Day 104: Pacific Fruit

In the last several days I've had the opportunity to sample several kinds of fruit common to New Zealand that I've never tasted before.  These are golden kiwifruit, guavas and feijoas.  Golden kiwifruit and guavas are shown in the photo.   Golden kiwifruit are like green kiwifruit, only I think they tend to be a bit smaller, and they have a lighter, more subtle taste.  A bit less sweet, I'd say. We have loads of golden kiwifruit lying around my house at the moment. My housemate Kat gets them underripe from her work (at a kiwifruit packing plant) and brings them home to ripen.

I just tried guavas for the first time last night.  To eat one, you kind of squeeze the insides into your mouth.  They are sweet as well, but the skins taste very bitter.  They also have very hard seeds, that you just swallow because they are too hard to chew.

Feijoas are my favorite new fruit discovery.  They are oblong in shape to eat them you scoop out the seed and pulp from the inside.  They are tangy and delicious.  By the way, they're pronounced Fee-JOAH.  Both feijoas and guavas grow on trees in people's backyards.  My kiwi friends tell me that they never pay money for feijoas because someone with a tree is always giving them away.

And that's your introduction to Pacific fruit!