h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There's something remarkable about getting to the fruit display in your local supermarket and realising that you're out of your depth. A shyness creeps up on me and I hesitate. Do I pick up some of these fruits? Am I choosing the ones that are ripe and ready to eat? And more importantly - what the hell do I do with them once I've bought them?

Here are a couple of photos of some of the successes. I hope the link works!

http://tinyurl.com/oaty7a9

The one in the dish that looks vaguely like a peach is a persimmon, or locally called Kakis. You have to wait until the flesh is as squashy and unctuous as the inside of a juicy grape. If you try to eat them beforehand they suck out all the moisture from your mouth. They're in season right now and are worth waiting for. You can see what the inside looks like in the second picture.

Papayas and watermelons are better in the summer, they are sweeter and juicier, but as we tumble into autumn we have different things coming into season. Loads of things I don't recognise. I've really got accustomed to using papaya in various guises. As a salsa along with refried beans or as a fresh chutney with dhal. Really lovely.

I crammed a smoothie maker into my suitcase a few months back. It had been on offer in the local town and is one of the better kitchen gadgets I've ever owned. It really is a good thing, not only for making fruit smoothies, but for other things such as gazpacho and blending soups of course.

Back to the unusual tropical fruits. The ruby-coloured (third photo) one is a Dragon Fruit. Pitaya roja. This is Hylocereus costaricensis - which is a cactus. They're not so sweet as more fragrant, perfumed even. The flesh is even more vibrantly red than the photo shows. I think the camera compensated in shock.

I've been so taken with learning about the local goodies, I am going to carry on and learn what to do with other things. I might bore you with my discoveries. Or write Entries about them. That would be a worthwhile plan perhaps.

[Amy P]

I've seen the dragon fruit in the supermarket here, but I've never tried it. I thought the top one looked a bit like a "Sharon fruit", so I looked it up: apparently that's what it is, except Sharon fruit is just the marketing name for one particular cultivar from Israel.

In Cambodia, they eat unripened mangos like a kind of a crunchy vegetable. Ever since I heard that I've wondered what it would taste like.

I used to grow cacti in a greenhouse and would often eat the fruits off epiphyllums and mammillarias. Prickly pear (opuntia) fruit appear in the shops here sometimes.

Sharon fruit is another name for those orange ones, but be careful to make sure they're ripe.

Prickly pears grow all over the place here. You need to be careful of the hairs that give them their name. I've avoided them, but in the interests of science and h2g2 I might try and pick one or two next time I see some ripe ones by the side of the road. I think it's the wrong time of the year though.

When you say hairs, is this the kind of opuntia you mean? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opuntia_microdasys

Those hairs a quite unpleasant - I remember getting them stuck in my skin on a few occasions. Most prickly pears have ordinary spines, or none at all, like the one I have out on my balcony. Those are all over central and southern Texas (including in the towns and cities) and they fruit like billyo

They're this sort. Evil brutes. The little white patches of hairs surrounding the spines on the fruits are nasty

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f9/Prickly_pear_cactus_beed.jpg

Ah, yes. With you now.

I love to buy ripe mangos, put them through the blender with orange juice, and add the resulting liquid to batter, then bake for an hour. There are also some spices and raisins in the cake. Mango cake is quite tasty.

Fresh mango eaten by itself is delicious.

Whenever possible, I try to eat fruits that grow in my own neighborhood. Raspberries grow behind my house. Mulberries do, too. Purple grapes grow on the fence across the street from me. They all have lots of flavor, because they are only available when they're in season.

For that matter, the nectarines that I enjoy only taste good in season, even though the supermarket carries them at other times, too. I've gotten savvy enough to stop buying nectarines when they stop tasting good, and switch to pears. For some reason, Bartlett pears seem to taste pretty good year-round.

From my time in Spain I remember a fruit called Cherimoya, with white flesh and loads of black pips which were a pain and had to be spat out because they were right through the flesh.

yes, exactly paulh. It's a question of eating locally grown food as well as my curiosity about what it tastes like.

And cherimoya - those are some I've seen but never tried. I'll give them a go.

Dragon fruit looks pretty, but it doesnt taste of very much.

I remember horrifying myself when I looked up the amount of calories (and carbs, and hence sugars) in a sharon fruit, and I haven't eaten one since.

My favoruites are the little physallis that look like yellow cherry toms, wrapped in their papery leaves.

Lovely pictures, Lanzababy! Those fruits look very inviting

One should never eat fruit, unless you are a woman of a "tweedy" age





RJR 'ol stumpy

Maybe imported dragon fruit don't have much flavour, but I think that is true for any foodstuff that has spent a long while in storage or transport from distant countries. There's certainly an incredible perfumed scent in the ones here.

Ooh! I passed some prickly pears on the way to the bus stop this morning. None quite ready for picking, but they literally are like weeds, this plant was typical. I guess it's about 5 feet tall by who knows what wide. About the same size as a small car. I've added a photo of it to the same album, but here's the link again to save you clicking in the OP

http://tinyurl.com/oaty7a9

Danish fruit growers pride themselves of their apples and pears. The claim that due to the climate the fruit ripens slower here than in southern countries which give them a stronger taste and fragrance

I tend to agree - and ask myself why they haven't started a proper calvados production decades ago already!

I'd agree that they'd be tasty - the longer day length is why Scottish raspberries are so prolific, so the same must apply to any fruit or veg grown further north.

Could this be the reason why Scottish marmalade is so tasty?

no that is down to the Whisky!

Remember: Don't pick the prickly pear by the paw, when you pick a pear try to use the claw"

Deb