Fruit of the Day: Pepino Melon

When I was in university, my roommate Lee used to exclaim "Babaghanoush!" whenever he realized something or even completed a task, kind of like you might use "Eureka!" or "Voilà!" At the time I had even more limited experience with international cuisine, and I thought Lee was just using a nonsense word. One day, while looking for hummus, I came across an unfamiliar product and sounded out the word on the label and had a similar "eureka!" moment when I realized I was looking at babaghanoush!

Today's fruit isn't an eggplant, but it does have lovely eggplant-coloured markings. I didn't buy the pepino melon on our first few trips to the grocery store, but I kept coming back to it. Its skin feels amazingly smooth and almost velvety, like a matte-finish photo.

I sliced it open and was surprised to find the inside hollow, with nary a seed in sight. The fruit itself is about an inch thick. It smelled sweet, like a ripe honeydew melon. When I cut off a smaller slice to try some, the skin peeled off easily, like that of a tomato that's been blanched. The texture is similar to a honeydew as well, and the first bite was sweet and mild and melony. As I finished the slice I identified a feint peppery aftertaste, and it suddenly occurred to me that pepino melon translates to pepper melon. Babaghanoush!
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Fruit of the Day: Cocona

I chose the cocona for its irresistible orangeness. It reminds me of a yellow pepper, and its stem is a little like that of a persimmon. The cocona also has skin similar to a persimmon, and is about as squishy as a very underripe tomato (read: not very).

I sliced it open to find a pale yellow insides with lots of small, soft seeds, kind of like tiny cucumber seeds. The cocona is very tart! The pulp around the seeds is juicy, but the fruit between the center and the skin is much firmer. I shared some with a couple who was in the kitchen with me. The girl thought it was like a fruity-vegetable (or a vegetabley-fruit) and the guy comment, "It's quite sharp, isn't it?" Indeed. I suspect I'd prefer the cocona juiced with a little sugar.
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P.S. I LOVE comments on FotD - I learn as much from you guys as I do from trying the new fruits! Thanks, and keep 'em coming!

Fruit of the Day: Tuna Roja

Before we get to today's fruit, I have to once again sing the praises of Peru's fruit. There are more new varieties than I know what to do with, and when we're craving something familiar, the options are plentiful and cheap. To wit: Here is a picture of 50¢ worth of strawberries:

They were fragrant, sweet, and delicious.

The tuna roja isn't a fish, I promise. It's a fruit, and one you might even recognize: In North America, it's more commonly known as the prickly pear. There were three prickly pear varieties available: roja (red), amarilla (yellow), and verde (green). A prickly pear traffic light! I don't remember why we chose red, but maybe because it looked the weirdest.

Without consulting the intarwebs, I wasn't sure how exactly to approach the tuna roja. I decided to slice it vertically, and was very excited when I found its insides to be as red as a beet!

I scooped out a spoonful of the juicy red insides and found the tuna to be full of tiny, hard seeds. The fruit itself is mild-tasting and not super-sweet. It's refreshing but I found it nondescript (as you may have gathered from my non-description). The seeds were too small to spit out so I just swallowed them, and they were inoffensive.
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Fruit of the Day: Granadilla

We found today's fruit, the granadilla, in the vast citrus section of the even vaster produce section in our grocery store in Lima, Peru. I chose it for its lovely orange colour and the long stem attached to each fruit in the bin. As an added bonus, it cost all of 0.49 soles (about $0.17!).

The granadilla isn't exactly squishy like an orange. It's shell is kind of hard and you can push a dent into it with your finger (a handy trait if you want to create a little flat spot on which to rest the granadilla for a photo op). When you shake it, it sounds like there's something shaking around inside. When I cut it open, its skin (which is really more like a shell) cracked open (not unlike breaking a cracker) to reveal seeds and pulp--seeds and pulp that looked suspiciously like the insides of a passion fruit!

