THE JACKY JACK!

December 2, 2013

I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving and for all the UAE people I hope you enjoyed National Day !!!

I am back from Sri Lanka and have lots to share with you. It was an amazing trip and I really did so much in just a few days. I will be sharing my trip with you shortly in three posts, a post for each day. Otherwise it would just be too long and too many photos to sift through. It will take me sometime to organize all of the awesome pictures we took, so be patient

I wanted to share this with you first, it made me happy to have a foodie adventure on our stay in Sri Lanka. Normally most countries have a lot of fried food and unhealthy types of cuisines. It usually turns me off from trying local dishes; however Sri Lankan cuisine is very healthy and tasty. They cook with ONLY coconut oil, which is a lot healthier then all of the other oils. They do eat meat but scarcely. There are a lot of delicious vegetarian options and lots of seafood!

Jack fruit is a huge deal in Sri Lanka. They are these massive fruits that grow on very high trees. The people have to climb the tree and chop them off to get them down. They use Jack fruit in two ways.

Health Foodie Adventure in Sri Lanka : The Jack Fruit

1. Baby Jack fruit is hard and not ripe yet, so they cut it up and mix it with many spices cook it on a simmer and make Jack fruit curry. AKA Jacky Jack 🙂 It is beyond delicious! Mind you I am not a fan of curry at all; however this is not like any other curry I have ever had. It is simply delicious. All of the Sri Lankan dishes are made with coconut oil, so they all have a sweetness to them. Similar to Caribbean food in a way. They cook this dish with coconut milk too and the sweet and a little bit of spicy just make it finger licking goodness

I have seen Jack fruit available in Chinatown. It is available and around if you look for it. If you have time and you feel like experimenting on a new style of food I highly suggest you try making the Jacky Jack. Check out you tube for recipes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNgzi5V3QYc

2. The second way the Sri Lankan people enjoy Jack fruit is ripe. Ripened Jackfruit is sweet and eaten as a fruit. There is a weird thing to it though. I highly suggest you try it for yourself, because it’s an extremely interesting experience. You cut open the Jack fruit and discover this weird looking thing, which if someone didn’t tell me it was edible I would have never guessed it. Its sticky really really really sticky… like the consistency of super glue slowly drying all over your hands and lips. My driver didn’t speak English very much at all so he wasn’t able to warn me that it will get sticky but not to worry. So I am sitting in the back of the car engorging this creature of a fruit and panicking about whether all of this stickiness is normal, or if its a rare sap that I will die from within the hour. The fruit consists of sections similar to cells, each orange yellowish part is the fruit you eat. They each have a huge nut in them.

Take the nut out, throw it out the window in my case, pick out the orange yellowish fruit and stick it in your mouth. There is now an abscess left from where you pulled the orange yellowish part surrounded by these extremely sticky strands of white things. It was seriously like an alien fruit from out of this world or maybe from Avatar. I was getting freaked out myself to tell you the truth. I seriously thought this fruit was poisonous and this would be my last health foodie adventure. Dramatic I know, people have told me. But I must say it was DELICIOUS!!! Besides the sticky factor, the fruit was delicious and I would eat it again. Oh you want to know how I removed the sticky??? Yes I was wondering that too at the time. We stopped at a restaurant to get lunch. (yes I eat and eat and eat) I started walking to the bathroom with the intention to be there for hours scrubbing away at myself, but my driver Ravin stopped me he told me to wait. He came back with coconut oil from the restaurant’s kitchen. I rubbed the oil all over my hands and lips and PRESTO I was back to my normal self.
Then I had a thought of a person who discovered this fruit, probably named Jack, long ago. How he must have opened it, ate it, and then sat there freaking out similar to myself about how the hell hes going to get this stuff off….. Did he figure out to crack open a coconut as the antidote? How long did he sit there covered in sticky sap collecting flies??