Figs and Chayote

For me, one of the big pleasures of travel is trying different foods.

I just went to the market, where I purchased some fresh figs. As soon as I saw them I was transported to a teak sailing vessel in the Agean Sea, off the coast of Turkey. I remembered the sun, and the motion of the waves, and the bees buzzing about, and the sweet, tender juicy fig. If you have only eaten dried figs, the fresh variety is totally different. In fact, it is sort of like the difference between a raisin and a grape. You dry the latter to get the former, but you would never confuse the two. Unfortunately, the figs I bought at the market were but a pale shadow of their Turkish cousins. Seated at the table on the deck of our gulet, we bit into the fresh figs, and agreed that we had never tasted anything quite like it.

At the same market, I noticed chayote. This is a pale green squash that I encountered in Costa Rica. It has a mild flavor and a smooth texture. It's rather innocuous -- not really the kind of thing I expect anyone to love or hate. But just seeing it reminded me of dinner in the middle of the rain forest. The nearest town was only two blocks long, and was a hard 50 minute drive from the hotel. We had purchased the ingredients for dinner based on a shopping list that our guide had recited to us, while we frantically made phoenetic notes. We eagerly rushed into the shop and hopefully recited the unfamiliar words -- chayote among them. The shopkeepers were friendly and helpful, but couldn't understand why we didn't smile and say 'Si' when they gestured to the desired item. How to explain that we didn't even know what we were asking for, so we didn't know whether we had found it!

Back at the hotel, we were invited to help make dinner if we liked. I was eager to see what would be done with these mysterious foodstuffs. Each was peeled, chopped, and thrown into a huge pot. We eventually ended up with a tasty soup. As I recall, the vegetables were scooped out and served separately, but then we each received a bowl of broth into which we dumped the vegetables again. I'm not sure we did it 'right', but we enjoyed it. To this day, the sight of a chayote brings back the aroma of the soup, and the good humored amusement of the cooks who saw that we didn't even know how to prepare simple vegetables.