The granadilla is probably best eaten blended and strained, but I was impatient so I just slurped up a few pulpy seeds. It was delicious! The pulp tasted like a super-sweet combination of orange and passion fruit juices, and the seeds were small enough to be inoffensive--I just crunched them up along with the juice.
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Fruit of the Day: Chirimoya

Yesterday we arrived in Lima, Peru, and today we spent a good half an hour exploring the fruit section of the grocery store. It was all I could do to not blow our entire day's budget on new and exciting produce. Kernels of corn are huge, like, a regular-sized cob of corn has 8 GIANT rows. And I counted at least 11 different kinds of potatoes!

Back to fruit. After much hemming and hawing, we decided to buy a chirimoya. It's closely related to the hand-grenade-shaped pinha, which was one of the weirdest-looking and most delicious fruits we'd ever tried. The chirimoya was much-hyped in my extensive fruit-research on the intarwebs, and it's from Peru! And we're in Peru! Hooray!

Even though we bought what felt like the ripest specimen, I suspect our chirimoya was a bit under-ripe. It was delicious and custardy, like the pinha, but a little harder than we expected. We did convince two skeptical Canadian girls to try it, and they thought it tasted like dessert!

UFF Fruit Rating: (Subject to change when we try a riper fruit)

Fruits of the Day: Late-Summer Berries

We're back in NY for two weeks; two weeks that are going by way too quickly. This past weekend I enjoyed my favourite Saturday morning ritual: A rendez-vous with my friend Vicki at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket in Brooklyn. I felt like a kid in a candy store. Browsing the late-summer/early-fall harvest (green beans! tomatoes! Jersey peaches!) was the first time I felt a pang about our current nomadism: Even if we had unlimited counter and fridge space, our overbooked schedule doesn't include a lot of time for cooking.

I settled for small quantities of the aforementioned green beans and tomatoes, and a couple of inimitable apple cider donuts. I also couldn't resist a few containers of what were probably among the last berries of the season. There were samples available of both blackberries and raspberries, and when Vicki tried the former she remarked, "That tastes like it should cure something." In other words, they were a little tart. I mixed some of the raspberries into my Greek yogurt for dessert last night and this afternoon made the rest into Baked's Raspberry Breakfast Bars, recipe and inspiration via Smitten Kitchen. It didn't seem like I had quite enough berries to cover the bottom layer of the bars so I chopped up a peach and threw it in there as well.

The verdict? The house smelled so good while they were baking that I could hardly wait for them to cool when I took them out of the oven. And they're delicious: Sweet and buttery and slightly tart. The bars are a little wetter than I'd have liked, especially since I plan to transport them to friends' places for dessert tonight and "breakfast" tomorrow morning (if there are any left - Ken also seems to like them!), but that's why god invented Tupperware. And forks.
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Fruit of the Day: Figo

We recently spent a very rainy day in Puerto Alegre, Brazil. We arrived at 8:30 a.m. and headed immediately to the central market, where our trusty Lonely Planet assured us we'd be able to dine at any number of restaurants and also buy delicious ice cream. We spent the morning drinking coffee and playing cards, and around lunchtime we wandered into one of the extraordinarily well-stocked fruit stands to see what we could find for FotD.

There were a bunch of new fruits, including some that we had to pass up because they were either sold only in large quantities or were just simply too large--like this guy, the unwieldy jaca (Jackfruit in English):

We settled on three different fruits, the first of which is the figo, which you undoubtedly recognize as a fig.

We're both fans of dried figs (ideally stuffed with a hunk of manchego and wrapped in proscuitto), but neither of us had tried fresh figs before. They're smooth and firm, but with a bit of squishiness. We cut one open and found its insides to be delightfully pink and seedy. Behold:

The flavour was nowhere near as intense as a dried fig, and I don't know that I'd even have been able to recognize the taste if I hadn't known what I was eating. It was very mild. The texture was the most familiar part - the seeds were unmistakeably figgy.

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