In between the multiple emails I get about the stupid-assed Cookie Diet and the weird-assed Pimple Blocker Battle events, I occasionally get emails asking me whatever happened to my Lick the Produce entries where I’d try new fruits and vegetables. Well, the produce section done been licked, y’all. The Kroger is bathed in my saliva. But, since you seem to like my tongue-based adventures I decided to drive across town for new material and visit Saraga, the international grocery.

Saraga is cold and quiet. The cashiers wear mittens and coats in the winter. An unsettling quiet blankets the store because no music is piped over the speaker system. I don’t know if they can’t afford a PA system, or if they don’t want to play music from any one nationality for fear of alienating another culture. I suspect it’s because they’re cheap.

It’s more fun to look at the items at Saraga than to actually eat them, especially after reading these reviews about how dirty and unclean the store is and how they allegedly rip people off and switch labels on items. I do wonder how long the items had been sitting on the shelf. How much pocky can they really sell in a week? And how frequently do chayote shipments come in?

Saraga isn’t close to my apartment, and it’s located in a somewhat sketchy part of town, so I don’t visit there often. I usually want to leave about 10 minutes after I do because of the cold and the quiet and the creepy food, like the Bulgogi above which looks like it crawled out of the primordial ooze and is about to gain self-awareness. Reading the description of bulgogi on Wikipedia makes it sound tasty, but my eyes can’t get over how gross it looks.

I searched for the corn and cheese flavored ice cream I saw there last year, but couldn’t find it. Which means someone actually bought it. I can only hope that like me, they were a blogger searching for material. I bought two weird fruits to review…and then I let them sit in my fridge for over a week. Spiky fruits are scary, ok?! So, you’ll have to wait a bit longer for any new “Lick the Produce” entries.

Out of curiosity, I also purchased two of the bean cakes pictured above, expecting a pastry made with red beans to be one of those items I chewed three times and then spit into the trash as a masticated ball of goo. Imagine my surprise when it was tasty! Really tasty! Proving once again that if you inject something with enough sugar, I will probably eat it.

Visiting Saraga made me wonder what American foods seem odd and gross to foreigners. Whatever they are, they can’t possibly sound as bizarre as fish paste.

ETA: Recently some people have reported problems when trying to leave comments. If you run into a problem, please email me with the text of your comment, your computer’s operating system, and the browser you are using. Thanks!

Pluot

Back in August I was passing the peaches when I saw a speckled, plum-like fruit. I examined the sticky label and discovered my Kroger had started stocking Dinosaur Eggs. Wow, I thought dinosaurs were extinct! These must be worth millions! Yet, my local supermarket was selling the extinct eggs for less than 6 figures per pound, though they didn’t specify what breed they were. Triceratops? Tyrannasaurus Rex? Upon further research, I learned the Dinosaur Egg is one of at least 13 varieties of the pluot, a cross between a plum and an apricot. Don’t confuse them with the aprium or the plumcot. While I loved the creative marketing, the pluot tasted like a plum to me, just with a cuter name.

Broccoflower

After I’d tried orange cauliflower and purple cauliflower, I was comforted by the fact that their demon cousin Broccoflower® was a color more frequently occurring in nature. This combination creature of broccoli and cauliflower is also a good source of Vitamin C and folate, if the package is to be believed. The word “Broccoflower®” is a trademark of Tanimura & Antle. So it’s like the words Kleenex or Xerox or if you want to keep talking food, it’s like Derby Pie, a chocolate, walnut, bourbon pie trademarked by Kern’s Kitchen of Kentucky and named for the Kentucky Derby. You’ll never find a recipe for Derby Pie in a cookbook because of the copyright issues. Instead people rename their Derby Pie recipes something like Pegasus Pie or May Day Pie even though everyone knows it’s a Derby Pie. Just like everyone at the office knows you’re having a Christmas Party even if you call it a Holiday Celebration.

