Brought Home a Dragon Fruit

(posted by Minda)

Bill and I spent the last several days at the ASJA conference in New York City, and part of yesterday in Chinatown. If you like Chinatown, but have confined yourself mostly to Mott Street, I highly recommend going a bit further South and East to East Broadway underneath the ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. There you will find no Western looking people at all, no one who speaks any English (though we saw thousands of electronic English/Chinese dictionaries, so apparently they're all trying to learn) and a society that seems to be entirely of and for its Chinese immigrant population.

We wandered the malls under the bridge ramp; I had to go back to find a jeweller who had sold me a 24-karat gold chain the last time I was in New York. It's unfashionable, I guess, but I love that deep-yellow, high karat gold that only Asians seem to wear. That mall also had a huge produce vendor outside. There were stacks of mangosteens, which I was able to identify, having seen them in the Philippines, and a huge stack of something else I couldn't identify: large egg-shaped fruit that were purplish-pink with green leaf-like protrusions. I really wanted to take a picture of the pile but wasn't sure it would be appeciated, and indeed a few minutes later Bill was pointedly told to stop video-recording inside the adjacent grocery store.

Anyhow, we asked what they were. A hefty communication challenge ensued but in the end we understood: Dragon Fruit. http://thaifood.about.com/od/introtothaicooking/ss/dragonfruit.htm

Very sweet, she said. So we bought one. Pricy too. We're going to have it shortly for one of our absurdly late breakfasts. Stay tuned.