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Pozo Azul: Crop Farm Tour + Cooking Class

Part 1: Crop Farm Tour

Coco (coconut)

These are coconuts, called coco or pipa en español. The green is for drinking. (You can often find “agua de pipa” for sale in plazas and on the side of roads in Costa Rica.) The yellows are for eating.

Sábila (aloe vera)

You can’t really see it, but this is what our two students are sampling in the picture below.

Guanábana (soursop)

Jaca / Yaca (jackfruit)

Achiote

Achiote is not for eating, but for color dyeing. When you open the fruit, you will see seeds and red pulp inside. The pulp is used as a natural dye.

In the pictures below, you can see a healthy ripe achiote fruit, what the fruit looks like dead, and the arm of a student who dyed herself with the achiote.

Carambola (starfruit)

First, you can see the starfruit tree. 

Then. you can see starfruit of different colors. All starfruit begin as yellow. As they mature, they turn to either orange or green. Orange starfruit are sweet. Green starfruit are sour.

You eat starfruit just like an apple--Bite into it. You can see based on Katie's reaction in the last picture that her orange starfruit is indeed sour.

Pimienta Negra (black pepper)

Carao

Carao grows on trees in Central America and many Caribbean islands. People consume it because it is considered to have medicinal properties that help with chest and stomach pain.

Jengibre (ginger)

Maracuyá (passion fruit)

How dumb that I didn't open this up and take a picture. The inside is the coolest looking part. I know that I've done so on another trip in the past, so I will find the picture and add it in the future.

Guayaba (guava)

Cassava

Here is one of our students after having just pulled a cassava plant. You can see below the stem the yuca--the starchy, potato-like vegetable that grows underground.

Part 2: Cooking Class

Banana Ceviche

Half the kids helped make banana ceviche.

Buñuelos

The other half made buñuelos, spherical/ball-shaped pieces of fried dough basically.