But, I wasn’t eating Derby Pie (sadly enough), I was eating Broccoflower®. And it tasted like cauliflower. It was a let down, really. Mad food scientists are going to all this trouble to combine fruits and vegetables and the results end up tasting no different than their parents.

Ugli Fruit

That is an ugli fruit. I’ll give you three guesses as to why it’s called that. Green, wrinkly people are automatically disqualified. The ugli fruit is from Jamaica and is also called the Uniq fruit. It’s a cross between a grapefruit and a tangerine. Mine was a bit larger than a grapefruit, though the label suggested I split it in half like one. When I got it open, I realized it was much easier to just peel it apart like an orange. It also tasted like an orange, just more bitter and tart. It was like an orange dressed up in a frumpy, green suit. If someone had served the pulp to me on a plate, I would have never guessed it was an ugli fruit. The picture on Wikipedia is yellow though, so perhaps mine wasn’t ripe enough.

All in all, the hybrid fruits didn’t seem worth the extra cost I paid for them. They were novelty items that were more fun to buy and look forward to eating than to actually eat. If you’re going to get a hybrid, you should probably stick to a car.

Cherimoya

Sometimes I do not know their names. Thank you to everybody who told me that the strange, green fruit I picked up at the grocery store is a cherimoya. They are a very popular fruit that have several web sites dedicated to them and Mark Twain called them “deliciousness itself.” Still, I’d never seen or heard of them before. I’m evidently out of the fruit loop. I don’t recognize any of the musicians in the Top 10 anymore and I cannot identify a somewhat popular and beloved custard fruit. I am old and out of touch with the world.

The cherimoya is described as having a creamy, custard flavor and it lived up to its reputation. It was very yummy, sweet with a tart after taste. My only complaint is that there are a lot of hard brown seeds that I had to pick out. As shown in the picture below, after I ate all the white stuff they took up one fourth of the remaining shell.

Sometimes if I’m feeling lazy, I will just eat the seeds in a watermelon or a grape, but biting into these seeds would have cost me some serious dental work. Someone should task the genetic engineers to breed a seedless version.

Dragon Fruit – Kiwano

The dragon fruit looks like a doggy toy. Or a strange aquatic creature. And the Google image search for “dragon fruit” makes me wonder if what I ate was a real dragon fruit. I conducted a fruit autopsy and the insides look fairly different.

The dragon fruit is also supposed to be mildy sweet, but when I stuck a spoon into its guts and put it in my mouth it tasted like – slimy, cucumber, seeds! It was like someone had taken the most tasteless part of a cucumber with the most disgusting texture and injected it into a doggy toy. I actually threw this out without eating the whole thing, a first in Lick the Produce history. I don’t know if what I ate was a dragon fruit or not, but I’m never eating it again.

ETA: Thanks to Lesley and Tracy for revealing this is actually a kiwano!

Feijoa

When I did a search for “fiejoa” I returned almost no results, making me wonder if I’d picked up some completely obscure fruit. Then I realized that I’d spelled it wrong because “feijoa” is evidently too good to obey the “I before E” rule. What a rebel. According to Wikipedia, it is also known as a Pineapple Guava or a Guavasteen.

The feijoa is a tiny, has soft flesh and a sweet smell. So it’s the fruit equivalent of a supermodel. It was very fragrant and tasted as good as it smelled, like a cross between a banana and a pear. I don’t eat supermodels, but I’d eat a feijoa again.

Acorn Squash

The acorn squash does sort of look like an acorn. When I picked it up at the grocery store, I had an urge to hold it up to my face with both hands and twitch my nose like a giant squirrel. However, I did not dig up the linoleum and bury it in the produce section. Instead, I just split it open with my giant knife and scooped out the insides before baking it in a pan of water.

I scraped out the insides and served it with some margarine, salt and pepper and, wow, it was pretty damn good. I wasn’t expecting too much from a squash, but it was fairly tasty. The acorn squash is a bit high on the glycemic index though, so I won’t be eating this too frequently.

