Tamarindo

tamarindo 2, originally uploaded by sunshine0216.

We stumbled across this at Meijer, which is great by the way for having lots of locally grown fruits and veggies...gotta keep it in Michigan. Anyway, the shell is like a peanut shell without the little "dents", then once out, the meat of the fruit is covered by a vine of sorts. Removing that, you chew the "meat" which is a bit like dried apricot, and remove the seeds. The seeds are shiny, smooth, and hard. Noah and Peter are totally into this now, and they want to collect the seeds until they have enough to use them to make rosary beads. I'll have to do some more research on this fruit, but I believe it's native to Mexico.