Kauai: About the Fruit

So, people have been telling me about the amazing fruit in Hawaii for years, but I still had no idea!  Seriously, I could have lived off fruit alone all week long!  The grapefruit and tangelos were packed with heavy, juicy flesh.  The lemons were sweet and sour all at once.  The expensive local grown white pineapple that I accidentally bought was outstanding, and I didn’t regret it’s price tag at all in the end.  That’s saying a lot, considering I’m usually not crazy about pineapple.  Usually I’ll eat a little, but I’m not generally excited about it.  This pineapple was magnificent.

My favorite fruit was fresh papaya.  I’d never had fresh papaya.  No wonder people from tropical places scoff at dried papaya.  After tasting it for the first time at breakfast with our friends, I declared I would be having fresh papaya every single day.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.  I did eat it every day, every chance I got.

The best place to find the tastiest fruit was at farmers’ markets, which sort of pop up in random places all over.  People have lots of fruit trees in their yards and they are happy to sell their produce.  The fruit at the farmers market was so reasonably priced, and so incredibly fresh and delicious.

For the first time I ate an apple banana, which was a small little banana that had a sweet, apple-like taste.  (There were even banana trees right in the yard of our rental home, but they were still green and on the branches of the tree.  Still, it was pretty neat to be close and personal to a banana tree).  I also tried passion fruit, which we had a hard time finding because it was right at the end of the season.  Mine was a little mushy.

When we first saw some of these crazy red things in our refrigerator, Dr. Peds thought someone had left sea urchins!  He was considering researching how to cook sea urchins on the internet, but a few days later we learned that they are really a fruit:  rambutan.  When you peel off the crazy hairy red outside, the inside tastes sort of like a firmly textured grape with a large pit inside.  The appearance of rambutan is a little shocking, but they are quite tasty.
This oddly shaped green fruit was a soursop, which was a little overripe as well, but still yummy.  The creamy white inside tasted like a cross between a banana and a pineapple.