Our May Trip: Florida

We've been lucky as all get-out this year. First, we got to stay at my uncle's timeshare on Captiva Island, Florida. Uncle Tom offered his week (at the end of May) to my parents, and they asked Sue and me if we'd like to go with them. They didn't have to ask us twice!

The biggest deal there is the beach. Captiva and Sanibel islands are world famous for the huge numbers of shells that get washed up on their white sand beaches. That Captiva has mainly private homes and resorts means that the beaches are people-quiet and clean. Which is to say, relaxing and beautiful.

There really are gobs of shells on these beaches. This is me, performing the Captiva Island version of the famous "Sanibel stoop." It's hard to walk on the beaches without pausing every so often to stoop down to examine something. Here, I'm rinsing the sand off of some treasure the very first night we got there. (Those are my flip-flops in my pocket, by the way.)

On one of the days, Sue and I took a short day cruise northward to Cabbage Key, where one of the prime things for tourists (like us) to see is the restaurant. The place got famous because it provided Jimmy Buffet the inspiration for his "Cheeseburger in Paradise" song. Naturally, one of us had to get the cheeseburger.

They serve libations there, too. (Oh no I dih-unht!) (Oh yes I did!)

On our previous trips to Captiva, we had not visited the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, which has a natural history museum, several hiking trails, and native plant nursery. Very much worth seeing! I wish we'd gone there sooner. And what a great idea to combine the native plant nursery and sales with the environmental education: as the green world goes, the rest of nature follows.

This (below) is simply a view from along one of the trails.

Here's a view of Pine Island Sound, taken during the aforementioned boat trip.

Manatees are pretty much emblematic of southern Florida, and it seems that whenever one of these "sea cows" lifts its cute little nose out of the water to catch a breath, people gather around and watch. I'm glad that the education about manatee conservation has reached so many people.

Another new part of this trip was visiting the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford Winter Estates in Ft. Myers. The homes and grounds (actually, an arboretum) are well cared for, and the museum and its staff are professional and informative. Here's our docent/tour leader. She did a great job!

There is a statue of Edison under the huge banyan tree that was apparently planted in 1925. It's one of the largest banyans in the United States. Its lower limbs reach out sideways and send down aerial shoots like a mangrove tree. This single tree constitutes its own small "forest."

Here's the statue of Ford, which is located near his winter home. The homes were indeed fun to see, but I have to admit, I got more excited about the many tropical plants all over the grounds!

As with the last time we visited Florida, we made a trip to the Everglades. You know you're getting close when you stop at a rest stop and, when reentering the car, a half dozen mosquitoes fly in with you! This mosquito is squashed against my driver's side window. Well? It wouldn't leave on its own.

Another new place this trip was the Fruit and Spice Park, which is part of the Miami-Dade County parks system. It's in Homestead, Florida, and it's incredibly fun for anyone interested in food, botany, agriculture, or gardening. Yes, bug spray was a good thing, but then, what other botanical garden lets you eat (indeed, encourages you to eat!) the fruits lying on the ground?

I could go on and on about this place, but I'd better hold off. But if you're headed that way, make sure you visit it.

Banana flowers!

Bananas! (Yeah, they sent us away with some; it was late in the day and they were closing up shop: "Here, take these back to your motel with you.") I'm pretty sure this is the variety called "apple bananas," which you can purchase online at Robert Is Here. I had never eaten a banana that tasted so much like a . . . fruit. They were sort of creamy and juicy, but certainly not "overipe." A revelation!

Folks, that Fruit and Spice Park had jackfruit trees, too! You can see the huge, watermelon-sized fruits forming on the trees! They even let you stand under them! (For those of you who are into such things, the jackfruit is in the same family as the mulberry and the Osage orange. The jackfruit is more or less like a big huge edible Osage orange! Another point of interest: Jackfruit is the original flavoring for Juicy Fruit chewing gum!) These jackfruits were forming close to the ground, but others were high in the tree!

This here is a baby pineapple. A variegated or red-tinged one, I think.

. . . And a dragonfruit! Easily the coolest-looking of the tropical fruits down there, because of the nearly florescent magenta pulp color and the nifty green and red outer rind. How does it taste? It's actually pretty mild. The texture (including that of the edible little seeds) is a lot like a kiwi fruit. They're available June through November, and if you keep an eye out for them, your supermarket might get a few in the "nifty gourmet stuff" section of their produce department.

Then, the Everglades. This year, while we traveled, Sue and I read Marjory Stoneman Douglas's Everglades: River of Grass. It's pretty intense, but it really is a great crash course in what the Everglades are all about. Recommended reading for any American. You have to read it! You just have to!

