A simple tropical breakfast is exactly what I needed after the past few days of high-fat, high-sugar, birthday related eating… It was extremely wet on Sunday morning and I opted to have a simple fruit platter and some hot chocolate with broas for breakfast. The fruit platter included some early seasonal mangosteen that weren’t in top form but the flavor is so unique and I rarely eat them fresh so they did just fine. Several incredibly sweet rambutan which are in season, half a humongous Cebu mango that was perfectly ripe and a small banana rounded out my fruit plate. I’m sure if you are sitting in Ireland, France, Canada, Japan or elsewhere in the temperate world you will appreciate this selection of local fruits…
After the fruit, I had a nice cup of hot chocolate and what better to 
dip in the hot chocolate than fresh broas from Bohol?! Yum. It must be a childhood thing but I do love dipping the crisp broas into the hot chocolate just long enough to get the taste of hot chocolate but not get the broas too soggy… it’s a very quick dip. I can easily eat a dozen broas on their own so to limit my intake I put just six on my breakfast plate and placed that beside my steaming cup of hot chocolate. I ran out of broas before I even consumed 1/4th of the cup but that’s how it always ends up, no matter how many broas I put out!
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I miss all those fruits MM! The only rambutans I can get are canned in heavy syrup. Mangoes cost about $5 dollars here and are manibalang (not ripe, not green – just in between. YUCK!). Forget about looking for mangosteens. It’s been more than 7 years when I tasted mangosteens. I swear I can eat a basketful of those delectable fruits. Sigh, the only thing I can get are bananas (senoritas that cost 3 dollars a bunch – YiKES! and the DOLE ones). No saging saba either nor saing leaves. Take me home, country road….
you’re so right about the quick dip for the broas – two seconds more and you have to drink them along with the chocolate. those rambutans must be from laguna, no? and the mangosteens,too, i guess…just wait till the marang and durian and mangosteen and rambutan and lanzones come to town! (yabang ba ng taga-davao?) hehe…we’re not even sure how good the yield will be this year..
aaaah! mangosteen! it’s right up there in my list of all-time favorite fruits!
they are not available fresh here in california, unfortunately. so everytime i go to vancouver i ALWAYS make it a point to buy mangosteen.
now i’m jealous. :)
Over the last few years of straddling the equator I perceive that tropical fruits are generally sweeter and more intensely flavoured than temperate ones. It seems that it is only worth waiting for the whole summer long if you own the peach tree and you are going to pick the fruit at its peak otherwise you might as well open a jar of Del Monte or a bottle of schnaps. Here in Canada, few tropical fruits have not reached the Asian markets. In fact, I can only readily think of marang among the commercially grown ones that have not breached the border but the ones that have are definitely out of their elements (not to mention expensive) and cannot really come close to the concentration of aroma, sweetness and texture of the fruits consumed close to where they were harvested. They are like passwords, change one tiny element and it fails to do it for me.
A Jamaican boss’s last ditch effort to persuade me to come and join him for a holiday was to entice me with the gorgeous exotic bananas they grow in Jamaica. My tact was sorely tried therefore when he finally mentioned that they are called “lakatan.â€
that lacatan story is so funny, apicio. about marang, i don’t think it will ever make it over any borders because marang has a very short shelf-life. you may only keep them two days, tops. does not freeze well, either…it turns all mushy and watery while thawing. during marang season, folks here eat whole marang by holding one by the stem, like a giant turkey drumstick, and munching away on the fruit.
I still have to gather enough strength to eat either marang or durian. Am I missing some thing? I have bad experience with local mangosteens. They were sour unlike the sweet ones I tried in Singapore. I hope I can buy sweet ones here. MM, hope you can come up with great breakfast food. I find breakfast challenging to prepare. I run out of food to serve for breakfast. I’m bored with the usual sinangag, pan de sal regulars. Since Pancake House’s quality has deteriorated, I belabored with a pancake recipe which turned out well. Hope you can share more breakfast fares.
Exactly what I fear Millet. If and when the shippers develop a process to export them, they would have made compromises with its point of harvest and played around with the ambient temperature and God knows what exotic gases they should be kept in in transit and by the time they hit the trays here their cheerful appealing good looks will just be hiding flesh that is wan in colour, weak in aroma and bland in taste, not even the slight suggestion of what they ought to be although still frighteningly expensive.
Better learn to preserve them in syrup and congeal or crystallize them in sugar when they are most plentiful and cheap and amaze yourself with the whiff of paradise when you open the jar long after their season has passed or you are far and away at the opposite part of the globe.
I could easily get fresh rambutan, mangosteen and lychees at the Asian Market here, expensive but worth it. About the cousin of the jackfruit, I could get durian which come frozen, it does not compare at all from eating it fresh from the market. They are good enough for making durian pies however.
Let’s not even talk about mangoes, the Mexican varieties does not even compare to Philippine ones and the US market is saturated with Mexican mangoes, in fact where I live it’s the only mangoes you’ll ever get. Yuck! My previous boss who was introduced to the local mangoes on his first year to the Philippines would actually travel back during the mango season just too have a taste of the “heavenly” mangoes as he call it, for him it was all worth it! I don’t blame him a bit, if you’ve tasted heaven, why go back to those dreadful Mexican or Brazilian mangoes, which are equally dreadful. Yuck!
About the bananas, I’ve always love the “lakatan” kind and I could easily eat a bunch of them. Too bad they are not known in the US as well.
Another fruit I miss is lansones, I’ll do about anything right now for a basket full of lansones. LOL!
Anyway, that’s one heavenly breakfast, MM.
no, no, apicio, the only way is to come over to mindanao late next month till late october. you know how different canned cherries taste from fresh? or worse, maraschinos (were they ever cherries once at all in their past lives?). some fruits really don’t take too kindly to manipulation – about the worse they can take is a gentle washing; marang is one of them, and it does not even need washing! i dare not insist on davao, but i say mindanao when i talk of fruit, lest i hear the rest of the island in a collective howl of protest, since kidapawan does have the best rambutan, camiguin the sweetest lanzones, and jolo does have the best, THE ABSOLUTE BEST durian and mangosteen..native varieties, mostly wild and organic. corinne, our mangosteen in davao is sweet, although there are sweet-sour varieties.
Gosh, Millet, you make Mindanao (or Davao?) sound like paradise! It’s just so sad that it has lots of fruits to offer and only Millet can eat them! hahaha! Patikim!!! I agree, Philippine mangoes are the best…my absolute favorite…I’m yellowish na nga eh… but I ate a variety in Vietnam that came so close.
For this past week I’ve eating a lot of fruits: plums and nectarines, mangosteen and mango (haha!), satsuma and dragon fruit.. did I miss something? Oh yeah, mangosteen again.. ;)