Breadfruit and Tea

We stopped off at the shop run by the wife of Mah Ri Jah on Mount Merapi for a quick snack. The snack consisted of breadfruit and tree bark tea. They cut the breadfruit into slices that are about a sixteenth of an inch thick then fry it up.

A sixteenth of and inch might not seem like much, but it’s more than three times as thick as your average potato chip. Except for the huge size of each chip – about four inches in diameter – they taste a lot like potato chips. Salty, oily, starchy yum.

Mr. Al is a connoisseur of potato chips. I’ve seen him go out of his way to get a hold of certain regional brands. After one taste, I knew I had to bring him some.

Buying a bag from Mah Ri Jah’s wife was the easy part. I stuffed them into by backpack and hiked them off the volcano and through the rest of the day’s activities until I got a chance to pack them in my suitcase.

In transferring from the backpack to the suitcase, I found though thick, they aren’t very durable. I had to find a container to hold them in so they wouldn’t get crushed on the way home – or any of the two weeks of travel left on the trip.

First I bought woven bamboo box typically used for offerings by the Hindu in Bali. That turned out to be too delicate. Then I found a plastic lunch box in a grocery store that you could get if you bought some cookies. When I went to check out, instead of ringing up the box as a package, the cashier rang up the box, then each of the three bags of cookies inside. I protested, but apparently that was the way they did things. It didn’t matter to them that I couldn’t eat the chocolate cookies inside and only wanted the box to begin with. If I wanted the box I had to buy the box AND three packages of cookies.

I donated the cookies to a school we visited. The breadfruit chips were a little worse for the wear, but made it home all right.

He still hasn’t eaten them all. I guess I shouldn’t have bothered.