Focus on Fruit - Dragon Fruit and Madrono

First off I have to mention that we have been without internet for over 2 weeks. No reading of newspapers or blogs, no researching interesting things, no Mars photos to see. Nothing but a not working white box staring at me on the desk getting me pissed off as Claro continues to charge us as if it worked! On one of my almost weekly trips to the San Sebastian pulgero I found a guy with dragon fruit!!! Most of the vendors have all the same things I have in my yard at this time of year - guineos (bananas), carambola (star fruit), coconuts, calabaza, avocados, culantro (different than cilantro but more alike than different), quenepas. Once and a while though there is something different! One week it was lychees, another week I found a zocato seedling for a buck (kind of a giant cucumber sort of? One of these last weeks there was a basket of beautiful Dragon Fruit! I knew immediately what they were and that I wanted some! Most shoppers had no idea what they were missing. Then I rambled to see what the fruit tree guy had and he had what he called a "Mahone" tree start and fruits in a baggie. I took some fruits and need to go back for the tree!

Dragon Fruit  or Pitaya hylocereus is a succulent/cactus type plant with super cool flowers and fruit! Being a plant person I had read about Pitaya long before I had gotten to PR. When I got here I found a little start at Enaidas Jardineria in Cabo Rojo. I snatched up the ugly plant and planted it at the other house. It bloomed prolifically for a couple years and never got fruit so I went back to Enaidas for a second one figuring it needed to cross pollinate with another of its kind or something. Still no fruit.

I got loads of huge flowers. The flowers bloom maybe from 9 or 10 at night until around 8 in the morning. Bats are the main pollinators. They smell magnificent and it is really cool to see them unfurl from bud stage to an open flower over the course of hours! Kind of like Little Shop of Horrors! Even Tuca the cat was amazed!

The beautiful flowers were on a really ugly plant. Look at that fruit though...totally cool looking with a really good flavor! The seeds are a lot like kiwi seeds - crunchy but soft...the fruit works on a normal salad or a fruit salad...I could see it in some kind of salsa with mango and avocado and onion or simply with star fruit and a little honey (not needed but would look really pretty).  I wanted fruit from my plants and after thinking about it figured if Enaidas was a smart nursery they would simply be propagating from one pitaya. This could explain my lack of fruit. While driving I noticed a huge pitaya plant in the trees on the side of the road. I picked up a piece and planted that. We moved before I got to see if the thing was gonna fruit but...I took a piece of each with me to the Moca house and we will see what it does here! If the guy has the fruit again I will certainly buy some more - he sold them for $1.25 each and they were apple-sized.

So what is the other fruit, the yellow ball? The guy called it a "mahone" but I couldn't find information on it by that name. What I did find calls it a Madrono (tilde over the n ) and another possibility is Rheeda madruno. I may never know the real name, but I have tasted the fruit and will go back for a tree start (hopefully he still has the baggies of fruit - 3 for a $1- and small trees). The fruit is kind of like a longan, or lychee, or quenepa inside (big seed with small amount of pulpy meat over it) and the taste is nice...kind of a sweet/sour refreshing taste. It is like many Puerto Rico fruits - kind of interesting and kind of pointless and kind of yummy all at once. You can't harvest enough to do anything with them, the seed is most of it, they require sucking and spitting out of seeds, and these things would maybe put them on my "pass up" but I like the taste and rank them up there with longans as being better than lychees. I like to wander the yard and graze. So I give a thumbs up to the spiky yellow golf ball and the awesome Dragon Fruit! Plant some today!

Focus On Fruit- Coconuts

I am just now understanding and appreciating the wonderful coconut! Our other house had yellow husked coconuts the locals call "water" coconuts. We also had a taller one that dropped brown husk free coconuts we used for the meat. Locals called those the "meat" coconuts. Turns out that there are really only two major types of coconuts - tall and dwarf. You can use all parts from either. We have both types at our Moca house and are enjoying the young "jelly" meat, the dry "what you think of when you think of coconut" meat and the water. There are dozens of different varieties of coconuts and I don't know what we have but I do know that the green husked giant coconuts are awesome for water and the jelly type meat!

This dwarf type coconut has huge coconuts starting at about 4 feet. In the past we haven't been huge fans of the water but these are so big and heavy we gave them another try. Absolutely delicious! We have a lot of fun things on our to do list and don't want to take forever to do the fancy de husking so we pull out the drill to get our water out. Jeff uses a pretty big bit to drill the first hole. You can see that these coconuts are much bigger than his head. I have a rule about not eating things bigger than your head but we make an exception for these! These suckers are heavy also.

