Making an Effort

As I've mentioned, I don't cook here in Hong Kong, and that's a bit of a shame. As a result, I also don't eat in a healthy way. It's hard. Hong Kong is not known for an abundance of either greens or fruits in the diet, and I have to make an effort. And these are foods I do, indeed, like to eat.

While there is Chinese broccoli available with Chinese food, and mushrooms, I wonder how many vitamins are actually left after it's been cooked. And the only salad I've seen in the stores is iceberg, and while that's a nice taste, it isn't terribly nutritious. It's true you can get fancier salad, but it runs about $6 a bag, so it's a bit of a splurge. Not many nutritious-type veggies in Thai or Indian food, either. And those three make up most of my diet.

And as for fruit ... surprisingly, a bit of a dead end. I eat a lot of bananas. A ton of bananas. To no one's surprise, I'm a bit picky about my bananas. They have a window of about two days before they're inedible, as far as I'm concerned. But since we always live within steps of a grocery, I can have perfect bananas all the time. And they're very good.

I would have guessed that Hong Kong, tropical as it is, would be rife with fruit. I was envisioning papayas and mangoes and exotic fruit like I had in Thailand -- rambutan and mangosteens. But not so much. Perhaps it's the fact this is an island. Or that the bulk of the affordable produce comes from China. I see a lot of apples and pears and neither is very interesting or very good, and I'm usually a big fan of apples. I keep waiting to see tangerines, but haven't. The peaches over the summer, in Beijing, were big and gorgeous and tasted awful. And we've now pretty much exhausted the choices of fruit.

To be fair, there are melons for sale, and occasionally I see halved papayas in the street stalls. But not often.

So I have turned to dragon fruit. This luscious, exotic fruit is, supposedly, very high in Vitamin C and dietary fiber. The perfect fruit. It is shocking pink on the outside, with soft spikes. Inside, it is white with kiwi-like seeds. To my mind, it also has the consistency of kiwi, a fruit I like very much but am allergic to.

It turns out they are easy to eat, too. One only has to slice it in half, and then scoop it out with a spoon. Like eating a kiwi. But in fact, it isn't at all related to kiwi, despite the similarities. The meat is slightly sweet, and not at all strong. It's very pleasant. I'm going to make a point of eating several a week.

But I'm not sure how to tell when one is ripe, or overripe. And I don't know how long they keep. So I'll have to do some research and keep experimenting.

Meanwhile, I worry if I should start to take vitamins?