HILO FARMER'S MARKET, OH MY!

Saturday is one of two big Farmer's Market days in Hilo. We awoke at dawn and started our day with lattes (yes, we brought our stove top espresso maker with us) and local papaya and banana. We can't get bananas that taste like this on the mainland. Yum! You'll notice that my fruit has a sprinkling of granola on it. We bought the house brand from one of the local natural food stores and it is delicious! It contains cashews, pumpkin seeds and goji berries. Goji berries are also called wolfberries and have been grown in the Yellow River valley of China for over 600 years.


We headed downtown to the farmer's market around 8 AM. The first thing that caught my eye were these exotic looking dragon fruits. I haven't yet tried them so can't tell you what they taste like.


We bought some of these stubby plantains from this lady so we could have them for breakfast. But, we didn't wait and had some with our Ono (white fish) dinner. They were like eating candy.

As you can imagine, tropical flowers are very plentiful and not too expensive here. These anthurium are quite ubiquitous here.

And, Hawaii is the Orchid Isle.



These wonderful fruits are similar to a tomato but a little sour. We had something similar in Ecuador, called uvias. The man who grows them said they are much hardier in this climate than tomatoes and can be used in salads in the same way.

Jim and I had a grand old chat with the young man who creates these salsas.

Anyone who knows Jim at all knows that there can hardly be a salsa hot enough. The creator of Lava Salsa experiments with all sorts of flavors and one of his salsas has no fewer than 7 different chilis in it. Needless to say, we bought 5 different salsas. Look how pretty they are.

The pink one has beets in it (along with garlic, cream cheese, etc. YUM!) The upper left is the chipotle one and it has a really good bite to it. The yellow one in the middle is a fruit salsa with passion fruit, papaya, habanero peppers, etc. We had to go right to the fish market and buy some fresh fish to eat with the fruit salsa.

The other part of the farmer's market is the craft market. There are a few booths with imported stuff but most is made by the artist who is behind the booth. We had lots of good conversations with the artists. This is Eide and I had to buy this lovely print from her to go with my Hawaiiana collection.

We had a really good time at the farmer's market and managed to spend about 4 hours there. We had to make several trips back to the car to deposit our purchases. The next market is Wednesday. We'll be back!

Next, a Bengal Tiger.

Audrey