When I find really good fruit it’s pretty much all I want to eat. In Costa Rica I’ve been eating buckets of it like it’s going out of style: pineapple, mango, papaya and best of all, passion fruit. Don’t worry, that’s not ketchup drizzled on top; it’s tabasco. My waiter clued me in to a little local secret: a few drops of hot sauce on a ripe piece of tropical fruit makes for a savory/sweet explosion on your taste buds.
Since I’m talking about fruit, let’s just take a moment to wax rhapsodic about the local passion fruit. Here is a perfect specimen: roughly the size and weight of a wiffleball, it’s the oyster of the fruit world. Well, to me anyway. Heady with perfume, combining the crunch of small seeds with the slick flesh that surrounds them, in the tropics you understand how it got its name: cracking the delicate shell and slurping the flesh into your mouth and across your tongue is a sensual experience you just don’t get from an orange! We don’t get these in the Northeast – not this size anyway; and certainly not fresh-off-the-tree ripe. So add the passion fruit to the growing list of ephemeral delights that make travel worth the trip.
About Author
