The exotic land called the Philippines has become very popular as a vacation destination. When youthink of an Asian vacation you may perhaps imagine white sandy beaches, crystal clear warm water, underwater adventure watching dolphins and colourful fish swimming around coral heads.
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 tropical 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’s not expensive.
You 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 familiar to you.
There’s the custard apple as an example. It almost looks like a small green hand grenade and is filled with a sweet scented white flesh. It’s delicious eaten 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 interesting eaten when it’s hard and not yet ripe , with a spiced salsa of salt, sugar and a few crushed 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 succulent and wonderfully scented. Normally it’s consumed fresh as a snack; and often the green parts are also used in cooking.
The longan is a small fruit with a durable but thin skin. The sweet and mouth watering flesh is white or pink and has a distinctive musky taste.
Mangoes come in several varieties, and they are unique from those in Hawaii or tropical America. The Asian mangoes are oblong in shape and have either dark green or yellowy golden skin with whitish or yellow flesh. They are delicious eaten raw, and in Thailand I used to eat mango with sticky rice and coconut milk poured on top. 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. It’s similar to some of the apples we get in the West and is quite crunchy to eat.
The Queen of tropical fruits is the mangosteeen. 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. 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”. Like a giant grapefruit it is sweeter and is used as a snack a desert or a salad ingredient.
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
