One of my last days in La Paz, Natalia and I bought all the fruits that we had been eating while we were there, and took photographs with them. We had a fruitoshoot.
Now, with the little assortment of fruits that I came home with from the market, I felt I wanted to repeat the exercise of taking still lives of edible things.
I bought lots of guava. Amazing fruit. I love the tartness. I’ve been shown the trees in the villages too, but there has never been any fruit in them. The kids eat them, my guides have told me. And they’re perfectly right to. It’s a delicious fruit.
Seedless, Burkinabe papaya, of course. I can’t get enough of papaya.
And also, Helena made me buy this thing, called a pomme cannelle, or sugar apple. Looks like a dragon’s egg, if you ask me (maybe I’ve been watching a little bit too much of Game of Thrones in the evenings here…). But, when I opened it and tasted the white flesh around the big black seeds, I realized this was just a small sibling of the chirimoya that Natalia and I developed a kind of love-hate relationship with back during my days in Bolivia. A very sweet fruit, tastes almost like pink bubblegum. Great to flavor milkshakes with. I was lucky with this specimen, too, I think. The chirimoyas in Bolivia were often over-ripe, having an aftertaste of decadence and rot. This Burkinabe sibling, though, only tasted sweet.
Combined with some home-roasted groundnuts and a piece of bread, this made for an awesome lunch.
Katja Malmborg 