When I was an exchange student living in Germany, my favorite gelato flavor was maracuja.  It had a tangy, sweet-but-tart character that made it refreshing and intriguing at the same time.  Imagine my ecstatic happiness when I discovered maracuja juice at the local grocery store!  “I’ve got to figure out what this is so that I can find it when I get back home,” I thought, and started flipping through my German-English language dictionary.  “‘Maracuja’ (Grm):  ‘maracuja’ (Eng)” it said.  I was stumped…until I thought to look in a Spanish-English dictionary.  “Maracuja’ (Spn):  ‘passionfruit’ (Eng),” it said.  Ah-hah!

This small purple fruit grows in South America but is enjoyed all over the world (although I’ve yet to find it as a gelato flavor in the States).  Ripe passionfruit has an exotic perfume and a wrinkly skin; its seeds are crunchy, tangy, and have loads of visual appeal.  You can scoop out the seeds and eat them as they are or spoon them over baked meringues, frozen dairy/soy cream, or cake to create a stunning dessert.  Passionfruit juice makes any smoothie taste tropical and any cocktail a smash hit.  It’s also a great source of vitamin C, vitamin A, and potassium.

You might also want to save the scooped-out skins for decorative purposes–they dry beautifully and can be used as centerpiece elements anywhere in your home.

Palm trees also yield edible fruits like coconuts and açaí (a deep-purple berry). Fresh coconut is hard to come by in the States and even harder to get open. When/if you do get it open, you’ll find that there’s liquid inside. This is coconut water, which is sometimes sold as a drink in juice boxes and which tastes quite different from the flesh/milk. (If you’re in a Latin American country, this is called pipa.) Coconut milk, on the other hand, is pressed from the flesh–if you’re going to cook with it or use it in smoothies, try to find whole coconut milk since it’s from the first press and contains far more nutrients than the second-press “light” coconut milk. (You can always thin it with water yourself.) Puerto Ricans favor a type of eggnog that’s made with coconut cream, so if you’re a coconut fan and you’re vacationing there, be sure to try the coquito!

Shredded coconut is readily available all year-round. It comes in sweetened and unsweetened varieties, the former generally being drenched with oil and sugar/corn syrup. (Tip: if you want the texture of coconut in a recipe but don’t like the taste of it, try grating a peeled apple and then squeezing out the juice. The taste/texture in the final product will trick almost anyone–even you–into believing it’s coconut.)

If you do have the fortune to have your coconut and open it too, remember that you can eat the inner brown skin! Most of the nutrients are in the inner husk, and plus, it has a pleasantly nutty taste. Or you can carve out the white flesh and grate it, chop it, or eat it out of hand. You might also stumble upon tiny, baby-sized coconuts in your grocery store. These are eaten as-is, husk and all.

But the most important thing to know about palm trees is to look up before standing underneath them! If there’s a brown, dry frond that looks like it’s about to fall, seek shade elsewhere–you don’t want to be standing there when it does!