- papaya
- milk
- fruit juice
- hot cereal
- main course including protein (egg or meat)
And that, my friends, is a daily breakfast at Rethy Academy in Rethy, Zaire, West Africa. And happens to be what I ate 5 days a week for 2 years. I just so happened to stumble across some nice looking papaya at the market last week.
I would tell you how to pick a ripe papaya if I saw any, which I didn’t. They are supposed to be a uniformly orange-y yellow-y color. They start green, and turn yellow, then orange. And then they are ripe, juicy, and sweeeeet. they are not supposed to be spotted, and definitely not brown. But, when they’re traveling from some equatorial country all the way to my sweet Vancouver, I can forgive a few brown spots, ya know?
Here are the ones we got.
Note – cut lengthwise, remove seeds like a melon, and cut peel off, serve chilled. They have a very mild soft texture like a banana, watermelon-y taste, and very juicy. They have NO strings like a mango, and are never bitter! They are a very common, easily grown fruit, and available to the masses in tropical countries. Here’s a few pics to show how to slice it:
whole papaya
slice papaya lengthwise
scoop papaya seeds from center
slice across the width of the papaya
the papaya meat can be scooped out to enjoy - there is very thin peel, the rest can be eaten.
The papaya peel is actually quite thin – like a peach – so you can eat most of the fruit middle.
