Guava

I ate my first ripe guava today.

The Bangladeshis quite like to start picking their fruits early and eat them in their sour state with salt and a bit of juice from a crushed green chilli.  They then ditch the salt and chilli once they've got more mature (and, hence, sweet) fruit.  This is what happened with the mangoes, which I couldn't quite get a taste for as a savoury item.  It also felt like a criminal waste to be eating them early, instead of just being a bit more patient and letting them get nice and juicy and sweet.

Anyway, guavas are actually really nice with salt (I skip the chilli).  You can buy them from street stalls peeled, cut into a flower shape (like the old flower carrot at the Chinese restaurant), shoved on the end of a stick like a toffee apple and sprinkled with salt and chilli powder.  They have flesh that looks like a cucumber, but firmer (see example on the right in above picture).  A nice bitter taste that becomes more enjoyable with each bite.  At 5tk a pop, that's a pretty good value snack.  I've been hopping into lots of guavas, especially during quiet times at the therapy centre when the therapy assistant will climb the nearby tree barefoot to get a few guavas to munch on until the next patient comes.

Today, we got served guavas as a snack during a meeting.  I was puzzled.  Skin on.  No salt.  No chilli.  No stick.  No fancy work with a knife to make them look pretty.  I asked one of my colleagues if it was okay to eat the skin.  "Skin - many vitamins," she declared, before biting into hers.  I did the same, to find that the flesh was really soft, sweet and had taken on a pinkish tinge (see example on left, above - much lighter pink though).  Delicious!  I've always been intrigued by apple and guava juice, having never seen or eaten a fresh guava in my life.  Those early guavas had confused me somewhat cos they weren't sweet or pink like the pictures on juice cartons.  But these in-season guavas are another tick in the column of things to love about Bangladesh.  Doesn't quite balance out the psycho phone stalkers from yesterday's post though.

(I can't believe I just wrote that much about bloody guavas.  I bet whoever is reading this can't believe they just bloody read it all either.)