After the first hole he drills a second one to get the fluids flowing more and I stick a strainer over the pitcher and we drain them in. Each coconut has a cup or more of water in it. So how healthy is coconut water? There are about 46 calories per cup (which can add up if you drink a lot during the day). It is low in sugar and has a lot of electrolytes. It is high in potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphates and other goodies. It has been used intravenously as a hydration fluid where/when saline wasn't available. I don't like to drink a lot and never do sodas so this is a nice, mildly flavored thing for me that is more interesting than water. In the states I like the grapefruit flavored seltzer water but we can't find anything like that here. I wonder if carbonating it might be a sometimes interesting thing? What about the "jelly"? Inside these heavy water-laden coconuts is a jelly-like meat. In my raw food non-cook books I have read about how to use it but today did so for the first time. I used a spoon to scrape out the meat in the biggest pieces I could. I took Bragg Liquid Aminos (which is a soy product that is salty like soy sauce but with a much lower sodium amount) and liquid smoke and marinated the chunks in it. The jelly like stuff kind of looks like fatty skin. I dehydrated it at 145 degrees for around 5 hours and then ate it all! It tasted kind of bacony. The texture was kind of fatty and the salty smokiness was pretty yummy! I will be doing this again. I was going to save some for Jeff but couldn't. I think I may be more excited about this than about the water! We still have the tall coconut for the "meat." I think the husk just dries up and since you have to wait for them to fall the water has all been absorbed and when it hits the ground is only meat. This is less interesting to me. I highly recommend having dwarf coconut trees. The water and meat are good. They scream "tropical" like no other plant. They offer stuff that can sustain you and I think are a good thing to have around after a hurricane. Even if they drop the water stays sterile for a long time and if you've got that and the meat you are set for a while. (breadfruit is another good staple for after hurricanes - but that's another post...wait, I did that! panapen)

Focus On Fruit - Annona family aka Custard Apple/Corazone

Our San German house had corazones (kind of pinkish, sweet and oddly grainy fruit) and some grenade looking white fruits that tasted just like a corazone but had a bunch of seeds you had to eat around. We were unimpressed with the grenade-type fruit and cut the tree down. I have a policy of generally not wanting to cut anything down unless it is disgusting or ugly or both. This tree wasn't pretty and the fruit was crappy. I was happy to find corazones at our Moca house and even happier when they turned out to be a crimson red color with red flesh. The ugly tree is down on the property where we don't have to look at it so it is perfect!
On the side of the house is another kind of annona - the grenade-looking kind. I decided to give every odd fruit a fruiting cycle before I consider taking it out. I have been watching the grenade annona and the fruit is finally ready. I expected to be unimpressed and expected to get the saw out for tree removal. I am pleasantly surprised!

Our other house's fruit looked like this only not pink. I expected this to taste the same and it is different (a good thing). This has a juicy, pineapple flavored pulp that is worth eating. There are a ton of seeds, but the pulp packet around each one is delish! For now the tree stays and I am harvesting these odd fruits every day or two. The texture isn't grainy at all so it is staying. The tree is small and not really nice looking. It'll fit in any mid-size yard and is kind of open in form. You can't really do much with the fruit because you don't get enough at once and of course you have the seeds to deal with. It'd make a good ice cream but would take an army of trees to have enough fruit at one time to make it practical. It isn't THAT good. You don't want to dedicate that much space for it but it is a cool shape and has a nice taste. Plant one!

Focus on Fruit - Guanabana aka soursop aka Annona muricata

Ah, another bizarre Puerto Rican fruit! When you first arrive in Puerto Rico there are all kinds of odd things growing in your yard, your neighbor's yard, along the road or in the jungle. Some of them can be found at a roadside fruitstand and others you may see once and never again. The first questions are:  What is it? What can I do with it? When it is ripe? How do I process it? I find a lot of the local fruit wonderful and a bunch of it nasty. A lot of things people eat here involve eating and spitting out lots of seeds, fibers, and pits. A lot of the fruit here have weird textures which are disturbing at first. Guanabana is one of the "disturbing textures" ones. The juiced fruit has the texture of man stuff. Yup, I said it. Man Stuff. The tree is a nice enough looking tree that will get spiky (soft spiky) football sized dark green fruit on it.We have been eating them for a couple months now so I suppose it is a spring fruit. The fruit is dark green and hard as a rock one day and bird pecked the next so you have to be watching if you want to harvest it. Seriously - one day it is very hard and the next day will have dropped to the ground. With all our fruit I make daily rounds looking for birds (easiest way to tell if something is ripe), fallen fruit or almost ready fruit. Once you pick it it looses its attractive dark green color and turns black and disgusting looking. Never fear, the fruit is still good! Once the birds have pecked a little hole in the fruit it is time to harvest. You just cut around that part. Inside is a soft, fragrant white flesh with hard black seeds. The seeds are covered with pulp and you just press the flesh through a sieve (I like this big holed one). Don't put this fruit in the blender/food processor or the seeds will ruin your blades. When you press it through you get a lovely bowl of man stuff. Slippery, slimy and a little frothy! I pour it into ice cube trays and freeze it. I store the cubes in the freezer in baggies to add to smoothies or simply make a guanabana smoothie with the cubes, a little soy milk and that's it! No sugar required. It makes a nice ice cream or sorbet also.

The only other thing I have done with it is use it as the liquid in pancakes. I had soursop pancakes in Fiji once. I suppose you could make "limbers" which are the adult version of a popsicle. The taste is refreshing - kind of like banana, a not-sweet pineapple...kind of hard to describe. It is one of the few fruits that isn't overly sweet. So don't let those fruit drop. Definitely don't just eat it (funny texture and too many seeds). Try substituting it for liquids in baking maybe or curries and report back...