I allowed (!) Tita in the pictures so you can tell the relative size, this is not a large Guanabana, it’s kind of small.

It looks like a warty, overgrown avocado on the outside.  The inside is basically white mush with large watermelon type seeds.  It looks kind of rotten when it is ripe, you cut it open and there is this stringy mush with big seeds and no obvious way to cut it – too mushy – or scrape it – too stringy.

The solution is to stand over the trash and use your teeth to pull the pulp from the skin, spitting the seeds into the trash.   It’s more common to make ice cream or smoothies or candy from it.

Kitteh does not think this is fud

I like it both ways, I had a hard time convincing Mimi to try it though.

The taste?  Well, it’s surprisingly refreshing, tart and sweet and not at all cloying.  It definitely doesn’t taste like it looks.

*bad pun intended