This year we finally drove all the way to the last "stop" on the Everglades National Park scenic road, the Flamingo area, where land and water are no longer clearly defined. We took a guided natural history boat tour there (again, very worthwhile), and saw lots of neat stuff. Here, for example, was one of the baby crocodiles we saw!

Yes, a crocodile! At the very southern tip of the Everglades, there's an overlap in the ranges of the American alligator and the American crocodile! Ain't he cute?

Well, that's all for now. We had two days between the Florida trip and the one to California. Soon, I'll post some pictures from San Francisco!

Sapodillas 101

Hello! Today I’m going to tell you about the other “new” fruit I brought home from Florida: a sapodilla, the fruit of Manilkara zapota. I bought it underripe from Robert Is Here (what a fun fruit stand!) and got instructions as to how to tell when it’s ready to eat. It was ready about a week after we got home.




Remember I told you about the football-shaped sapote in my last post? Well this little potato-like “spud” is in the same family, the Sapotaceae, and like the sapote, the plant (a tree) has a sticky, latexy sap.

In fact, the sapodilla was for years a major source of “chicle,” which was the primary ingredient in American manufactured chewing gum. Sapodilla is sometimes called “chicle tree.” Did you know that even the Mayans chewed chicle? They had the original Chiclets!

We don’t know this fruit much in North America, but I have no idea why. You can ship it rather green and hard, and it ripens just fine on a shelf. It’s not hard to figure out when it’s edible. It’s not hard to cut up and eat. And lots of other people in the world love it!

With the thin skin and small seeds, there isn’t much waste, either.




It is native to Central America and has been cultivated a very long time. Today, it’s grown in its home turf (especially in Mexico), plus in the Philippines and tropical south Asia, including extensive cultivations in coastal India, where it is called baramasi, chikoo, or tree potato. (“Chikoo”: I love it! Say it aloud, and you will love it, too!)

As with most tree fruits in cultivation for centuries, there are numerous cultivars with different flavors, shapes, maturation times, and other characteristics. I don’t know what particular variety of sapodilla I ended up with, but here is what it was like.

Pictures are worth thousands of words.

Superficially, it looked a lot like an Irish potato. The skin is a lot like a kiwi’s, only without the fuzz. Yeah, more potato-like—you know how potatoes can be smooth and kinda scurfy at the same time.




Inside, the flesh was a lot like a ripe pear’s. There’s a graininess to it (stone cells, I guess), but given enough ripening it is plenty soft enough. I can see where it would be problematic if you cut it up while it was still hard.

I understand that unripe fruits can leak milky latex. Bitter stuff. So make sure it’s ripe.

The usual deal is: Cut it in half (along the “equator”), then spoon the flesh out and eat out of the cup of the rind. A lot of people eat kiwis this way.

I wanted to include it in a little fruit bowl, so I cut it into chunks. It came apart naturally into nine segments, easy to pry apart with my fingers. It was pretty neat.




I picked out all the seeds, which are curious little things. One source I read said there are usually three to six of them, and sure enough, mine had six. Only two had matured; the other four were shrunken, aborted little things.




In the pockets where the seeds rested were little white chunks of hardened latex. I ended up pitching those latex flecks along with the peel and aborted seeds, but come to think of it, I should have tried chewing that stuff. Oh well. I know there will be a next time.




All the stuff I’ve read cautions sapodilla-eaters not to swallow a seed by accident. Supposedly, the little “hook” can make the thing get lodged in your throat.




“Supposedly” . . . but the “hooks” on the seeds I got 1) weren’t hooked, they were straight; and 2) had rather flexible tips. And anyway, they were large enough you’d have to really be scarfing that fruit down in order to mistakenly swallow one of these.

The flavor? Well, Robert Is Here described it as “like pears with brown sugar”—and that’s actually pretty close.

I guess that not a lot of people cook with these. From what I’ve been able to find on the Web, the most popular way of eating them is raw, alone or combined with other ingredients. Such as other fresh fruits.




The next most common thing to do with them, I guess, is to puree or grind the flesh into a paste to use in breads, drinks and smoothies, sauces, and other preparations. Most recipes don’t leave the sapodilla flesh intact; even a recipe for sapodilla “pie” mashes the sapodilla and incorporates it into a creamy pie.

Anyway, like the mamey sapote we brought home (which was very very different, despite some external similarities, the family relationship, and similar names), this sapodilla was tasty and fun, packed with culinary promise. Perhaps someday it will take its place beside the mangoes, passion fruit, pineapples, and papayas in my beloved “weird fruit” section of the supermarket.

