Intentionally, Chris

One of my absolute favorite things in the world to eat is baked apples. My mom used to make them for us when we were little kids and she'd make them very very simple. Just sprinkle some cinnamon and butter on them and bake them. Well I decided to get fancy the other day :p My family had come over for the Saints game on Sunday and I had cut up some honeycrisp apples and served them with a bowl of nutella to dip them in (best snack ever) but had lots of left over apple slices! I also had a bosc pear that I had been meaning to try.

So I decided to peel the pear and peel the remaining apples and bake them. And then get a little bit more fancy :P First, I heated my oven to 350 and melted about a half stick of butter in the bottom of a glass dish while I was peeling everything. Once that was melted, I mixed 1/2 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 cup of white sugar and a splash of vanilla extract in with the butter to make a caramel base that would cook into a liquid and laid the apples and pears on top of that and let them cook on top of that for 30 minutes, then flipped everything over and let them cook for 30 more minutes until all of the fruit was soft. They came out looking like this:


I took the fruit out of the dish and put it into it's own dish:

Already looks yummy, right? But that wasn't good enough for me :p I was left with all of this yummy caramel-y goodness that had liquified in the glass dish. So I put that in a saucepot on the stove, threw in about 6 or 7 cloves and about 4 tablespoons of almond milk and brought it to a boil, constantly stirring it to reduce it...I cooked it I guess for about 5 minutes. In the end it looked like this:

I poured all that back over the fruit:





Then put some in a bowl and to make it extra yummy, I put some cold sweet vanilla almond milk on top of it. It basically tasted like melted vanilla ice cream making it taste like a perfect pie a la mode! This was SO GOOD!!!!! Good way to start off this goal ;)

Guess what? I've never cut a kiwi and eaten it fresh before! Here's a good example of my intentions behind this goal. It's not so much to only eat fruit that I've never had before, but also to truly savor and experience different fruits that I've never truly appreciated. I know I've tasted kiwi in a fruit salad or on a cake, but if you asked me to tell you specifically what kiwi tasted like or if I closed my eyes and blind tasted kiwi, I couldn't really tell you what it was. So I bought a kiwi and cut it up myself and tasted it :) They're odd little fruits aren't they? All fuzzy on the outside and then FULL of seeds on the inside. But they are SO gorgeous when they're cut up!





I have to say that this has by far been my favorite of the fruit goal so far!!! This was absolutely divine and the entire kiwi was gone in probably a matter of 15 seconds. I probably sounded like I was having an orgasm in my kitchen eating this thing :p There were lots of "mmmmms" It has a deliciously lime like flavor without being sour...perfectly sweet..and I love the crunchiness of the seeds too. I could do some damage with some kiwis!

I also had a bosc pear this week which I've never had before. I usually eat bartlett pears..you know the green ones. But I've never had these bosc pears before. They're super hard and look like a potato! I'll tell you what I did with it in the next post ;) I'll tell you now that it was freaking amazing. So two more fruits added to the list!

This goal is just fun. I've found that whenever I go to the grocery now, I have to stop myself from buying too much produce, because I know it'll all end up going bad if I buy EVERYTHING that I haven't tried before...or at least everything I've never really properly paid attention to in the fruit department. Two updates here...one a total failure and one a huge success....well mostly a success.





The first one is muscadine grapes. These make me think of Matt actually. His grandfather grows them on his farm and he used to talk about them all the time, but I've never had this type of grape before and saw them for sale. The first thing I noticed was how BEAUTIFUL these are! The picture doesn't quite do them justice but they have an almost metallic sheen to them. They look like little golden orbs. Ok...well not so little, they're actually huge. That's the other thing you can't tell in the picture. Some of those grapes are as big as ping pong balls! I couldn't get over the size of them!!! I was super excited about trying these because I love grapes and imagined a big, juicy, super sweet grape.

I got home and rinsed them off and bit into one.....and spit it out immediately. They have an EXTREMELY thick skin and seeds in them too! Two things I didn't know so it freaked me out at first and I instictively just spit it out :p So I tried again...this time, I peeled the skin off the grape (it really is THAT thick) and took out the THREE seeds in the one grape. And it was just gross. Which was really sad. I can't even imagine a grape that doesn't taste good and I can't even describe the taste of these really. Obviously some people love them, but not me....I had to drink lemonade just to get the taste out of my mouth. The best way I can describe the taste is sort of melon-y (and I hate melon) and very "plant-y"...like you're eating chlorophyll. Oh well...we can't love them all.




