Catching Up: A variety of Food and Drink

Bananas
Our driver #2, Pak Rapiudin, has gifted us a large bunch of bananas on two occasions. They come from his mother's yard. Each time he had probably just picked them off the tree the day before or that morning. As he hands me the bananas he tells me exactly how many days until the first ones in the bunch will be ripe. They are delicious bananas! With the last batch we had to cut and slice some of them for the freezer. Banana "ice cream" is in our future!

Yummy Cake
I hosted my Needle Nomads recently and I was extremely tight on time so we purchased a cake instead of me having to bake something. Sometimes while cakes here look pretty, they are less than stellar in the taste department. This was different. Covered in fresh whipped cream, strawberry layers with strawberry filling. Quite good!

I don't know if I've mentioned the cake server situation previously. We did not have, or just didn't bring, a cake server with the silverware set we brought with us. I just used a knife to cut and a large spoon or some other tool to serve cake.  I had not purchased a cake here before so I didn't know what to expect. When you do purchase a cake here you are usually supplied with a fairly nice clear plastic cake slicer/server. After I found out about this a friend gave me a couple of the ones she'd collected. When we purchased this cake, we received an extra package that included a clear plastic cake server, candles and matches in the cake server handle. This is great!

Interesting (?) Food Options

I just don't know about these first two choices. We have not tried them.

Black pizza? Yes, along with black frozen yogurt, black smoothies, black hamburger buns and black lemonade yogurt, we have black pizza. It was one of the menu items at a work party with B. B comment - it tastes better than you think as it is all in your (our) head.

I need to comment on the black lemonade yogurt. In addition to the lemonade flavor, the yogurt also contained something called nata de coco. These are 1 cm squares of a chewy, translucent, jelly-like substance produced by fermenting coconut water. You can buy bags of nata de coco floating in coconut water. They are added to cold iced fruit desserts and drinks. In this case there were some in the yogurt. Flavor wise, not bad. Appearance? I'd give it a 1 out of 10, maybe. The yogurt looked like medium grey deck paint. Wish I'd taken a photo.

At the Grocery
I'm actually a little surprised that I don't see more ants in the grocery. However one day they had placed new rambutan fruit for sale. Apparently ants had been hiding in the fruit. The rambutan is way on the end of the top shelf but the ant trail ran all the way around this shelf. I've been here a while I guess. I thought it was funny and I felt sorry for the staff who were dealing with the ant invasion.  I think I bought a couple of mangoes from below the shelf, but I inspected them for ants. No need to bring them home.

I think it was on the same day as the ant invasion, they had dragon fruit still on the plant for sale in the produce department. It looked like they tied together several stalks from the plant and stuck them in pots. Right next to the buah naga merah ( red dragon fruit) are some small super delicious bananas, pisang mas.

Drinks
Lemon Bush. Had red tea on the bottom and citrus juices on the top.

A carafe of green apple kiwi. It was mostly soda water. Refreshing.

This one was like a milkshake. Called "Green Hulk" it had green whipped cream atop a matcha green tea ice blended milk tea with a caramel drizzle inside the glass.