Marula

There's my new word for the day. I had never heard of it before until I was buying yogurt in the grocery store today. I was drawn in by a package of vanilla-cinnamon yogurt cups (I love cinnamon) and discovered half of the yogurt cups in the cardboard sleeve were vanilla-marula. Marula? The label wasn't a lot of help- it had a flower and some kind of non-descript round thing that looked like a fruit. Still, I bought a package on the strength of the cinnamon-flavoured cups.

Got home and turned to the handy dandy Internet connection on my Palm Pre (by the way, three months in, I'm loving my new smart phone, must post about that later in the week). I discovered that marula trees grow in Africa and they are a popular source of food, healing, oil and that all parts of the tree are used for various products. I also found it interesting that elephants love them and when marula fruit fall to the ground and slightly ferment they're like elephant catnip. I also read they have four times the vitamin C of an orange.

I can also vouch now that they taste good in yogurt.

So now I'm wondering if marula is going to become the new vogue exotic fruit flavour like kiwi and mango and pomegranite in recent years.

Anyone out there familiar with marula? Are they readily available in grocery stores and fruit markets? Have you bought products with marula in them? Have you cooked or baked with marula?