Rambutan

This is one of the weirdest fruits I’ve seen and it’s why I love it. It has a thick skin with bristley (scientific word) hairs growing out of it. It’s a called a rambutan and is a close relative of the lychee (best Pinkberry flavor) and longan.

We went to lunch at a mostly Vietnamese strip mall (or plaza as it’s called) today for father’s day and a shop selling tropical fruits caught my eye. I’m a huge fan of tropical fruits. I think it partly has to do with the fact that they look so weird, partly because they’re super sweet and partly because I grew up eating them.

I’m glad I googled these things before eating them. You have to slice the skin around the widest part of the fruit and then “crack” them open. This kind of reminds me of that scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where they eat monkey brains. The white “meat” inside is similar to lychee and longan: sweet and fleshy.

Along with rambutans, I also picked up a cherimoya (I can’t even start to describe this one) and a dragon fruit (looks like one of Daenerys’s dragon eggs from Game of Thrones). These fruits are making me really excited for Kauai where I plan on stocking up on all things tropical at the farmer’s markets.