Local Fruit and Vegetables

I haven’t eaten this much meat since…well, since the last time I visited here probably. It seems very strange that there’s a lack of vegetables here. Meanwhile, there is a dearth of local fruit. Perhaps it’s the season, but people seem to be more interested in fruit than vegetables when it comes to food that actually grows.

My parents and grandma have a substantial garden to grow food compared to us urbanites. They have potatoes, taro root, an assortment of beans and collard greens (of the infamous caldo verde soup). Then there’s the fruit. They have orange trees and Brazilian guavas. In their yard!

Other local fruit include the baby bananas that I’ve been eating with breakfast everyday and the local pineapple, which is sweeter and more orange in colour than the pineapples you see from Hawaii. My mom’s friend also recently gave us some lemons from her yard. They’re strange little lemons. The look like tiny oranges and their juice looks orange. But they’re sour like lemons.

So yes, back to the meat. Perhaps it’s just my family, but god, there’s a lot of meat in their diet. My mom or grandma will make chicken, and in the pot there’s the chicken and then the local sausage and potatoes. If my mom is the cook, she’ll add carrots, but it doesn’t cross my grandma’s mind to put any carrots in! She says that she’s no rabbit.