When we spent our year in Alaska it was hard to find fresh fruits and veggies without driving 45 min to Kenai in the winter, and 2 hours to Fairbanks during our time in the interior in the summer. We even tried out Full Circle when we spent our 6 months in Healy since we were so far away from a grocery store, it was great but pretty expensive. Now, we have taken a complete turn around! Every single day on Kauai you are able to find a local Farmers Market! Each one has different things to offer so each we try to visit different ones to try a variety of new fruits and veggies. You would be surprised at all the exotic fruits available!
Above are pictured Sour Sop, Mango Stein and Breadfruit, just a few of the exotic fruits we have come across. The sour sop might look intimidating but it is a amazing superfood that makes the most incredible juice I’ve ever tried! We have yet to try a breadfruit, its next on our list to try but has tremendous health benefits and can be eaten and used in a variety of different ways. Now for the mango stein, it might look like an ordinary fruit, similar to the look of a plum but it is anything but ordinary! You open it up and eat the inside pods, they melt in your mouth and have a very sweet flavor, kind of like a mix between vanilla ice-cream, strawberry and a grape. They have amazing health benefits too!
One of the best things besides trying new fruits and veggies is being able to get some of our favorite fruits whenever we want! Pineapples, mangos, apple bananas and more! We have been completely spoiled!
Guava, Sugar Apple, Papaya and Star Apple (Custard Apple) are some other fruits we tried for the first time. Gauva is wonderful and makes fantastic juice. I enjoyed the Sugar Apple as it was similar to eating vanilla pudding or custard but Lucas didn’t care for it too much (more for me to enjoy ha!) We both agreed Papaya was not our flavor so we have yet to try it again to us it favored the taste of soap or very similar. The Star Apple was fun to cut into it and makes a really pretty picture but it was just so so, neither hated it or loved it, I think we were mostly turned off by the fact there were fruit larva in it so that was a fun first experience. We definitely LOVE the variety of fresh fruits available to try though, it makes it very exciting each week when we go to the markets to see what we end up going home with!
While fruit is an abundance, vegetables are too! Any vegetable you can think of, you will find at some market throughout the island. We have rarely purchased any fruits or vegetables from the big chain grocery stores which has been very nice for a change!
Fresh exotic flowers and plants are also available at most of the farmers markets too! These above are various types of flowering ginger 🙂
We are so spoiled on Kauai, with all the fresh produce available, it will definitely be one of the major things we will miss when we leave.
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