“Gabrielle Moriah likes Papaya”

This little rhyme has been true since the girl ate her first bite of solid food. It was when we were living in Santa Cruz that she got her first tastes even before she cut a tooth or could walk. My baby ate papaya like it was going out of style.

Now that she is eight she still enjoys papaya along with her two sisters. I eat it every once in a while. My boys won’t touch the stuff. Personally, I think it smells like feet. Not the pretty manicured feet. Nope. The stinky, sticky, hours-in-the-gym, hold-your-nose-I’m-coming-through feet.

The papaya tree is lanky and tall with very few leaves. To see the bulging fruit swaying at the top of the trunk you think that it will double over. Papaya: tropical and comical.

My kids like to drink their milk from bags. The company is called Pil (pronounced: peel) and they make individual sized bags of flavored milk. Pictured here you have pineapple, orange, apple and peach. Also available are flavors such as maracuya, mango and mandarin. They also make fruit flavored yogurt that comes in the same sized bags.

We had a boy visit us from the States and we all went to the post office so that he and his brother could send post cards to their grandma. If memory serves the only thing that he wrote was, “We drink milk from bags.” I smile every time I think about that. Felipe, you are always welcome back to this fine country.

Click here for other posts of real funny fruits (you know the horticultural kind).

She had said that we were allowed to eat a snack from the fruit bin whenever we liked. We had just landed in Bolivia and were invited to stay with another missionary family until we found a house. The quarters were cramped, but we were thankful for a roof over our head and some help acclimating. The wife had gone to do some grocery shopping and I stayed with the kids. After a while a snack sounded like a good idea so I looked to see what they had in the bin. Oranges, perfect! I opened the first one and it smelled a bit rotten, so I tossed it in the trash. The second one smelled equally potent, so it met its doom as well. As the sixth piece of fruit was being thrown away the woman of the house entered and said, “What are you doing!” She was shocked, so what should have been a question was clearly expressed as reproach. I jumped, startled, as the last fruit went to the can. I explained that the oranges smelled bad. She explained, “That’s because they are not oranges. They are ‘mandarinas’.” Profuse apologies from a newbie missionary to an upset hostess followed.

We are like that with God sometimes. If he asks us to do something that smells different we throw it out. Better to embrace whatever it is that he wants us to do and trust that things are going to be ok if we do.

The Funny Fruit – Mandarina

So in Spanish it has an extra ‘a’ tacked on to the end. The pronunciation is melodic [mahn – thah – DEE – nah] (the ‘th’ is a quick light touch to the back of your top front teeth with your tongue, and the ‘D’ is aquick light touch to the front of the roof of your mouth with your tongue).

Maybe this is not a rare fruit for you; but where I grew up (Omaha, Nebraska) the only mandarins we knew came in cans and were used to dump in the bottom of Jell-O.

Saturday at the market the stand I buy from had four different kinds of ‘mandarinas’ available. The main difference was the size and juiciness. I chose the ‘hierba buena’ (good herb / weed / grass), the smallest and easiest for the kids to munch on. All mandarins are easy enough for a toddler to peal; which is what is taking place as I type. They are a part of the orange family so are packed with vitamin c. Their fruit is sweet and oh so yummy; though they do have a strong smell when you peal them.

Click here for other “Funny Fruit” posts.

]]> http://www.angiewashington.com/2008/06/funny-fruit-%e2%80%93-mandarina/feed/ 0 http://www.angiewashington.com/2008/06/funny-fruit-kaqui/ http://www.angiewashington.com/2008/06/funny-fruit-kaqui/#comments Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:39:00 +0000 @ngie http://angiewashington.wordpress.com/2008/06/07/funny-fruit-kaqui/

On the corner near our house was a small stand under a colorful umbrella. Grabbing the plastic woven bag that my house help usually used to do the market shopping I took a deep breath and announced my departure. Not quite ready to leave my baby with the help I maneuvered the stroller over the pavement that was losing a futile battle with the roots of the ancient trees. The whole bumpy ride my baby gooed and gaaed while I rehearsed the few Spanish words I knew to prepare for my first produce purchases.

The people running the stand were taken by the baby, leaving me time to take in just what they had for sale. Vivid colors mixed with the fresh fruity fragrance wafting from the oversized baskets lent to a euphoric confidence bolstered by the giggles shared by my child and the venders. Over-pointing abounded but was quickly forgiven when I attempted speaking to them with my limited vocabulary being sure to smile real big. I purchased bananas, kiwis, apples, papaya, watermelon and tomatoes. That was all that would fit into the carrier under the stroller. The papaya was the only exotic thing I bought, or so I thought.

I made the proper leaving remarks and trotted home that cloudy morning. I was so proud of myself for this accomplishment. We began washing the fruit and my help made a comment about how much she loved this fruit as she indicated the tomatoes. The argument if the tomato was a fruit or vegetable was not new to me so I thought that I would practice some Spanish and present the opposing view. A comical discussion ensued that my help won only after she took a knife and cut the ‘tomato’ in half. Huh?! It was not a tomato! It was, indeed, my very first funny fruit encounter.

It is called a ‘Kaqui’. It, obviously, looks like a tomato. The taste is sweet with an extremely subtle hint of a cinnamon flavor. It is juicy yet firm. The flat pale seeds are edible while the tough skin is not. We are in kaqui season now. It is fun to eat it and remember my first market shopping experience about six years ago now. Oh, in English kaqui is translated persimmon.

“Look my tongue is purple!” Raimy greeted me at the gate of her friends’ house where they had passed the afternoon. Promptly she went on to explain that they had been sucking on ‘granada’ fruit. The English term for this historic fruit is pomegranate. The boughs of this full bushy tree growing beside their house were decorated with dozens of pinkish colored balls of fruit. There are hundreds of bright red seed pods inside this fruit. You scoop up a bunch and put them in your mouth. Squishing them around the seed pods burst open and you swallow the tart juice then spit out the tiny cream colored ‘pepa’. And your mouth is tinted purple. Pomegranates are common trees to have in your yard here in Cochabamba.

For an interesting history of this word click here: pomegranate etymology

“Look my tongue is purple!” Raimy greeted me at the gate of her friends’ house where they had passed the afternoon. Promptly she went on to explain that they had been sucking on ‘granada’ fruit. The English term for this historic fruit is pomegranate. The boughs of this full bushy tree growing beside their house were decorated with dozens of pinkish colored balls of fruit. There are hundreds of bright red seed pods inside this fruit. You scoop up a bunch and put them in your mouth. Squishing them around the seed pods burst open and you swallow the tart juice then spit out the tiny cream colored ‘pepa’. And your mouth is tinted purple. Pomegranates are common trees to have in your yard here in Cochabamba.

For an interesting history of this word click here: pomegranate etymology