Upon arrival to my house here in Los Pocitos, I was relieved to find the 40-ft tall mango tree in the backyard still heavy-laden with its luscious fruits. In fact, the mango season had just begun, and the tree had so many softball-sized mangos that I was afraid that this year one might actually make it through the zinc roof during its descent. Only a 15-ft bamboo pole can reach the lowermost branches, so instead of knocking them down, I wait to hear, and feel, the “BOOM”: the impact of a ripe mango on the dusty earth. I rush out to seek out the freshly fallen mango amongst the graveyard of the Fallen, which are already being consumed by the bees and ants. Breakfast is batido de mango con leche.
Tonight marks the first rain in several weeks. It is hopefully the beginning of a delayed and long-awaited rainy season. The past couple of days, thunder clouds rumbled by, but produced nothing but noise here on the coast. This afternoon, I felt the first cool breeze in ages before I noticed the tiny puffs of dust that were lifted up by the first raindrops. Then, the pitter-patter of water on the zinc became noticeable over the sound of the strong breeze that rattled the roof. I felt the dense air of the heat and humidity be lifted from my shoulders as the breeze lifted it away and the rain pounded it to the ground.
In addition to the mangos and the rain, today is even more exciting because the first soursop fruit from the tree in my backyard matured and was captured successfully before it could fall to the ground into a sad heap of its own delicious juices, a fate to which the first few fruits succumbed. Soursop is my favorite fruit for several reasons:
- The white, slippery fruit inside is very sweet, creamy and delicious, having some semblance to ice cream, but a bit slimier.
- Soursop grow large, sometimes bigger than a basketball (today’s was more of a medicine-ball variety),
- The fruit has an awkward shape, not being completely round, but more soft and lumpy looking, green, and with dull, soft, short spines spaced out intermittently all over the surface of the peel. It looks like something out of a Dr. Suess book.
Soursop is a tropical fruit, and the first time I tried it was in Australia during a tour of an organic fruit farm. The farmer was an aging hippie type who lived a subsistence life on his tropical fruit farm, on which he grew tropical fruits from around the world. The tour was impressive to me, first because I discovered the wonderful soursop fruit, among others, but more so because I was immensely intrigued by the simple lifestyle of the fruit farmer and his wife.
Continuing on with the fruit discussion, another tropical fruit obsession of mine are the lychee and rambutan fruits. Here they are called mamones. There are momones and momon chinos. As far as I can decipher, the momones are the equivalent of the English word, “lychee” and mamon chinos are like rambutans. The momon chinos are the juicier, better variety for the following reasons:
- Mamon chinos are absolutely covered with long, soft spines, green when unripe, which turn yellow, then deep red as they ripen.
- They are fun to eat. You pop open the fairly tough spiny outside, and get squirted by juice unless you know the technique. Inside there is a slimy, perfectly round seed covered in a thin layer of sweet, transparent fruit, resembling an eyeball in size and texture. Suck the fruit off the seed. Spit out seed. Fun.
- Regular mamones are stringier and less juicy, leaving your mouth feeling slightly dry. Mamon chinos are irresistibly juicy and grow in large bunches, making them easy to obtain in large quantities. When I was home in the States, I discovered Lychee juice, sold in a huge Asain wholesale supermarket. Score. Further investigation unearthed loads of lychee and rambutan products available in the US of A, a very untropical place for various reasons that I will not describe at the moment. Other products include lychee flavored gummy candy, also obtained at the Asian warehouse in St. Paul, and freeze-dried rambutans, available at Trader Joe’s. The cashier at the Asian warehouse promised an import of fresh lychees at some point during the growing season (around August, I imagine), but I doubt the quality of these fragile imports to non-tropical areas.
The fruit of the tropics is one of the many incentives to stick around Panama for one more year…
