Chinola
In English, this is passion fruit. I'd heard of it before, but before I'd got here I'd never seen it and wasn't even quite sure what it was. It looks bizarre, covered in green and yellow specks on the outside and filled with gunky seeds on the inside, but it's actually really delicious. It's a little sour when you eat it plain, but in juice or smoothies, it adds a great flavor.
Pasta de Guyaba
I don't know if my family will remember this, but in high school for a Spanish assignment, I had to cook a Caribbean-style meal. The dessert needed guava paste, but, despite searching every specialty grocery store in a 15-minute radius of our house, I couldn't even find someone who knew what guava past was. At long last, I have discovered it. This is guava paste. It is basically a puree of dried guavas. Even though it doesn't look that appetizing, it tastes pretty good, almost like raisins but with a slightly grainier texture.
Fruta Picada
This is by far my favorite breakfast/snack: a bowl full of amazingly fresh and sweet tropical fruits. Here, there are pieces of the sweetest pineapple I've ever tasted, delicious papaya, and sweet strawberries. So good.
Aguacate
Avocados are a reoccurring theme in the food, because they play such a big role in pretty much every meal I eat here. This may be part of the reason: They are absolutely gigantic. When I saw this avocado for the first time, I actually had to ask my host mom what it was because it was so big I didn't think it could possibly be an avocado. It was the size of a small cantaloupe. My hand is here for scale, but even this cannot convey how huge it was.
Helado de Melacotón
This is homemade peach ice cream. It was delicious - it tasted like a creamy blend of peaches and vanilla.
Bolas de Sandía
This was another highly delicious snack - fresh and pretty watermelon balls in a glass bowl. To top it off, my host mom drizzled on some condensed milk, so in the end it tasted like watermelon and cream, which is just as delicious as strawberries and cream.
Batida
I think batidas (or smoothies) may be my favorite food here. They're made out of delicious fresh Dominican fruit blended with ice, milk, and a little bit of sugar, and they are incredibly refreshing on hot days (aka every day). This particular one was made out of zapote. I have no idea what zapote is in English, so I looked it up. According to the online translator it is "Sapota-tree, sapodilla, and its luscious apple-shaped fruit." As I don't think that will mean anything more to most of you than it did to me, I'll just say it was highly delicious and tasted a little bit like papaya.
Cacao
This is where chocolate comes from, and it's another thing I'd kind of known about but never really seen before I got here. Those white pods are soft, delicious fruit that surrounds each bean that, when dried and ground, becomes cocao powder. Although most of the time the fruit is just used for the cocao beans, the white part is edible. When my host family showed me cocoa for the first time, they told me I could eat it and told me to take one of the white pods and eat it. With some difficulty, as the white pods are quite slippery, I got one out of them out, popped it in my mouth, and started chewing. Immediately, my host parents started laughing and saying, "No! You're not supposed to chew it!" I found out why a split second later, when I broke through the white part and was overwhelmed by the disgusting taste of pure bitterness that is a raw cocao bean. A little later, though, I had the chance to try it again and, if you just suck on the white part and don't bit into it, it's actually a really delicious, sweet, mild flavor.
Along with your Dominican child, you should bring back a giant avocado. We could make a month's supply of guacamole!
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