fruit by the foot
an exploration of the fruit in kauai
i had a foot of fruit in my car today. i didn’t stack them up to check, but the branded imprint left on the crest of my shoulder from my tote straps were evidence enough.
it all started at the kilauea farmers market, where we met jared — a sweet seventy-something year-old gentleman who sets up shop every saturday at the market armed with the excess of his backyard bounty.
we fell into conversation and were quick to exchange mango-cutting techniques and praise for the way a gentle squeeze of lime elevates a papaya from good to great. to punctuate his sentences, jared would offer us bite-sized bites from his table.
among the papayas and mangos, there was an item on display that i had never seen before: a ruby-like fruit that looks like a pear with pink lipstick on. judging by the number of stands encrusted with these gems, the mountain apple was clearly the star of the show for kauai in june.
“take! try!” jared thrusted two our way.
i was hoping to fly, but my first bite of the mountain apple fell flat. the second and third were equally as disinteresting. it tasted like a pear that gave up on their dream of becoming an apple, so is now stuck in this weird limbo stage with no end in sight.
maybe i just had a bad apple, but after seeing a furrowed brow blossom on my friend following her first bites, i withdrew my bet.
“some more for the road!” oh boy…
in an oddly generous gesture, jared gave us the rest of his mountain apples free of charge. i say oddly not to diminish his kindness, but because there was something that felt a bit off with the whole exchange. perhaps he wanted to rid himself of mediocre tasting fruit, so her naturally he found some tourists to pass the baton too.
what the hell were we going to do with so many mountain apples?
i considered leaving them in front of the self help section at the book store, or sitting them down in front of the tony robbins documentary to spark some hope in the no-longer-soon-to-be-apples — it was the least i could do.
switching gears, i ended up taking a different approach: to avenge the wrongs into hopefully something right. if this was life’s way of giving me lemons, you bet i would make a bangin’ lemonade*.
well played jared. thank you.
kauai is known as the garden island, so it’s fitting that folks take it to cultivating their own gardens of eden. like pam, a family friend who has a yard reminiscent of an in-and-out drive thru minus the queue and the cholesterol.
another friend lives tucked away into the folds of the lush mountains, and guards her home with trees, bushes, and shrubs of all sorts that bear delectable delights.
whenever i come over, she feeds me a smoothie so green one can hear popeye coming around the corner**. this time around she sent me away with a santa-like sack filled with lychee, lilikoi, and what i assumed to be lemons, but later turned out to be oranges (they must have watched tony).
i must also tell you about the egg fruit. unlike the mountain apple, this is one i was texting friends about.
props to the marketing team for lulling me in — i have a gravitational pull towards anything with egg in it’s name. it resembled the love child of a papaya and a yellow mango from the philippines: taking on it’s colour from the latter, and size from the former. the pit was 25 times the size of single papaya seed — that could have been nature or nurture.
was it going it be egg-like in any way or was the name just a pr stunt?
i pinched the flesh between my thumb and middle finger to get my first bite, and the skin collapsed in like a piece of leather. the taste was, dare i say, almost caramel-y — it was as if someone had cooked down a tropical fruit and made syrup from the extracted juice.
the sweetness was more figurative rather than literal: rather than reminding you of the budding cavity in your top left molar, the egg fruit exhaled a perfume of sweetness.
tasting like a hard boiled egg after a trip to the spa, i am happy to report that the egg fruit is actually quite egg-like.
i didn’t quite get the name of this last fruit i tried. when i asked the first time, the dear woman at the fruit stand mumbled back as if she was stating the obvious. it felt like i had asked her what colour the sky was. due to my own embarrassment, i was too shy to prod. this unidentified specimen looked a bit like a stunted coconut, yet the skin gave in like a plum. it’s smell reminded me of the fumes that escape the nut-shops in berlin — the ones that sell baklava of every kind and honey-crusted ____fill in the nut_____.
unfortunately, the fate of this unknown fruit was not so sweet. i accidentally dropped it into a murky puddle that had permanent real estate on the side walk.
i figured the fruit had been through enough already, so i decided to return her back to where she came from to see if a second life was in store.
here’s to hoping there’s an encore.
breadfruit was the one that got away: i’ve got a thing for gluten, so this craving is an instinctual one, but alas, my delta flight isn’t going to catch itself.
kauai, i’ll be seeing you and your fruit very soon. thank you for giving me something to look forward to. i’ll try to make do when i’m back in berlin, but i’m probably better off just ordering the schnitzel.
*i resorted to a tropical twist on the all-star zucchini muffin: the mountain apple muffin. just replace the famed classic with grated mountain apples, and thank me later when your teeth sink into this delight.
**irish moss smoothie: aka the cure to a six-hour delta flight: whole lotta parsley (great source of iron, + vitamins A, C, and K), whole lotta cilantro (detoxes heavy metals), basil (leftovers that needed saving), coconut water (hydrating), protein powder (self explanatory), lions mane (rawr), and half banana (potassium, texture, and let’s be honest, we needed something sweet in there to keep it from crossing into soup territory). blend it all together and feel yourself begin to photosynthesise upon first sip.
Wanna try some of those crazy fruits!😜