The Strange Fruit Taste Test

We had our niece and nephew visiting with us from Houston for the week.  They love helping out with all of the farm chores and have named our guinea fowl interesting names such as “Beak” and “Marshmallow” and “Pepper.”  Our niece and nephew have spent a great deal of time out in the pasture and up in the loft of the barn where they discovered a broody hen sitting on a nest of 13 eggs.  (No wonder we’ve been collecting fewer eggs!)

In the evening we have been playing games.  They taught us a game called “sardines,” which is simply Reverse Hide and Seek.  In this game, one person hides, the others look for them and as they find them, they hide with them.  The last person to find the hiders is “it” and they hide for the next round.  We also have had interesting conversations at supper time and we got to talking about our favorite fruits – mine is mango.

We got to talking about durian fruit.  Yuck!  I would NEVER try that.  Then, Noah, our nephew, told us about Dragon Fruit.  I had never heard of it.  He told me he’d like to try it.  So, at lunch on Monday, I went driving around Lake Charles in search of strange fruit.   At Albertson’s I found the following “strange for us” fruits – from left to right: Mango, Papaya, and DRAGON FRUIT!!! 

Mango, Papaya and Dragon Fruit

Who would have ever thought?  Noah was pretty fired up!

Dragon Fruit, also called pitahaya, is the fruit of a cactus that grows in Mexico, Central America, and in Asia.  The flower of this cactus blooms only at night and are pollinated by bats and moths.  It is a weird looking thing – a bright pinkish-red thing with fleshy soft spines with a yellowish tinge on the top.

Dragon Fruit

Time to try our cornucopia of tropical fruits.  We gathered in the kitchen and cut up the mango and promptly devoured that thing.  Delicious!  Even the huge seed was stripped of all its flesh.  Then we cut open the papaya.  As opposed to the large seed of the mango, the papaya has many small seeds resembling the poop of our baby goats.  That’s not very appetizing, I know.  I scooped out all of the seeds and sliced it up.  It was good, but it doesn’t really compare to the sweet awesomeness that is the mango.

Papaya

Alright, time for the pièce de résistance.  I cut the Dragon Fruit in half, revealing a bright fuchsia outer layer and white flesh, speckled with tiny white seeds!

Cutting open the Dragon Fruit

I peeled back the rind and pulled out the flesh and began slicing:

Ain’t that something else?!

We assembled a nice platter of strange fruit for us to snack on, papaya at the upper portion of the plate, dragon fruit at the lower right, and mango on the lower left.

Our Strange Fruit Tray

I have waited until now to tell you how the Dragon Fruit tasted. With a $9.75 price tag, I really expected the Dragon Fruit to cause a flavor explosion on my taste buds coupled with fireworks, flames billowing out of my mouth like a fire-breathing dragon and a burst of energy that would make me fly around the room. I think my expectations were too high. It didn’t happen.

The Dragon Fruit had a subtle scent, reminiscent of a rainforest with a slight oakiness, hints of leather and a finish of berries, vanilla, coupled with cherries on the tongue. Okay, I’m lying. The Dragon Fruit smelled fresh and had the taste of a kiwifruit with a bit of watermelon. You can eat the seeds, similar to kiwi. It was really good, but from a sheer taste standpoint, we agreed the strange fruit ranking was:

1. Mango,
2. Dragon Fruit,
3. Papaya

It was a fun experiment and we all enjoyed it – even the ‘big’ kids, Tricia and I. We’ll do it again soon. I already saw another fruit we’ll try – quince. I’ve never eaten quince. I’ll tell you this, though – I ain’t trying durian, no sir!