To Market, To Market

Went to a farmer's market yesterday. Fascinating collection of fruits and vegetables - I wish I'd had a kitchen! Oh, and it made me miss the Monterey Farmer's Market so much. Orlando, sadly, just doesn't have a good market scene. They have farmer's markets daily in Kauai - and it isn't like the island is all that big, so it would be easy to hit one every day. Reason #651 to move there.

Anyhow, they had a couple "booths" with fresh coconuts. Yay! I'm playing fast and loose with the terminology there. They were pickup trucks with the beds full of coconuts, backed into the the stall, with a big gruff machete-wielding guy (well, would you be anything other than gruff if you had a machete in your hands?) who would violently hack away at a coconut, stab a hole in it, and give you a straw so you could suck up the water from inside. Then, when you were finished drinking, you'd hand it back to him, he'd whack away at it with his gigantic knife, cut it in half, scrape out the flesh and hand it back to you so you could eat. I mean, how these guys have all their fingers - that's skill. So of course I got one. But we took off before I finished sucking down the liquid. Which made for fun back at the hotel when I slipped my coconut into a trash bag, went out to the balcony and started thwacking my coconut against the concrete. A bit too satisfying an activity, to be perfectly honest.

Bought a bag of fresh lychees, too. Seriously, who was the first to check these things out? To look at them, all red and spiny, it would take me a while to figure out that just under that peel is some super tasty goodness. Which leads me to wonder about the first people to figure out that certain things are, in fact, food. I mean, a potato? Dig up a root from the ground and eat it? But they're marvelous! I've got to give it up for people with a sufficiently intrepid spirit to be the first one to try eating something. Because I'd be watching everyone else, and only after they didn't collapse would I give it a go. It wasn't all that long ago that tomatoes were assumed poisonous because of the plants to which they are related. Don't get me started on the dude who figured out bread. Or coffee. To quote a friend: pluck a bean off a tree, cook it, grind it, soak it in boiling water, throw away the bean and drink the water? Seriously, who thinks of these things?

Anyhow. Back to the lychees. Hawaii has some strict agricultural restrictions, and I can't blame them. It's always amusing to see the "Agricultural Amnesty Bins" as you deplane at HNL. :) So we went to the market the day before we left, which meant I had about 18h to put away my bag o' lychees because I wasn't going to be able to take them with me. While I was waiting for Brian to return the rental car, I ended up scarfing down most of them at the airport, just outside the USDA inspection station (not completely unlike a smoker huddled just outside the doorway of a building or something). I guess the ephemeral nature of Hawaiian fruit just adds to its appeal.

And just so you know, I don't think an entire fresh coconut is meant to be eaten in one sitting, at least for our mainlander stomachs. Just trust me on that...