Mamey Sapote Ice Cream

I just told you about our trip to Florida, right? And how we stopped at the famous tropical fruit stand in Homestead called Robert Is Here—right? So here’s more of the story.

Yes, I did get a few “new” fruits to carry home with me on the plane! I selected two different underripe fruits and got ripening tips from one of the friendly Robert Is Here staff.

One of those fruits was a sapote, a.k.a. mamey sapote, a.k.a. Pouteria sapota. Because I’m a botany junkie, I have to give you a little background on the plant. If all you want is the ice cream recipe, then scroll down to the bottom—but I contend you’ll appreciate your food more if you learn more about it.




Mamey sapote is a tree fruit native to southern Mexico but which is now grown and loved throughout Central America and the Caribbean. And south Florida. Latin Americans enjoy eating it raw or made into a variety of frozen treats—Wikipedia says: “milkshakes, smoothies, ice cream, and fruit bars.” The same source describes the fruit’s flavor as “a combination of pumpkin, sweet potato, and maraschino cherries with the texture of an avocado.”

The fruit I purchased was shaped something like a football, with a mildly rough-textured rind. I selected one that was still pretty firm and underripe, so I could transport it home in my backpack and still have time (about a week) for it to ripen.




I wonder: Why in the heck isn’t this fruit carried in more supermarkets? It can be shipped firm and underripe, and it’s tasty and easy to work with. (Send me out there. I’ll stand in the produce department, handing out samples!)

Here are some pictures of what’s inside the fruit. I highly recommend looking at this Web site, which is from the book Fruits of Warm Climates, by Julia F. Morton. Its treatment of mamey sapote is much more interesting than Wikipedia’s brief “intro-primer.”

The bit about the texture being “like an avocado” is spot-on, even though the avocado is in a different family (the laurels) instead of the Sapotaceae (sap-oh-TAY-see-ee), to which this species belongs.

One of the hallmarks of the Sapotaceae is that most members have a milky latex sap. The chicle tree is another member, and its latex became the original chewing gum. (Hey, care for a Chiclet?) Chicle sap was still being used for chewing gum until the 1960s, when gum companies switched to cheaper, synthetic sources of, well, rubber.

So keeping in mind that the sap of this thing is latex-ey, make sure your sapote is nice and ripe before you cut it open. The guy at Robert Is Here told me to wait until it’s quite soft and starts getting kind of shrunken and wrinkled—which I did.

It turned out beautifully. The buttery-smooth flesh was salmon-orange and scoopable with a spoon. There was one big, lovely, shiny seed in the center. It did remind me of cutting an avocado.






We tried some of the fruit plain and in a bowl, and yes, it had the same kind of rich, sweet taste that pumpkins and sweet potatoes have, but with an extra “fruity” quality. A very distinct flavor. Personally, I thought it was kind of “strong” for my tastes. Maybe adding a dash of lime juice, like you can do with papayas, would help a newbie like me get used to it. Or just including it with other fruits on a platter.

The fruit, which was about 8 or 9 inches long, yielded about 2–3 cups of flesh, I’d say. Taking a cue from the Latinos, here’s what I did with the rest of the sapote.




First, I ran the sapote flesh through my food mill, using the smallest holes, to remove extra fibers and make it all smooth. Then I put it in the fridge and drove to the store for ice cream ingredients!

The following recipe is a combination of a frozen yogurt recipe and a “simple” ice cream recipe, which both came from the booklet that accompanied my Cuisinart ice cream maker. Simple: It uses no eggs and requires no cooking. It makes about a quart of ice cream.

By incorporating the vanilla yogurt into the recipe, I added creaminess while decreasing fat. It also added a certain yogurty tanginess that combines well (I think) with the sapote flavor. (Instead of brown sugar and cinnamon, I prefer sour cream or plain yogurt on my sweet potatoes—and I guess that’s kind of the same thing.)

(One final word: This recipe would work well with dang near any fruit pulp you want to use. It’s not rocket science!)




Sapote Ice Cream

2/3 c. heavy cream (chilled)
1/3 c. whole milk (chilled)
1 c. low-fat vanilla yogurt (use the costlier, creamier kind!) (chilled)
3/4 c. sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
1 c. sapote pulp (that’s been run through a food mill or pressed through a sieve to remove fibers) (chilled is a good idea)

Dissolve the sugar into the liquid ingredients, being careful not to whip the cream (indeed, you could just stir in the cream after mixing the sugar), and then fold in the sapote pulp.

Freeze in your ice cream freezer per instructions.




