The Fruit Explorer Stubs His Toe on an Orange

To All,

While rummaging through that emporium of the off-beat,Trader Joe's, I found a curious fruit called an orange. Let me say first that the color is off-putting. You would never want to have this stomach-turning color in your kitchen, except possibly at Halloween. The first person to eat this fruit must have been brave indeed. The variety I tested is called a naval orange since it is eaten by naval personnel to avoid scurvy.

The fruit is round, and the outer peel reminds one of the uniq, but it lacks the appealing asymmetries of the uniq. Also, this puny fruit is considerably smaller than a uniq. The peel does not display the cuttability of the passion fruit since it is too soft. Watch out and don't cut your hand. Keep an aloe leaf handy. If you throw the peel into the trash, expect it to stink up your kitchen until trash day finally comes. The smell is pungent enough for a perfume.

Once you have removed the peel, you find an uappealing, fishbelly white under-peel. You can with difficulty remove it, though the nutritionistas will howl since, you guessed it, as usual, the most revolting part is the most nutritious.

After peeling, I gathered my courage, put a piece into my mouth, and bit down. It was unpleasantly squishy, and juice shot all around my mouth. 

If you eat fruit so that you can delight in caressing the seeds with your tongue and playing spitting games with them, the naval orange denies you even these simple pleasures.

The verdict: Visually revolting, a hazard to peel, too squishy, stinks up your kitchen. Maybe someone will make a drink of this fruit.

This fruit illustrates one of the drawbacks of modern society, namely the ascendance of the marketeers. In Germany they tried to popularize this fruit by calling it an apfelsine, i.e., a Chinese apple. These out-of-control marketeers thought that by combining the familiar (apple) and the exotic (Chinese), they could hoodwink people into spending their hard-earned money on this turkey.

The Fruit Explorer Goes for the Garlic

To All,

Little did I know that a major theme of my retirement would be the search for a satisfactory garlic strategy. I am now on my fifth garlic strategy.

First, I started my retirement by keeping a head of garlic on my kitchen counter. Whenever I wanted garlic, I would remove a clove, peel it, dice it, and throw it into whatever dish I was preparing. Peeling a clove, however, was tedious and time-consuming; I wanted something easier.

Second, I got a container of garlic powder and would just shake some into my cooking pot. This certainly met the goal of ease of use, but the flavor didn't seem to be there.

Third, I got a jar of Adobo seasoning, which Maria had introduced me to, and would shake some into my dishes. This powder contains garlic as well as other seasonings. This improved the flavor, but eventually I was put off by the high salt content.

Fourth, while scouting the fruit and vegetable aisle at Market Basket, I found a mayonnaise-sized jar of minced garlic for only $3.49. This was cheap, easy, and was much closer to the true garlic experience. But could I do better?

Fifth, on my last trip to Market Basket's fruit and vegetable aisle I spotted a plastic container full of peeled garlic cloves. The container is one of those tapering plastic cylinders that restaurants use for doggy bags; it is about three inches tall and four inches wide at the top. It is crammed with about 80 perfectly peeled cloves of garlic. When I want garlic, I get a clove out of the fridge, dice it, and am ready to season. No peeling. Easy. Should I need a quantity of garlic that makes the dicing a hassle, e.g., if I make a mess of black-eyed peas, I have added a garlic press to my arsenal of kitchen tools. The peeled cloves are so immaculate that they are things of beauty; you can almost see your face reflected in them. Have I finally found nirvana? Is my search for the ultimate garlic strategy at an end? This strategy certainly wins the prize not only for ease but also for cheapness since I got 0.68 pounds of garlic for $1.35. My only doubt is that the container had a sell-by date less than a week into the future. Do peeled cloves of garlic go bad or lose their potency in the fridge? 

My container is marked "Product of China." I am now wondering if there are wage slaves in China who are perfectionists who spend twelve hours a day hunched over a garlic-peeling table. Or perhaps the cloves are pristine because they are cleaned in a bath of asbestos water.

