Tropical Fruit Fantasies on Your AsianHoliday
The exotic land called Malaysia has become very popular as a vacation destination. When youthink of an Oriental vacation you may perhaps imagine white sandy beaches, crystal clear warm water, underwater adventure watching dolphins and colourful fish swimming around coral reefs.
There is so much more to an Asian vacation, though.
An Asian vacation is healthy. You can relax on the sand , you swim in the sea , and you take in lots of vitamins, minerals and other trace elements when you refresh yourself with a variety of exotic fruit. You can eat them cut up and peeled, or you can endulge yourself with a mixed fruit shake that brims with vitality and health. and it is not expensive.
We all probably know tropical fruits such as bananas, oranges, limes and watermelons. There’s also a wide range of fresh fruit that may not be as well known to you.
There’s the custard apple for example. It resembles a small green hand grenade and is filled with a sweet scented white flesh. It’s delicious consumed ripe with coconut milk or made into ice-cream.
The guava is a greenish-yellow fruit with a white aromatic flesh. I’ve had it as jelly, and it’s also a different experience when it’s hard and not yet ripe , with a spiced dip of salt, sugar and a few crushed chillies.
The jackfruit is thebiggest of all cultivated fruits. The outside is rough and green, and inside sit the segments of yellow-orange flesh which is sweet and delicately. Usually it’s eaten raw as an appetiser; and often the green parts are also used in cooking.
The longan is a smaller fruit with a tough but thin skin. The sweet and succulent flesh is white or pink and has a distinctivearomatic flavor.
Mangoes come in several varieties, and they are all different from those in the Hawaiian Islands or tropical America. The Asian mangoes are oblong in shape and have either dark green or yellowy golden skin with whitish or yellow flesh. When you are in thailand you will probably be served your mango on a bed of sticky rice with a generous serving of coconut milk. They can also be pickled, made into chutneys or juices, or even used in traditional medicine. When you eat green mango dipped in chillie sugar mix it is a culinary experience you will never forget. It’s similar to some of the apples we get in the West and is quite crunchy to eat.
Sometimes called the queen of the tropical fruits: that’s the mangosteen. with a dark purple skin that hides sweet scented white flesh divided into segments. it can be eaten raw used as an ingredient in drinks or simply as part of a sea food curry recipe. And apart from its delicious taste, it has a variety of healing properties and is therefore sought-after by alternative medicine, although, as far as I know, it hasn’t been successfully grown yet in temperate climates. So, the mangosteen may be one of the reasons you would want to have an Oriental Vacation.
Pomellos are a taste experience not to be missed. It’s the largest of the citrus fruits, weighs up to two pounds, and is sometimes referred to by the name of “ugly fruit”. Similar to a grapefruit, it is much sweeter, and is delicious by its own as a snack or a desert, used as an ingredient in salads, or squeezed to make a refreshing drink.
There are so many other wonderful tropical fruits, like the well-known pineapple that is so much sweeter here in Asia, or the lesser known rambutan with its sweet white flesh within a bright red hairy skin, or the sapodilla, an oval-shaped fruit with sweet, succculent reddish-brown flesh in a brown skin. tamarind pods are used to make tamarind paste, a key ingredient in many Eastern dishes.
Remember to check out all of these wonderful tastes when you’re on your Asia vacation
