Farmers Market Costa Rica Style

We have local farmers markets here every weekend, most local small town have the local farmers selling there home grown things, it is pretty interesting as you get some strange things for sale, they have every tropical fruit known to man kind. They have a giant bean pod called Manga, i always wanted to know how you did something with it, we bought one and Jenny told me to peel the pod and extract the beans, around the beans were a hairy skin, you put the bean in your mouth and suck the hairy skin off the bean, it was sweet and scented but it amounted to nothing more than a tiny little bit of flesh, useless. how about a giany red gooseberry thing, called Mamon Chino, translation is hilarious, Chinese sucker, it has a hairy thick peel that you have to remove and then you are left with a white flesh inner with a giant stone, it is very tasty but the flesh is full if strands that stuck in your teeth, nice to eat only now and again.





There are lots of funny little pumpkin type things that you boil as a vegetable. We don't bother with most of these but one larger one the Choyote, is nice, it looks like a pear but cooks like a potato and has an interesting flavour, now don't get me talking about potatoes as they are 6 times the price as lemons. onions are also expensive along with carrots, it is because they can only be grown on the higher slopes of the volcanoes here and that land is hghly prized but it makes the prices for these delicacies very expensive. Its a good thing that rice is the staple food here.




You see some very funny characters, these farmers are real hill billies and some days you get horses running about, they ride them like kids ride BMX, they make the horses go all crazy going sideways and backwards and prancing, all very dangerous, but that is the Costa Rican way, very dangerous.