A lot gets me excited about food. But I think that in the food world, when you push pastries aside, fruit gets me really, really excited, especially tropical fruit. Sometimes, I get sad when I think about all the fruit that’s considered “normal” in the U.S., like apples, bananas, and oranges, when there’s such a vast variety of fruit across the world that the average American would never even fathom. And even within the banana world, there are over 600+ varieties (most found in India) that are far more complex in both texture and taste that they just make the Cavendish banana (that’s your mainstream supermarket banana variety) seem blander than bland. I never rank countries, but I will say that of all the places we have visited, Colombia was definitely the biggest eye-opener when it came to the sheer variety of exotic fruits that exist in the world. I still reminisce about all the incredible fruit we ate there and all the different textures, tastes, and colors.

Unfortunately, we came in the fruit low season to Chile, which meant that the prized fruit (for me) that is quite “normal” here in Chile, the cherimoya, was not in season. During high season in Chile, you can find cherimoyas for the equivalent of a couple of USD per kilo. But as we browsed the fresh food markets in Santiago, they were nowhere to be found. I asked a fruit vendor, and they told us that cherimoyas are not available until November or December.

On the other hand, what I did find that we enjoy were fresh passion fruit (maracuya) and pomegranates. The pomegranates were huge and slightly cheaper than the ones we’d buy during our autumns in New York. And the passion fruits… wee, the passion fruits were fat, fragrant, and CHEAP. You can get a pound of passion fruit for the equivalent of $1 USD. I was so excited! We didn’t have too much time left in Chile, so I only bought four fat passion fruit to share. Kaia ended up not remembering it and refused to try it, but that just meant more for the two of us to eat.

I’d wash the passion fruit in our hotel bathroom and bring them down to breakfast to cut. And these were at their peak, with pulp that was bright orange, thick, and extremely fragrant and sweet, with a good hit of tartness. The pulp was almost syrupy thick! They were nearly FILLED with pulp, unlike some previous sadder ones we’d gotten that only had a little bit, while the shell was much larger. We definitely scored big with these babies.

So while we didn’t get to enjoy fresh cherimoyas, we did get to have cherimoya juice, and we also got some of the best passion fruits of our lives. And the pomegranate was also quite perfect, with almost all the seeds perfect and plump. We shared with Kaia, but let’s be honest… she definitely ate the majority of this heavy pomegranate and kept demanding more and more. So really, she reluctantly shared with us!