Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Passionate about passion fruit

Wednesday, 8-24-11

A couple days ago when I was in Usulután Kathy told me that Cecilia had made some kind of fruit juice for lunch. She couldn’t remember what kind it was but said it looked like frog eggs. When I asked Cecilia what it was she told me it was granadilla, which is passion fruit. I was sad because I really like passion fruit and wanted to try some of the fresh juice. Too bad. They drank it all. Oh well.

So today when Cecilia brought home several passion fruits from the market I was excited. I wanted to try them. They looked a little different than the passion fruit I’d tried before. Here, there are actually two kinds of passion fruit: granadilla and maracuyá. Even though I’ve asked about the difference between them I’m still confused as to which one is which. But I’m pretty sure the granadilla is smaller than the maracuyá.

Since the granadilla has a hard, outer shell Cecilia put it on the ground and cracked it open with a rock. Then she gave half of it to me. Inside were little, squishy green pieces with black seeds inside. They really did look like frog eggs. However, these were green with black seeds and I typically think of frog eggs as being clearer with black bits in the middle. Cecilia ate the inside of her part of the passion fruit so I tried mine. It was a little sour but I liked the taste. She said people sometimes put sugar on it to make it sweet.

Kathy came down from her office so we both cracked opened some more granadillas because I wanted to take pictures of them. Kathy arranged them on the counter as I got photos. Then we scooped out all the seeds. She made an attempt to create a frog from the seeds since we’d started referring to the seeds as “hueves de rana” (frog eggs), but the frog turned out to look more like an arrow. I took a photo of it and then ate the seeds. I added a tiny bit of sugar but not much.

The next day I came home from school and Cecilia had made a fresco (fresh juice) from the remaining granadillas. It was delicious. It didn’t have a really strong flavor and wasn’t overly sweet. When Balmore walked in Kathy offered him a glass of “huevos de rana.” He laughed and accepted some. Soon we’d polished off the entire pitcher. I’m going to have to go to the market on Sunday and buy some more fun fruit to eat.



Granadillas


We broke one open


Creating passion fruit art


Seeds arranged to look like a frog


Picture I took in April of a passion fruit


I made fresh passion fruit juice


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mmm, looks good. I like the "frog" made of seeds.