Hello from beautiful Jamaica!
We got in on Tuesday, that day was a bit of a wash with all the travel, but Wednesday and today have been non stop fun!
The first night we were super tired, so for dinner I ordered "Rasta Pasta" from the hotel restaurant, which seemed like a pretty standard dish: pasta and some vegetables. But there was something totally unfamiliar in the pasta, it looked like small dumplings, but tasted a bit like cheese and had almost the same consistency. I thought it was mysterious, but great! I ate every last bit and made a note to take a closer look at the menu the next day to see what it was.
The next morning at breakfast, my husband and I sat with a Jamaican native and he ordered a dish that looked like scrambled eggs and vegetables. My husband ordered the same thing, and it turns out the dish had no eggs whatsoever, is actually a fruit called ackee. And that's exactly the same thing that was in my pasta the previous night!
I had never heard heard of this fruit before, and I asked some locals why. It turns out, if ackee is harvested too early, it can be poisonous, so it was banned in the United States for a while. If harvested properly, it is DELICIOUS!! I am amazed that there isn't a huge ackee vegan cheese/egg replacement industry in the United States, because it would be a huge success!
(photo: UNRIPE ackee growing on a tree in our villa grounds. Don't eat it in this state, you have to wait for it to open like a flower before harvesting the edible part.)
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