"Cat Pee White Flower Tree"

“Something smells like cat pee.”  This is how our conversation started a few months ago.  We don’t have a cat.  Our neighbors don’t have a cat.  And despite the thousands of stray cats in Tel Aviv, we are more than 4 stories up so it couldn’t have been them.

After a short investigation (us smelling everything in the apartment and on the patio) we discovered the rancid smell was coming from a flower.  Yes, a flower.  When we moved into the place there outside gardens had lots of flowers, vines and small trees that had just been planted.  Because of our love of vegetable gardening we uprooted one of the small trees, transferred it to a big pot and moved it inside in March.  In June the rancid flowers appeared.

As biology was NOT my favorite subject, in July I called my favorite cousin-in-law who loves stinky flowers, Mitch.  Holding the video camera close to the tree to show Mitch the flowers we noticed small green balls!  A lime tree!!!  We were so excited. Throughout July and most of August about 10 limes appeared…but they were all tiny and hard and 8 of the 10 fell off the tree.

Then…when Jonathan was visiting we were excited to show him our odd little lime tree.  We put more soil in the pot and carefully watered it to make sure it would be healthy. – only to discover our limes were turning red!  No joke.

Internet searches surprisingly returned few-to-no results for “cat pee white flower tree.”  It wasn’t until mid-August that we made the greatest discovery yet of our little cat-pee tree:  the fruit is DELICIOUS!!! One day, while pinching the red limes which we now thought were mini-pomegranates, the soft fruit fell off the tree.  I picked it up from the ground, blew off the dust (my house is clean but this is right by the door), and popped the little guy in my mouth!  Not really – I washed it in the sink and then cut it in half.  The inside was white and there were a few round seeds.  The taste was like a strawberry, the texture like a pear, and the size like a grape.  “What an odd little fruit!”

After enjoying 6 of 9 fruits which appeared on the tree in the past 2 weeks, I finally brought one into work to ask the locals what it was. “Ma ze?”  Passion fruit.  A berry.  Cherry.  They were all wrong.

On my last attempt to “ask the locals,” one replied “Strawberry” (which is clearly is not; look at it!) and the other replied “Guava” (which is much larger and not red).  So instead of googling “cat pee white flower tree” I googled “Strawberry Guava.”  And wouldn’t you know it…it is a strawberry guava tree!  (There are also pineapple guava trees.)

The bad news about strawberry guava trees is that they grow like weeds.  The good thing about strawberry guava trees is that they grow like weeds – and taste DELICIOUS!!!  Hopefully I’ll be more successful in growing them next time!  This fruit rivals raspberries as my favorite!  While I can’t make a raspberry pizza or raspberry cheesecake with strawberry guavas, they supposedly taste great in drinks, by themselves or in ice cream – and I just happen to have become an expert at making Julia Child’s frozen custard.  Frozen strawberry-guava custard…Mmmm.