Pomegranate

Last time I was moaning about how I couldn’t do a Kate Bush themed LTP entry because there were no guavas or sultanas or pomegranates around here. So what do I find at my local grocer’s the very next week? A bin full of pomegranates.

The pomegranate is as difficult to eat as it is to spell. I still have to look it up in Webster’s online every time and before eating it I read some directions. First you cut off the flowery top part.

Then you score it into four sections.

Next you place it in a bowl of water to soak, and then rip open the four sections, revealing all the seeds nestled in a white cocoon of… stuff.

You want to eat the seeds, not the white stuff. So you have to pick out the seeds which fall to the bottom of the water while the white stuff floats. Then you skim the white stuff off the top and eat the seeds.

By the time I was done with this, I felt like I’d disarmed a dirty bomb. The seeds were fairly sweet and tasty, but I wouldn’t consider them worth all the work. Just hand me an apple instead. I prefer fruits I can just bite into and I know how to spell. I also hear pomegranate juice stains pretty badly, so don’t attempt this wearing your Sunday best.

Mango

When I think of mangoes, I think of the Gauguin painting Woman with mango. Typing that title makes it sound like another recipe from the cannibal’s cookbook. I opted to eat the mango raw. However, if I had taken a closer look at Gauguin’s painting I would have realized I should have waited until it turned red to do so. Instead, I got out my big knife and tried hacking into a green mango. I got about an inch into it and felt like I’d gotten my workout for the day. I checked the wikipedia article on mangoes and realized my mistake, but by that time it was too late. If I left my mutilated mango to ripen on the counter it would just have gotten moldy. I finished cutting out a wedge anyway, bit into it and it was about as bad as you’d think unripened fruit would be. I threw it out for the trash flies to feast on and bought another mango a couple weeks later.

This time I waited for it to turn red and soft and bit right into it. That was mistake number two. If I had finished reading that wikipedia article I would have discovered that you’re not supposed to eat the skin. It’s like biting right into an orange or chewing on watermelon rind. In fact, there is a fancy schmancy way you are supposed to cut a mango to get out all the good, fleshy orange stuff. After all those mishaps, I finally ate the damn mango already. It was tart, somewhat lemony or limey, but sweeter. I’d certainly eat one again, now that I now how to do it properly.

I checked Eat Fresh, Stay Healthy, a book about fruits and veggies that some kind reader suggested (thank you kind reader!), which also has the fugliest cover of any book I have ever seen ever in all my life, and it said mangoes are the “number-one consumed fruit in the world.” They just don’t show up in the US that much due to various boring importation reasons I won’t get into. I had no idea they were so popular, especially considering how hard it was for me to eat one. Go figure.

Kiwi

I have had kiwi fruit before, but I had never bought one in my adult life because it was brown and fuzzy. Kiwi skin reminds me of shag carpeting and I’ve never had a desire to chomp on the carpet. Avoiding kiwi fruits was stupid though because, yum, they are delicious! After my experience with the mango I looked up information on the kiwi to be sure it was okay to just bite into it like an apple. Usually kiwi is served sliced up, but that would mean I’d have to clean my knife afterwards and I am always looking for ways to cut down on dirty dishes. Kiwi is now one of my favorite fruits and I’m definitely going to put it into high rotation in my lunch bag, weird fuzzy skin be damned.

Purple Cauliflower

When I saw the purple cauliflower and orange cauliflower heads in the produce section, I thought they had set it in water with purple food coloring. In grade school we did the same thing with white carnations to color their petals with streaks of purple. I didn’t know why anyone would turn cauliflower purple or orange, but the oddness appealed to me and I needed a new vegetable to try, so I grabbed the purple head because I thought purple was a slightly weirder color than orange.

When I researched my purchase, I discovered that the coloring was natural. “The purple color is caused by the presence of the antioxidant group anthocyanin, which can also be found in red cabbage and red wine.” I roasted this in the oven with olive oil, salt and pepper like I usually cook cauliflower and it tasted just like normal cauliflower. Maybe true taste connoisseurs would catch slight variances in flavor, but if you’d blindfolded me I doubt I would have been able to tell what color the cauliflower was. While the purple coloring was fun, I think I’ll stick to the white stuff for now. If I stick it in a pool of food coloring I bet I can turn it any color I want to.

