Tropical Fruit Adventures on Your Asian Vacation
The exotic land called Thailand has become very popular as a vacation destination. When youdream 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 lounge on the beach, 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 tropical fruit. You can eat them cut up and peeled, or you can endulge yourself with a mixed fruit shake that brims with goodness andwellbeing . and it is excellent value for money .
You probably know exotic 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.
Take the custard apple for example. It resembles a small green hand grenade and is filled with a sweetperfumed white flesh. It’s delicious consumed ripe with coconut milk or made into ice-cream.
The guava is a greenish-yellow fruit with a pale aromatic flesh. I’ve eaten it as jelly, and it’s also interesting eaten when it’s unripe and hard, with a spiced salsa of salt, sugar and a few freshly chopped chillies.
The jackfruit is thebiggest of all cultivated fruits. The exterior is rough and green, and inside sit the segments of yellow-orange flesh which is sweet and wonderfully scented. Usually it’s consumed fresh as a snack; 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 distinctive musky taste.
Mangoes come in many varieties, and they are unique 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. The way to eat Mango in Thailand is topped with coconut milk on a bed of sticky rice. They can also be pickled, made into chutneys or juices, or even used in traditional medicine. You get a completely different culinary experience when you eat slices of green, unripened mango dipped in chillie sugar. While it doesn't taste exactly the same as the apples we get in the west it is still crunchy and delicious.
Sometimes called the queen of the tropical fruits: that’s the mangosteen. It's dark skin colored purple reveals sweet white flesh when peeled. It’s usually eaten raw, poured into drinks as juice, or even added to seafood curries, depending on where you are. This scrumptious fruit is also renowned for it's healing properties. So, the mangosteen may be one of the reasons you would want to have an Oriental Vacation.
One of my other favorites is the pomello. It’s the largest of the citrus fruits, weighs up to two pounds, and is sometimes referred to by the name of “ugly fruit”. Larger than a grapefruit and sweeter too this fruit is used for making salads in deserts or used to create fresh fruit drinks.
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 succulent 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. Or last but not least, the sweet tamarind whose tough brown pod with sweet dark brown flesh is made into a concentrated pulp and used in cooking, such as Thai curries and soups.
Remember to check out all of these wonderful tastes when you’re on your Asia vacation