whoa whoa there guys, this is not an offer to ship any fruits over. =) Its more of just letting you know where to find this treasure if your interested. Not that I wouldn't like to but I'm a bit lacking in time these days and this don't seem to be that fun of a fruit to ship. Heavy, spikey, odd unusual smells here and there. What would the post office people think. =) Eldys, sounds like you ran into the frozen ones. These are usually almost available year round. ah, the smell. Imagine leaving one in the car for half a day. Well that's what happen to me, luckily it was a frozen one and in the trunk, so the smell of the car was not that bad and eventually was gone only after 3-4 days with lots of air fresheners. =) The fresh durian found are always the Monthong variety also for the most part. It ships well because of the breeding on the "Thai" varieties. They are usually picked slightly under ripe and would ripen nicely after they been cut off the tree. "Malaysian" varieties lack this shipping quality, they are usually tree ripen and does not handle shipping very well. Most durians connoisseurs have proclaimed the "Malaysian" varieties to be much stronger in tastes and quality. However, you could only find these on a trip to Southeast Asia. Picking a fresh durian may be challenging if your not familiar with it. Look for ones that are golden brown in color And where the outer husk of the segments are already splitting open nicely and evenly. This makes it easier to open and also assures you that their ripe. Sometimes you find these underipe durians in the market. yikes and ack, who want's to pay about 50 dollars a fruit when this happens. The textures should be very custardly and should not be crunchy or hard(meaning its underipe). If a fruit doesn't start splitting open in a few days, its a bad sign its under ripe. Certain season you see a lot of these, but the ones I have seen recently appears to be very nice and ripe. Also the texture of a fresh durian is so much better than the frozen ones.

It was definitely a lot of fun, will it happen again, who knows? But Puerto Rico is always there, barring a few hurricanes and I'd be willing to bet that most of the places we went would allow small groups to visit them. It was mostly hiking straight up and down muddy terrain, through tall grass, etc. for me as good as or better than camping (just needed some fishing). Mailing back bare rooted plants and clean seeds is the best way to go. Felipe, I'm not 100% sure Murahilin tried the mammea, I think the seeds may have been from fallen fruit, it was a large tree. Perhaps he can offer a different response? -Ethan Here is a link that might be useful: More info and photos about the PR trip

A lady from Hong Kong was a care-giver to my then 99 yr old grandmother about 2002. She prepared a durian for us - quite a production. It seemed to require elbow length gloves, a machete, knives, a very well protected table and a variety of scooping tools. We tried it - it tasted good smelled funny. She went home for the weekend and we had a bowl of durian in the fridge. The next day the whole kitchen stank of it - not appetizing - neither of us was inspired to eat it or anything else in the kitchen. The next day I triple wrapped it and trashed it. When she returned she figured out what I had done and was deeply offended. Oh dear.

I've eaten horse, during the PBB scandal when all the cattle were poisoned and dropping over from PBBs in the cattle feed. LindaC, I bought Pocky at my local Meijer's and sent it to dishesdone, they had a chocolate and a strawberry version. Ashley says she's gotten it at WalMart right next to the college, it's a cookie shaped long and thin, not as big around as a pencil and dipped in chocolate or strawberry fudge. I have eaten crocodile AND alligator, and black pudding which Grandma used to call blood sausage. Nettle tea tastes icky and "green" but is supposed to be a diuretic and make your hair shiny, I can't figure out what the heck those two things have to do with each other, but I've tasted it because it's also supposed to be helpful for anemia. I didn't see that it helped. I had chicken tiki masala at a restaurant in Ann Arbor with Elery. It was basically a chicken dish with a curry kind of sauce over rice. Eh. I'm not a huge fan of curry. Paneer? Elery likes cheese. A lot. So we tried this, it kind of reminded me of the homemade yogurt cheese I make by putting yogurt in a strainer and letting it drain for several hours. Criollo chocolate is just a variety of cocoa bean. It's expensive and I found it to be very mild, I wasn't all that impressed with THAT either. I think I bought it at Fresh Market, and everything there is expensive so maybe that's just why it cost more. Tom Yum is just soup. I think it had coconut milk in it and it kind of reminded me of Chinese hot and sour. Annie