Tree to Blender

Chocolate.  On this island paradise, cocoa pods are literally hanging off the trees.  If you have money, you can spend a night ay at the intoxicating Chocolate Hotel and eat at the restaurant where every dish has chocolate in it.  Or you can take the Bean to Bar tour where you pick the pods yourself, process and  build a chocolate bar, all in the same 4 hours.

Or, if you're like me, you experiment at random, cut open a pod and harvest your own beans. Each cocoa bean is born inside a package of pulp. The white pulp is a sweet nectar, that you can suck on or process into sorbet and other yummy things. Then the bean gets roasted and ground. The locals roll the chocolate nibs with cinnamon and nutmeg into chocolate sticks.  On a rainy day, you grate the logs into boiling water or milk and make cocoa tea. Great source of theobromine!

To take the nib even further from the pod, I froze my concentrated cocoa tea in ice cube trays and used the frozen chocolate cubes to make a smoothie.  Combined with local banana and fresh coconut meat from the guy on the beach who carves coconut shell bird feeders, this is my go-to breakfast.  It's taken me too long to sort out how to be a locovore, but the blender makes it easy!