Terra firma

It's so fruitfully delicious to be back in tropical climes. We've been gorging out on mangoes and papayas once again while discovering new fruits for the first time.

Our first bite of a cashew fruit didn't exactly make us sing hallelujah. "It's OK", we both thought. But somehow by the third or fourth nibble, we slowly got hooked to it's subtle flavour and juicy flesh.

When Roch tried an umbu for the first time, he thought it tasted like 7-up! We're just coming into umbu season (December to March). Umbus are apparently unique to Brazil so we'll have to enjoy them while we're here.

Saturday, when we took the bus to the Novo Mercado do Rio Vermelho, we noticed a hustling and bustling outdoor market along the way so we decided to check it out on the way home. We bought a dozen green mangoes, 3 papayas, 10 small cherimoyas, and a big bunch of bananas for R$ 9.00 - that's $3.27 CAD!!!

The first time we bought the green mangoes, it was with the help of Kelly, our hostess at Pousada Colonial. We bought them from the fruit man who passes by the pousada with his cart of fruit every day around 12:30 pm. If Kelly didn't encourage us to buy them, I doubt we would have because they didn't look ripe yet they felt overly soft at the same time. However, the first time we tasted these green gems, we went gaga. So fragrant and so sweet. One of the best varieties of mangoes I've ever eaten.

We also found a fruit man in the old part of time who sells fruit that's sliced up and ready to eat. It was entertaining just watching him carving up the pineapples. Locals would come along and drop him a real (R$) and help themselves to a wedge of watermelon or a piece of pineapple. We had to, of course, join in with a couple of reals of our own.Read more