Tropical Yumminess

October 9, 2006 - 9:42 PM by Sarah

pitanga
In her late-night search for simple ingredients for a fruit salad, a blogger at One Jerusalem discovers that even the run-of-the-mill supermarket in Israel offers tropical delights:

Apples, apples… where are you? Oh, here they are, next to some other pretty common fruits in Israel, like pears, oranges (ours!), nectarines… But I wonder what these funny-looking, spiky, strange colored fruits are? Koubo, pitaya, anona, pitanga… Have I tried too much of my exciting new liqueur before shopping for other fruit-salad ingredients, or were the bright lights really the entrance to (tropical) Heaven? We have it all here in Israel, so it appears. Like a madwoman I pile three or four of each specimen in my shopping cart and wait impatiently to carve them open in my kitchen.

So beautiful they all are! The fleshy purplish-pink skin of the pitaya hides underneath it even more breathtaking purple; the quite similar purple of the koubo skin envelopes an extremely lovely contrast of white spongy flesh and black seeds, as does the anona turns out to be, underneath its pretty much ugly-looking greenish skin; the pitanga (or the Surinam cherry), like its cute original name is a small, bright red bell-shaped fruit. There’s no way in hell I’m going to cut these babies into little pieces – each of them deserves special attention!

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