I use a Cuisinart ice cream maker, and this recipe makes about as much ice cream as the thing will hold. Since I had about 2 cups of processed pulp to work with, I made two of these batches, each a day apart (the Cuisinart’s freezer-bowl has to be refrozen between uses).

Robert Is Here: The Frugivore in Paradise

The last full day we were in Florida was the day we woke up in Kendall (a western suburb of Miami—on the highway) and drove through Homestead to Everglades National Park. If you’ve never been to the Everglades, you should make a point of going.




Unlike other major national parks, which mostly seem to center around some kind of spectacular rock formations (mountains or canyons), this one shows you geological flatness. On the road leading into the park, there are signs giving you the elevation: “2 feet”; “3 feet”; “4 feet” . . . However, just a tiny change in elevation means the difference between swamps, prairies (“glades”), pine scrub, and mahogany and mangrove hammocks.




So although it doesn’t offer the mountaineer much to chew on, it is an excellent place to feed your inner biology nerd, to go botanizing, bird-watching, and much more. Including alligator-watching! (And yeah, if you want to see the nifty tree snails, you’ll need sunscreen and bug repellent!)




Apart from the day when all the hydromedusae and comb jellies were in the water near where we were staying at Captiva, this was my favorite day of the whole trip. Yes, because of the wonderful biological diversity of the ’Glades . . . but in particular because of our stop at the nationally known fruit stand called Robert Is Here.




Robert Is Here is a fruit stand located in Homestead, Florida, at a prominent intersection for visitors headed to the Everglades—where westbound FL Route 9336 turns due south onto local road SW 192nd Ave. (There! Now you can find it on Google maps!) It’s surrounded by orchards and crop fields.




There’s a fun story about the name of the stand—it started when its owner was six and sitting at his dad’s produce stand, and not selling anything. Then, a “light bulb” lit up above his dad’s head and he made a sign, “Robert Is Here”; the next day he hung it up next to the sweet little boy. The advertising worked, because people noticed young Robert and bought up his produce. That’s how it got started, back in the early sixties.

This was actually my second time to visit Robert Is Here (and the Everglades). My first visit was in July 1975, when I was nine! On that trip, we saw the liftoff of the Apollo portion of the Apollo-Soyuz spacecraft linkup (remember the handshake in space?). My uncle was living in Florida at that time and invited my family to visit. (By the way, in the picture, that’s him waving from his sweet little Jensen-Healey.)




I have foggy memories of that visit, as they are all mixed up with the rest of my impressions of the entire trip. I do remember that Robert Is Here sold curiosities such as starfruit, mangoes, papayas, and watermelon soda. Even then, the tropical fruit stand seemed as much of a tourist attraction to me as the national park.

Now it’s thirty-five years later, and Robert Is Here has been featured in lots of national media, including my beloved Gourmet Magazine (May 2003), which singled it out as one of the few places in this country to get a decent selection of truly delicious mango varieties.




(Foodie geek: since Gourmet’s demise, and there were no "recent" issues to bring along, I plumbed my back issues for a few magazines to take with me on the plane. The Florida Keys issue, May 2003, was one I brought on this trip. How appropriate!)

Not surprisingly, Robert Is Here has expanded in the last thirty-five years. They offer a luscious selection of seasonal tropical fruits and cool beverages to a curious, hungry, and often overheated tourist crowd.

By the way, there are a ton of fruit stands in the area, many of them apparently owned by Cuban immigrants, and they probably offer lower prices, but I suspect most of them don’t offer the huge extravaganza of products, or the “experience.”




Mangoes are a specialty, but Robert Is Here offers a huge range of tropical specialties—avocados, sapodillas, papayas, key limes, tamarind, water coconuts, and on and on. When we were there, the oranges and most other citrus weren’t in season. But they do sell homemade key lime pies!




And their milkshakes were incredible! There was a big sign for key lime milkshakes, but you could get just about any of their fruits mixed in. Sue and Dad had the key lime shakes, as advertised. The creaminess of the shake made it taste kind of like a key lime pie—a stupefyingly delicious combination of tart and sweet, juicy and creamy. I can’t think about it without my mouth watering.

Mom had a strawberry-key-lime milkshake. I didn’t try that, but you can imagine how yummy that must have been. When it came time to order, I was in a momentary crisis. I wanted to try all of them—they had something like twenty different fruits posted, most of which were curiosities like sapote, dragonfruit, longan, and so forth.




“Jackfruit” caught my eye, so I ordered that.