The Fruit Explorer Struggles to Ripen an Ataulfo Mango

To All,

While sleuthing at Market Basket, I found something called an Ataulfo mango.  It is related to the standard mango but is smaller. In looks, it's a cross between a pear and a comma in that it has the size, coloration, and general shape of a pear, but it has a little bend at the small end. See the picture below to see its shape and compare it to a standard mango. 

A You Tube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxuD6Zjo5bM stressed that this fruit needs to be fully ripe. It advised that you let it sit on your window sill until it is all wrinkled. ("Let it get really ugly.") This advice spoke to me because of my experience with the unripe standard mango reported on previously. Perhaps over-reacting, I let this sit on my window for seventeen days until it was wrinkled like a 90 year-old face.

Finally, it looked so over-the-hill that I judged it ready to eat. I cut it lengthwise so that I got a nice, flat slab off of one side. There was a slight discoloration inside; perhaps I overdid the ripening thing. As the experts advise, I then scored it. That is, I took a knife to the fruit side and cut a cross-hatch pattern, with a little less than half and inch between cuts. I then turned the slab inside out, and, to my surprise, the fruit popped right up just like it does in the videos made my the experts. 

One thing the experts leave out is how to eat the fruit once it is so attractively presented. Not knowing what else to do, I gnawed it like an ear of corn. While perhaps inelegant, this worked fine. To my surprise, there was tartness rather than sweetness. I would call the taste mildly peasant. It was not a taste that stuck in one's mind. After finishing the first slab, I sliced another off the other side and ate it. I was eating it eagerly and not forcing myself. I could not tell that the discoloration affected the taste. I then tried to cut a third slab but couldn't because the pit took most of the remaining fruit. I ended up paring off the remaining peel and eating the remainder like an apple, but in fact there wasn't much more to eat. I was surprised at how little meat there was; I guess I have been spoiled by fruits such as pears that are mostly fruit.

Compared to some of the other fruits I have surveyed, at leasTht the ataulfo mango has a taste. Perhaps after repeated eatings it would become an acquired taste that one would relish. Perhaps.

The verdict: I hesitate to draw strong conclusions since it might have been that this fruit was overripe. Nevertheless, there was not much meat for $1.29, and the taste was middle-of-the-road rather than something to fire one's desire for more.

The experts say that the season is from mid-March until June, so I might give this fruit another try to make sure that I am not misled by a small sample.

Rick

Trying a New Fruit: Cactus Pear

To All,

In my foraging trips to Market Basket I had seen something called a cactus pear. Wondering what this was, I googled it and found out that it was the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, which was one of my common childhood weeds. It never occurred to us to eat a weed, so I never sampled this food.

I got one at Market Basket for 99 cents. (My keyboard does not have the symbol for cents; this is one way that we have regressed from the typewriter.) My cactus pear had the size, shape, and pebbled skin of a hand grenade. (See picture below.) I looked up an Internet video on how to peel it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJpW_j1EYTY. (There was another video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsOix7iFvD0 that showed how to pick it; this involved a blowtorch.) You cut off the ends, make a shallow cut end to end that just penetrates the skin, and then peel it. Easy, even for me. The fruit that came into view had the unappealing sickly red that I associate with beets. I cut off a slice and stuck it into my mouth. The essence of this fruit is that it is all texture and no flavor; despite assiduous effort I was unable to discern any flavor at all. The texture was chewy intermixed with big hard seeds; You had to be careful when chewing not to chomp down on a seed. I apparently swallowed the seeds, though I was unaware of it. I easily finished this fruit in one sitting.

Verdict: While it is of some interest to eat a childhood weed, this fruit has nothing to commend it (except for the hackneyed claim that it is high in vitamin C), and the many hard seeds make it something of a chore to chew. I see no reason to revisit this fruit.

Where do these cactus pears come from? I speculate that the barren fields of West Texas, ruined by overgrazing, have been re-purposed as prickly pear farms. Imagine the majestic site as you drive down the highway and observe prickly pears stretching out on both sides as far as the eye can see.

The Fruit Explorer

P.S. While at BJ's with Mike, I was, as ever, alert to new fruits to sample, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a big display of chayote. I sorted through the big pile while Mike studied the posted documentation. Just as I had found a good one and was putting it into the basket, Mike announced the fruits of his scrutiny; chayote was a vegetable. l quick put it back. I shudder to think that I nearly bought a vegetable.

