Other items for sale

While most who travel to Color de Tierra’s little store are coffee drinkers, there are other attractions too.  These include handcrafts like bowls of higuera (fig) made by hand.

There store even carries an assortment of locally-made beauty products.

But what I like most are the different kinds of local produce, products, and even seeds that the store sells.

A lot of these are things are familiar to even those not native to Mexico. But I have found a lot of things here that I wasn’t familiar with before like the delicious arallanes (related to guava) shown below in one of the handmade higuera bowls.

Of my new finds, the tamarind sweetened cocolistles these women sell are my favorites.

The Coclistle plant (Bromelia plumieri) is a relative of the pineapple and produces heads of elongated inch-long fruits. The fruits have little hard seeds that some “texture” people might have problems with but I just “work” around them and then swallow them with the rest of the fruit.  Anyway, these “candies”, if you will, have a smoky, sweet taste that I find irresistible.

Barry Sullender

Instructor of Tropical Rainforest and Canopy Ecology for the Institute for Tropical Ecology and Conservation (ITEC).