Next up was a guava! Which I found at walmart believe it or not. Who ever thought that Walmart would carry tropical fruits! They had a tag for "starfruit" too, but sadly, they didn't have any in stock...but I'd definitely like to try out a starfruit whatever the hell that is :p I believe they have them in Kingdom Hearts the video game :p Anyway, this is what a guava looks like from the outside. I had no clue how to eat it, what to expect or anything. So I looked it up. Some people said just to eat it like an apple! And others said no, don't eat the skin. So I decided to cut it up like an apple and then cut the flesh from the skin. This is what it looks like when you cut it in half:




Isn't that gorgeous? It smelled so good too! Very nectary and very sweet. I cut it into triangles just like an apple, and then cut the skin off the bottoms and I ended up with this:




People who say to eat it like an apple are nuts! They say to eat the seeds and everything.  The seeds are hard as pebbles. I ended up having to cut the sections with seeds away too which left me with very little fruit sadly. I probably could've either blended the part of the fruit with the seeds in a food processor or just strained it and gotten some really good and sweet nectar, but I tossed it. The fruit that I ended up with was DELICIOUS!!! This was a really nice surprise. I was just sad there was so little of it. I honestly have nothing to compare it to. It was perfectly sweet and very nectar like actually....It's a pretty soft fruit and just...yum yum yum!! This would be so good served ice cold on a hot day. Definitely one I'd like to try again. Might look up some recipes or try to find something else I can do with it. I know there are some popular Mexican drinks made with Guava.

The second fruit to "experience" was a peacharine! Yep, a cross of a peach and a nectarine. It looks just like a peach from the outside and sadly I forgot to take a picture of it from the outside :( I let it get really ripe before eating it because I like super sweet fruit. I peeled the skin off and cut it in half and this is what it looked like:


Didn't have the orange color of a peach! The fruit was much more on the whiter side and the pit was really big. It smelled delicious! I took out the pit and I'm drying it along with some seeds from the passion fruit the other day because you never know what I'll want to try growing some time in the future :p I chopped it up into some tiny pieces and here's what I got:


The verdict? Meh. Not too great and not something I'd buy again. I've found that hybridizing fruit normally doesn't result in anything too spectacular. A fruit normally tastes best when you let it just be itself. This fruit had a really bland taste to it actually and was somewhat mealy. Every now and then I'd have a bite that was good and juicy and perfectly ripe, but overall, not fantastic. But I didn't want to throw it all away, so I thought to myself...hmmm...how can I make this more palatable and delicious...and I turned it into this :p


I know that's not the most appetizing picture in the world, but let me tell you just how good that tasted! What you see up there is the peacharine mixed with a spoonful of nutella and a handfull of honey granola with dried mixed berries. Oh yes...now THAT was good :p If anyone can make something healthy UNhealthy, it's me :p I think you can add nutella and granola to anything and make it good :p

Excited to see what other fruits await me!

So I discovered a new goal. I love fresh fruit. I always have...nothings more delicious than a fresh piece of fruit that's still juicy and delicious. But there are so many fruits that I still haven't even tasted! And then there are fruits that I've never truly tasted. The original goal was to try 50 new fruits. Then I thought...well maybe there aren't 50 fruits out there that I haven't tried :p I started thinking of all of the weird fruits I see at Whole Foods and thought surely there are 50 but I'm still not sure. But then I thought, there are different varieties of apples that I haven't tried, etc. Still...don't know if there are 50.

However, there are certainly plenty of fruits that I've had in one form or another, but haven't truly appreciate. Like raspberries. I'm sure I've eaten them on a cake or in something, but I've never sat down and intentionally eaten fresh raspberries. Same with figs...growing up in New Orleans, everyone has a fig tree, so I know what figs taste like..hell fig newtons! But I can't recall actually ever sitting down and EATING a fig....really appreciating it. Grapefruit. I say I hate it, but I don't ever recall actually eating grapefruit :p I have no memory of actually trying it.

So what I'm officially calling the goal is "Experience 50 different fruits". And that's what I'll do. Whether I've had it before or not, this goal will be about really experiencing and appreciating the fruit that I eat.

The first fruit that I tried is something that I really have NOT had before. I wanted to start with something that was a bit of a "different" fruit. Something I've never had before and didn't think I'd ever eat. And Whole Foods is good about carrying these strange fruits so I thought I'd try a weird froot! Here's a passion fruit!


The first thing I noticed about passion fruit is that it's super light! Seriously, it feels like it has absolutely nothing inside of it. It's about the weight of a ping pong ball. And the skin is dried and wrinkled and I read that that's how you tell it's ripe. It should be dimpled. You can smell from the outside that it smells like grapefruit. The way to eat it is to cut it in half. When you do that, it looks like this:


Doesn't look all that great, huh? It's a gooey mess of pulp, juice and seeds all inside of a leathery skin. I'm actually trying to dry the skins right now though I don't know how successful that will be because they're so cool looking and they look like they'd make neat little pinch bowls :p I'm guessing this won't be too successful of a thing :p Once you slice them, you spoon out the fruit and strain it through a sieve or mesh strainer to get the fruit and juice from the seeds: