Trying a New Fruit: Passion Fruit

To All,

I decided to follow Mark's suggestion and try passion fruit. I don't believe that I had ever had it before.

My first observation is that passion fruit is expensive. A passion fruit is about two inches in diameter, i..e., a little smaller than a tennis ball, and it cost $1.99. With this stratospheric price, at best a passion fruit is suitable only for special occasions.

The first job is to figure out how to eat it. Again, the Internet came to my rescue, and a 90 second video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISBKscT3-90 showed me all I needed to know. You get a knife, cut the passion fruit in half, scoop out the innards, and eat them. I was surprised at how hard it was to cut this wimpy little fruit in half. Though I had a sharp knife, I had to saw away for quite a while before I got through it. Perhaps this toughness protects it from jungle predators. A monkey might have a hard time penetrating the outer shell.

When you look inside your freshly opened fruit, you are disgusted by the goopy mess you see, but as a dedicated fruit explorer, you push on and scrape the slush of seeds and sticky, syrupy juice into a bowl. Because the fruit clings to the inside of the husk, it is surprisingly difficult to scrape it all out, but the experienced fruit eater sticks with it and does not get irritated. The seeds are surprisingly big, and there are a lot of them. The knowing gourmet then takes a spoon and eats the seed-juice mixture. It has a very tart taste, and it suggests some citrus fruit but does not match any well known fruit. The seeds go down easily and are not a problem. Since the husk is nearly a quarter of an inch thick, there is surprisingly little payload, and your $1.99 of passion fruit is gone is a few seconds.

It is easy to see why I never had passion fruit before. It would be hard to integrate this goop into a fruit salad or to arrange it on a plate so that it looked appetizing. This is a fruit to eat by yourself where no one has to watch as you try to manipulate the goop into your mouth.

Verdict: Refreshing but undistinguished, and so expensive as to be little more than a curiosity for the gourmet to sample once so that passion fruit can be checked off of his lifetime list..

Trying a New Fruit: Kiwi

To All,

Here is the next installment in my quest to sample new fruit. When Mike and I went to Market basket last week, the kiwi fruit was on sale three for a dollar, so I got one. I had had one mouthful of kiwi once at the lunch table at work, but otherwise I had no memory of eating this fruit (though I might have had some in a fruit salad).

When presented with the rough brown fruit, I didn't know how to peel it or even if it needed peeling, so I went to the Internet and found a YouTube video that shows a nice way to peel a kiwi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIxdS-xzXbU  I found that this method worked pretty well, though careful finger placement on the spoon was needed to control it, and you need to match the size of the spoon to the size of the kiwi. If you are not careful, you can cut away too much fruit. The alternative, primitive method is to use a potato peeler. Also, some say that you can eat the skin (which, naturally, is claimed to be high in nutrients), though you might want to first rub off the fuzz.

One the fruit was peeled, I cut it into slices and downed them. My verdict: It was okay. I might have more.

My kiwi was imported from Italy. The fruit is a native of northern China. The name kiwi was chosen for marketing purposes since the original name, Chinese gooseberry, did not sit well with focus groups.

In short, nothing dramatic to report, but this is another notch on my exotic fruit belt.

Rick

P.S. Feel free to suggest to me fruits that you personally have tried. The pomegranate might be next so I can try the seed-expelling method that Mei-Mei sent around.