At a glance:
on the Cambridge side of Charles River
Price: varies
Stars (out of 5): 5 for variety and diversity!
There was so much food at the annual Dragon Boat Festival!! Food trucks and eateries really lined up next to the river to showcase their specialties. I ate so much food while checking out the various performances. The kung fu performance was exhilarating; they were waving around their weapons with such ease and grace!
Don’t really have a lot of pictures to show because my phone ran out of battery halfway through the festival, but I’ll just highlight some great things I had.
There were fresh coconuts for sale! People were actually walking around with fresh, carved young coconuts. The vendors would stick straws into whole young coconuts so you can drink the magic water inside. Then, they have hammers to break open the coconut for you so you can eat the meat. On a side note, do you ever see coconuts at the super market and feel intimidated because you don’t know how to eat/use them? Fear no more. I have some tips. Ok, this is completely irrelevant… But relevant at the same time…
Let’s start first with the mature coconut. They are the brown, fuzzy, rock hard spheres you see people drinking out of. Look around the coconut. You shall see 3 dots in a triangle on one end kind of resembling creepy magnified Drosophila eyes. There are two dots on the same row, and you want to find the other dot that’s NOT on the same line (basically the tip of the triangle). Yes that dot. Congratulations, you just found the softest part of the coconut. In this general area, the shell can be poked through with a sharp object. Use the tip of your knife, or a screwdriver, or whatever (be careful), and drill a hole into that dot. Make the hole large enough for you to stick a straw through. Enjoy yummy coconut water. (Do not confuse this with coconut milk. Coconut milk is made from combining coconut water and coconut meat and pressing the mixture until milk comes out). There won’t be a lot because this coconut is mature already, so it has mostly meat, but there’s definitely enough for one person to savor the tropical goodness. At this point, if you throw away the coconut, you will be wasting the quintessential coconut meat inside. Find a hammer and rotate the sphere in your hand like you have the globe in your hands. Find the equator: there is a line in the middle that encircles the coconut. Tap your hammer following that line. After a few times tapping around the coconut, the fruit should crack open in the middle. Now you can take the hammer and break the halves into even smaller pieces. Then you can take a knife and slowly work off the peel from the fleshy white meat. There will be ALOT. You can either grate the meat on a fine grater into fresh coconut shreds for baking and dessert, or cook with whole pieces of coconut meat.
Ok this is really going off on a tangent. The young coconut is even easier! The young coconut resembles a dome with a pointy cone head. Take a knife and start shaving off the tip. Shave shave shave until the whole cone head just comes off haha. Peel that away and you have literally a bowl full of water swishing inside. And the meat is so tender that you can just scoop and eat it with a spoon. Or you can save it for cooking. My mom then uses the young coconut shavings/peel to fertilize her garden to substitute for wood chips. Yeah my family maximizes the wonders of a coconut.
I digress.
Back to the street food.
BonMe was there serving up Vietnamese fusion fare. The miso braised pulled pork bowl was so good.
Eggroll Cafe had succulent Asian versions of Philly cheesesteak.
Bao Nation had the most creative but quite expensive buns. I had the Central Bao, which is braised kurobuta pork belly, sesame, and cilantro.
Things I wanted to try but didn’t have room nor money for:
Dwa Cafe, India Castle, George’s gourmet grill, Rica gourmet, Arepas and Gyros, Tea station, and Boston Projuice popsicles.
Also there was fresh sugarcane juice on tap…….. Sugarcane is a wonderful thing. I used to buy them whole and gnaw on pieces. I know, super ratchet but super fun.
Eat on!