The breadfruit that Soschi gave us is getting ripe quickly. I've heard the way you cook them is toss them in an open fire but since we don't have one of those I'll just see what the book says. The book I am referring to was published by friends of ours; the author and fellow cruiser is Mike Riley and it's illustrated by his cool wife Karen. They are on their third circumnavigation in their boat 'Beau Soleil'. We saw them just before we left New Zealand and they are now also here in Fiji somewhere. Mike's book is called 'How to Thrive on a Tropical Deserted Island'. We bought it from him in Mexico. They actually print their books on the boat, and now of course you can buy his stuff for your Kindle as well. We pull out the book from time to time and I'm grabbing it again since we've acquired several fruits that are completely unknown to us. Breadfruit, it says, made it's mark in history back in the days of Captain Cook and Captain Bligh. Seems the British wanted heaps of breadfruit trees picked up in Polynesia and taken back to be cultivated to feed their slaves in Jamaica. Well, when the famously brutal Captain Bligh ordered his crew to leave the paradise that is Polynesia and sail back around Cape Horn they refused. The mutiny made Captain Bligh famous as well as his amazing 2,000 mile sea voyage in an open boat. Eventually breadfruit did make it back to the West Indies and guess what...the slaves didn't like the stuff, they preferred bananas instead. So, back to the present, our breadfruit was very ripe so when I cut it open much of it was pretty sticky and mushy. The book says it's perfect for making coco-bread pudding. Add coconut milk, put in on the coals until it's nice and hot and eat. No coals...so I scooped away all the soft sticky stuff, took off the peel, leaving what was left of the firmer solid sides. I sliced it thinly and fried the small pieces up in olive oil and garlic salt and ended up with a nice pile of breadfruit chips. And they were pretty good too. The next fruit to try is the weird and some say sort of wonderful soursop. It's in the same family as durian, ugg. It's very cool looking, big and green with pointy knobby spikey things that stick out all over. But man, when it gets ripe, which happens very quickly it goes from cool to one soft gooey mess. I guess it's normally processed into ice cream but we were determined to eat some raw. I was smart enough to put it in the frig for a while first and that helped with the consistency problemo. We both ate a bit, the flavor is sweet and sour sort of, very different. Finally though, the weird consistency overwhelmed us and we gave the rest away to Asari, the fijian fellow who works at Waitui Marina. On to another fruit, I asked Asari what the weird orangey yellow podlike fruits are and he said 'cocoa'. Finding cocoa in the book, these pods grow right out of the trunk of the tree. Chopping the top off (with my knife, not a machete that Mike says to use) inside are tightly packed, whitish fruit sections, each with a bean inside. He says to eat the pulp on the outside of the bean so I do. He says it's delicious, I say it's sweet for sure but it's that weird soft consistency that I have a hard time with. Evidentally, the sweeter the pulp, the sweeter the chocolate will be. So far so good. Next it says the beans have to be dried for ten to fifteen days, then you have to roast them. You'll know when that part is done because the bean will enlarge and pop open it's protected membrane. I guess I'll have to return to this later...I've still got a lot of bean sucking to do. Back to Little Bay, this morning we had a visit by a skiff with 6 or 7 young men. They are from the village of Mavana and had been further past Little Bay to some sort of plantation. They had a pile of drinking coconuts in the skiff and also a big bag of something. One of the guys asked if we like lemons and we answered yes. He pulled out the biggest darn lemon I have ever seen. Of course Don and I recognized it as a 'pamplemousse', the wonderful grapefruit on steroids that we loved when we were in French Polynesia. The guys were eating it differently though, instead of slicing it in half and eating it with a spoon, scooping out each little half section, they cut it the other way and were just pulling the sections out with their hands and chowing down. They gave us one of the fruits and took off on their way. I felt bad that I didn't have anything to share back so I went inside and made a quick batch of chocolate chip cookies in case we had another visit. Now that I am looking in the book, Mike has listed it as a 'pommelo'. Maybe that's what 'pamplemousse' means in french.