     

Trying a New Fruit: Star Fruit

To All,

While prowling the aisles of Stop&Shop, I came across the visually arresting star fruit (aka carambola). If you want to create a decorative still life, then this is the fruit for you. It will draw the eye and ignite conversation. It will make your living room into a salon as artists are drawn to paint your still life.

This fruit is maybe four inches long and shaped somewhat, like a stubby cucumber. Rather than smooth like most fruits it has six prominent ridges that run the length of the fruit. (Some varieties have five ridges.) This longitudinal peak and valley construction gives it in cross section the look of a six pointed star, hence its name. It is neon yellow and green. (Brown spots indicate it is overripe.) The combination of bizarre shape and unusual color scheme makes this fruit a real eye-catcher. See pictures below.

To prepare, cut about a quarter inch off of each end, then trim the top off of each ridge from end to end. This is quick and easy. Then cut it cross-wise as you would a cucumber into slices a quarter-inch thick (or get creative). The only part of this fruit that is a hassle is that you will probably want to remove the two or three seeds from each slice. The visual appeal extends to this stage as each slice is a little six-pointed star. This fruit could be used to teach astronomy.

Pop a de-seeded slice into your mouth.Various web sites compare the texture to apple or watermelon, but to me it is much like cucumber with a very slight crunch followed by melting in your mouth. The taste is pleasant. That might sound like damning with faint praise, but so be it. To me there was no strong taste. (A super-taster like Mei-Mei would probably detect all sorts of entrancing sensations.)

The verdict: One can't help but like such a goofy fruit. It's a little expensive at $1.99, but you get a lot of fruit, so it is a much better bargain than passion fruit, and the fruit has lots of little extras that justify the occasional purchase of such a diverting dessert.

This fruit is like a cucumber in so many ways (shape, method of cutting, texture) that I would call it "tree cucumber" if it didn't already have such an apt name.

The Fruit Explorer

    

The Fruit Explorer Encounters a Mango

To All,

Despite the criticisms hurled at Market Basket by a couple of you, I continue to go there for fruit, and each time I bushwhack through the produce section and scan the aisles to search for hitherto untasted fruit. A couple of weeks ago I bought a mango. I let it sit on my kitchen window sill to let it ripen.

I decided that today was the day. Not knowing how to prepare a mango, I watched two videos on how to cut up a mango, including https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbWsCISLDho.  (This video has a pointer to another video that shows how to tell if a mango is ripe. My first discovery was that even after two weeks in the window, my mango was not ripe. The main tip is to buy mangoes that are yellow and red, not green. Mine has splotches of red but was mainly green.) I ended up cutting off the two sides, cutting each side lengthwise into slices, and slicing off the skin. This was fast and easy. (I did not do so well when I tried the scoring technique.)

I had previously had mango in salsa, and perhaps in fruit salad, but I had never had pure mango, so I was ready for a new taste treat. I was disappointed. I blame the disappointment on the unripeness of the fruit. It was hard, tasteless, and not sweet at all. The first lesson is the importance of ripeness. The second lesson is that my kitchen window sill is not the sure path to ripeness. The third lesson is that the Internet is crammed with useful tips.

Several of you blamed my unhappiness with the uniq (the first fruit covered in this series) to be due to its unripeness. I reject that line of argument and contend that the uniq is just not that good. For the mango, however, I think that not being ripe was the cause of my dissatisfaction. I need to use my new-found knowledge to pick a ripe mango and try again.

When the Fruit Explorer stubs his toe, the proper response it to let out a curse and then get revenge on the offending fruit by making another attempt to eat it. I noticed that Stop &Shop had mangoes on sale for a buck apiece; this presented a perfect opportunity for me to get my revenge. I went to Stop&Shop and sifted through a mountain of mangoes, but not a one was anywhere near ripe. I despair of finding a ripe mango. Revenge deferred.

r

P.S. Please let me know if you would like to be removed from the Fruit Explorer's mailing list.

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..