Finally I got some photos and will update some previous entries, but here are all the pictures of fruit I took. Not many, I know, but a few interesting ones. Above is a road-side fruit stand in the Miraflores district of Lima, Peru. These little stands are ubiquitous, standing in for smaller grocery stores of depanneurs as we’d have in Quebec (though Peru does have a lot of those too). The entrepreneurial spirit of Limenos creates a booming business fo side-of-the-road vendors who buy from the Mercado Surquillo and display their selections attractively with small or less small mark-ups to locals and tourists both.
This was the first mango I purchased at Mercado Surquillo. I didn’t have a knife but that was okay because the skin peeled back easily and a fork was all I needed to scoop out the perfectly ripe flesh.
Here is a guanabana. It looks a lot like a cherimoya but is not. When ripe, the skin is soft and bruises easily. Inside the flesh flakes like giant pieces of fish when perfectly cooked (fish, not guanabana), and the sticky-sweet juice can be chewed out from the dense, meaty flesh of the fruit. It’s popular in juices where you can suck up the slightly thick syrup through a straw, but the raw fruit has dollar-sized pits that you need to spit out.
Just on the inside of the green skin before you hit the meaty pieces of white flesh there’s a layer of salt-like mush, except it doesn’t taste salty – it’s just texture. There’s also a middle spine that oxidizes and browns once exposed to air. It tastes like nothing. The white flesh, however, tastes sweet and syrupy.
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