Weird Fruit Wednesday

When I’m allowed to go to the grocery store by myself and I have the time to poke around I tend to come back with things that we’ve never tried before, and I especially like doing that with weird and wonderful fruits. On this day I brought back a quince (with which I was somewhat familiar), two tamarillos, and a horned melon (otherwise known as a kiwano).

Sometimes my experiments with new fruit end poorly (remember the cherimoya incident?).  And of course I didn’t do any research before I cracked these babies open (hindsight is 20/20).

In this case, though, I didn’t need to prepare ahead of time and just dove right in. I should have realized the quince was completely unripe just by touching it. Similar to an apple or pear, it was so hard and sour that I’ve put it in the fridge in the hopes that I can stew it into something less objectionable with a lot of sugar.

I think I liked the tamarillos best of the whole thing. The skin tastes terrible, so don’t eat it, but you can scoop out the seeds and a bit of the inner flesh and to me it tastes like a combination of passion fruit and persimmon.

The kiwano was harder to get into but I went with my instincts and I’d picked a nice ripe one. The seeds squeeze out and taste kind of like a cucumber mixed with a banana.

What new foods have you tried recently?