First up was the brown Asian pear. A protective white, netted, foam, covered its bottom half, which made it look like it was wearing pants. This made it irresistible to me. Maybe if they started dressing the apples and bananas in miniature dresses, produce sales would boom. Watch out Bratz dolls!

The interesting thing about eating a new fruit was that I had no expectation of what it should taste like. I love D’Anjou pears because they are juicy and sound vaguely French, but I didn’t know how much the brown pear would taste like them. I read in the book Mindless Eating that our expectations of how a food should taste actually shape how we perceive it to taste. For example, a chef on a navy ship during a war accidentally ordered too much lemon Jell-O and too little of the soldiers’ favorite flavor cherry. After the cherry Jell-O ran out, the crew started to complain, so the chef just took the lemon Jell-O, colored it red and served it. The crew was convinced they were eating cherry Jell-O again, even though it was actually lemon.

It was interesting going into an eating experience blind, though my impressions of what a pear should taste like probably left some chalky residue on an otherwise blank slate. The brown pear was crunchier than a D’Anjou pear, though not as hard as a Bartlett pear. It also had faint taste of bread to it. It was a satisfactory eating experience, but considering the price of the Asian pear, I doubt I’ll buy one again, even if calling it Asian makes it sound very exotic despite the fact it was probably grown in this country. It’s just as well because if I were ever to anthropomorphize this fruit for a blog entry and make it have a fake conversation with other fruit in the produce section, I’d have to make it speak Chinese or Korean or something, which is well out of my linguistic bullshitting abilities.

My next new fruit experience was the plum. I can’t ever recall eating a plum, which seems very odd because a plum is nowhere near as exotic as a starfruit. It’d be like saying I’d never had coffee at a Starbucks. I liked plums so much that I’ve taken to buying 5 or 6 of them at a time. They’re firm but juicy, sweet but somewhat tart, and come in a small serving size which is good for snacking. As long as I don’t bite in too fast and chip my teeth on the pit, they’re a great addition to PastaQueen’s approved fruit list.

Last night I finally cooked the sweet potato I bought about two weeks ago. This is another fairly common vegetable that I have avoided eating all my life for no real reason. I don’t have any psychological hang-ups against sweet potatoes. I never had a horrible sweet potato eating incident in my youth. I was never hit by a sweet potato delivery truck and buried in a pile of tubers, their eyes coldly staring at me as I was mashed by potatoes. It took me about 3 trips to the grocery store before I could even find the sweet potatoes. I never did find them at Kroger, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not there, just that I couldn’t locate them among the bags of regular potatoes and red potatoes. Eventually I picked one up at Meijer when I was stocking up on pistachios since they have a larger produce section.

The biggest obstacle in eating the sweet potato was figuring out how to cook it. I was disappointed they didn’t print instructions on it in ink made out of food coloring. All the recipes I searched for turned up complex sweet potato concoctions like salads and pies. I thought it best to try the sweet potato basically on its own for my first sampling so I didn’t become biased against it if other ingredients made it taste nasty. I settled on a quick and easy sweet potato fries recipe which involved slicing the sweet potato up and tossing it with 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil, ¼ tsp of salt, and ½ tsp of paprika. Then I baked the slices for 15 minutes at 425 degrees F, turned them and baked for another 10 minutes.

This was a recipe I might need to destroy every copy of for the safety of mankind. The knowledge, it is dangerous. The fries were delicious. I ate the whole batch, which was bad because I used a sweet potato the size of a mutant guinea pig. I attempted to put half of the batch in a Tupperware bowl to stick in the fridge, but I kept picking out just one more fry before putting it inside. Eventually all I was left with was an extra Tupperware container to clean. If I make this again, I will have to be sure to buy a very small sweet potato since I obviously have no self-control.