I’d never tasted jackfruit before. I was drawn to them in the fruit stand because of their tremendous size and unusual bumpy rind. While waiting for our order to be made, I scored a sample of jackfruit as some of the workers were cutting up one for a customer. (They will cut the fruit for you—how nice is that? Not every tourist is adept at dismantling novel fruits, you know.) It tasted like . . . smooth, creamy pineapple, or pineapple without the “bite.” The texture was also like pineapple, but more slippery. Or maybe like a banana crossed with a pineapple.

Botany nerds: Jackfruit is in the Moraceae (mor-AY-cee-ee), the mulberry family. So is our local Osage orange (which is not edible but shows promise as a source of mosquito repellent). The interior of the jackfruit fruit is structurally very similar to that of the Osage orange (if you’ve ever broken one of those in half)—both are “multiple fruits.” Jackfruit has been cultivated in India for perhaps six thousand years.

Anyway, after my little sample, I was confident of my choice! In the milkshake, the jackfruit was mellow, and it added an intriguing flavor that was just . . . “tropical.” Yum!

Sorry that there are no pictures of the actual milkshakes, but it was starting to rain, we’d spent the whole day traipsing around the Everglades, and we still needed to drive clear across the southern part of the state and get to Naples in time to find our motel and get dinner.

And I haven’t even told you about their fabulous selection of honeys. They had samples available of each. There were “flavored” honeys (ginger, key lime, tangerine, cinnamon, etc.) as well as those whose flavor actually comes from the nectar source. Of the latter, I was intrigued by the mangrove honey, as well as the goldenrod, palmetto, avocado, mango, and (of course!) tupelo. (We brought home some mangrove honey.)




And then there are the preserves, jellies, salsas, dressings, and other relishes and sauces. All this stuff, including the fresh fruits (when in season), is available by mail order: www.robertishere.com.

There was more—live music, some lovely parrots to visit out back, vintage trucks in front, and flowers and souvenirs for sale. And yes, Robert himself “was there,” cheerfully helping customers and offering advice alongside his many young employees.

Of course, the biggest attraction for me was the heart of the business: the incredible array of strange new fruits. Such possibilities! I wanted to bring home a sample of each, even a big ol’ jackfruit!

Decisions, decisions. (I’ll let you visit their Web site to see the list and all the pictures.)

What a fun place!

What’s Up?

I’m home, that’s what. And I haven’t been posting like I’ve wanted to. The problem is, I went on a vacation, then came back, and of course the price for all that nice relaxation and stuff was the predictable reckoning when I came home: Work, work, work.

The truly hot Missouri summertime weather finally hit while we were out of town. The yard has transformed into a jungle, complete with mosquitoes and chiggers. Even the grass has been pretty much out of hand, since it’s been raining so often.

To make things even nuttier around here, we’ve had some interior finishing experts at our house to destroy and then rebuild our sunporch ceiling. So all the stuff from the sunporch had to be moved; the second floor is a maze of furniture. You might remember me talking about the sunporch ceiling, and all that mess before . . . it got a lot worse before it got better.




But I’ve been up to some fun things, too, since I’ve been back. I’ve even taken some pictures to share with y’all, but I just haven’t found the time to, you know, simply write about any of it.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with all my snapshots of Florida, but here are a few, so you can get an idea of what the vacation was all about. We stayed on Captiva Island. (No, there was no oil washing up yet when we were there, though all the folks there were getting ready for it.)




Yeah, it was an excellent trip. We had perfect weather, and we spent most of the time on the beach or in restaurants or museums or sight-seeing.




The last two days of the trip, we traveled east to visit the Seminole reservation and then to Everglades National Park.




Alligators, dolphins, manatees were seen. Sea turtles were seen, too, and one night, a sea turtle laid her eggs on the beach not far from where we were staying.




And I had forgotten how, even though you may not move from the same beach location over a period of several days, the ocean gives you new things every day. One day, it’s calm and warm; another, it’s cool and choppy. Or one day, the ocean’s full of weird little jellylike hydromedusae; the next, it’s throwing all kinds of seaweed up on the beach, and another day there’s a large amount of some particular kind of shell being washed up.




And I had forgotten how the ocean reaches out from its depths and hands its objects out onto the beach, and then a few hours later reaches along the slant of the beach and drags it all back.

If you live near a coast, you are truly lucky, and you should visit the beach as much as possible, I mean it. Even if it’s a cold, windy place with a lot of rocks instead of sugar-white sand. Just do it.




Anyway, it was a good vacation, and now I’m back, struggling to retain some of that relaxation, the joy of discovery, the broadened mind, the readjusted notion of what is “important.” Alas, it’s fading fast.




So much to do . . .