Found food adventures

One of the reasons I was excited about coming to Panama is that (a) I try, when I can, to eat local food, and (b) I love mangoes, and so (c) I'd get to eat lots of local mangoes in Panama.  Yay!  When I'm in Pennsylvania, I hardly ever have mangoes.  In fact, if I'm eating a mango in PA, it's most likely to be in our local Rescue Mission where I serve breakfast; I have no problem at all helping to eat donated mangoes that will just get tossed in the garbage if someone doesn't appreciate them.  

So, picture me all ready to find myself in a street paved with mangoes!  Like this:

Except that picture isn't from me; it's from my former host daughter, who is currently on a medical missions trip in Honduras.  Where I am in Panama, the mango trees look like this:

A mango tree right outside my office with no mangoes on it.
In June and July, it dropped mangoes every day!
So close, and yet so far . . . 

And unfortunately, the reason you don't see mangoes on this mango tree is because mango season ended just before I arrived.  Sigh.  

There are mangoes in the supermarkets, but they're imported from other countries.  The fresh-air market I found has no mangoes at all (they're not in season, the cashiers informed me), and they're not in the trees or on the ground.  So, I'm largely mango-less after all.

Nonetheless, there are other interesting foods I've found and experimented with. 

Almonds, almost

Here's one of my current experiments, also right outside my office door: an Almond tree!  The first few people I asked about this tree weren't sure what it was, and shook their heads "no no no" when I asked about whether the things on the ground were edible.  Then I happened to find a biologist, who happily looked the tree up in his database and said it's a kind of an almond tree. The nuts were edible, he assured me, but then he added he had no idea how to actually eat them.  So I took some home to experiment, of course!

First attempt to open the almond nuts.

You know, I know, we all know, that a knife is not the proper way to open an almond.  Not only is it kind of dangerous, but also, it doesn't work.  Another guy in the office asked, "What about a rock?".  It turns out that rocks make great tools for opening nuts!  And plus, smashing things with rocks is oddly satisfying.  The actual almonds inside are very small and still quite soft.

I've since bought a nutcracker ("cascanueces").  The almonds I've found haven't dried out enough, I'm guessing, and a nutcracker mostly squeezes the shells like a sponge, with a bit of juice seeping out.  I'm going to keep experimenting with drying, with rocks, and with nutcrackers.  There may be more almond updates in the future.

Loquats / Nísperos

At the main plaza/bus stop in the Ciudad del Saber is a tree that drops little orange-colored fruits on the ground; these are loquats (in English), or nísperos (in Spanish).  My internet investigations say they're from China, where the local legend has it they are so tasty and powerful, that if a loquat drops in a river where a snake can eat it, then the snake swims upriver and becomes a dragon!  And indeed, these little fruits pack a powerful punch.

These loquats are quite yummy; a bit tart.
They're more seed than fruit, but are a lovely little snack.

I think I lucked out on loquats; I arrived in what seems to be peak season.  There are still lots of them falling now, but they do seem to be getting to the end of their healthy season.  The ones I'm seeing these days are a bit wrinklier and more likely to be bruised by falling on the ground.

Pipas

In the palm trees all around me, I see these things that look for all the world like coconuts, except they're green instead of brown.  I asked one of my friends here what they are: are they a variety of green coconuts?  No, no, she assured me: they're something else entirely.  They're called "pipas", and you open them up and drink the liquid inside (called "agua de pipa") with a straw. You can buy cold pipas from all sorts of food trucks, restaurants, and markets, I've since discovered.

So, I nabbed a pipa (from a tree, not from the ground for this one).  A bit of an Internet search told me that a pipa actually is an immature coconut, after all, and that the the way you open it up is by using a machete. Since I wasn't allowed to bring a machete with me on the airplane, I used a kitchen knife instead. It took me two tries; the first time I just lopped off one end without opening up a hole. The second time, the juice/milk started leaking out and I had to put the pipa in a bowl to catch the remainder.

First attempt: verified that the knife works,
but I did not actually open up the pipa.

The liquid looks like water, and it has very mild and yummy coconut taste. The stuff inside the shell that will eventually turn into the white stuff that I normally think of as coconut, what you might call the coconut meat, has a texture much more like jelly at this stage. The internet says you can scoop it out with a spoon and eat it, and I did just that. It, too, was really yummy and sweet.

Agua de Pipa (in the glass) and the pipa comida.

Guanábana (soursop)

For a while, I'd find these half-eaten mystery fruits on the ground.  I say "mystery" because at first, none of the people I asked about it could tell me what it was.  Eventually, we identified it as a guanábana, which led to the next mystery of, there were no guanábana trees near where I kept finding these fruits.

Guanábana: fun to say

The English name for this fruit is "soursop", which is a dreary name.  "Guanábana", on the other hand, is a word that delights me.  The accents alone make me want to sing; the cadence is like that muppet song (Ma - Na - Ma - NAH!  Do, do, dee, DOO doo; Gua - Na - ba - NAH!  Do, do, dee, DOO).  

The fruit looks a little bit like a pineapple on the outside.  On the inside, the fruit is filled with brown seeds that are slightly larger than almonds. They don't pop out nicely like watermelon seeds do; I had to put the seeds and fruit together in my mouth, and then spit the seeds out later.  It's a fun fruit, but also more work than I want.  

I'm guessing that the appearance of these fruits in this particular place was due to ñeques, aka agoutis, who transported them and left them there half-eaten, so maybe the guanábanas were more work than the ñeques wanted, too.  

At any rate, I haven't seen them on the ground in a while.  The guanábana tree further along the path has only one lonely fruit hanging from its branches.  I suspect that this is yet another fruit whose season will soon be behind us. 

Platanos / Plantains

We're traveling backwards in time here.  The first fruit I found on the ground in Panama were these:

¡Platanos!

They'd fallen from a nearby tree, where you can see others hanging, suspended from the branches. 

The platanos point upward, not down. 
Below them is a big red . . . blossom? ball? of some kind.

With most of the other found fruit I'd discovered, I was much more curious and interested than the local people I talked to.  With these fruits, though, I was among experts. These are plantains, not bananas.  In Spanish, "son platanos, no bananos".  (Notice that it's not bananas with an 'a', but bananos, with an 'o'!  Sometimes bananas here are called "guineos" instead.  Bananas are masculine.  But none of this really matters, because the things I found aren't bananas or bananos or guineos anyway). 

You can tell platanos from bananos because the former are triangular or squares in cross-section, while the latter are round. Also, bananas are sweet, and platanos are not.  They're starchy like . . . potatoes, kind of?  

Also, yes, you can eat green platanos; just fry them up, or boil them and mash them, or cut them up and add them to soup.  As they ripen, their outsides turn yellow (just like banan-things), but they're fine to eat while green.  My husband refused to try them, but I sautéed them and then added them to my oatmeal, and they were yummy.  

And that's my found food adventures so far. It's possible that as we head toward October (which locals assure me, as incredible as it sounds, is rainier yet than August or September), we're heading out of fruit seasons entirely, and that these will be my last found food adventures for a while.  We'll see!