Offbeat Grub: Prickly Pear

I get so excited when we try new foods! Our most recent new food we picked up a Prickly Pear Cactus Fruit This fruit was going for $3.99 per pound, which meant we spent under $2.00 on one piece of fruit (I forget the actual price).

The prickly pear when cut into has a great magenta color and minimal fragrance. As with most fruits we try we wanted to taste it in its purest form and decided to have it with our lunch. I did some research online as to how to prepare the fruit for consumption. I peeled it and carved it up and put some slices on a plate.

Presentation wise the fruit is very visually pleasing. The taste was very subtle. The one draw back to eating a prickly pear is the amount of seeds. There is a TON of seeds in every bite. The amount of seeds for us took away from the enjoyment of the mellow flavor.

It is nice to report that we both agreed that we would love to try cooking with prickly pear and making some sort of reduction out of it. The flavor condensed with maybe a little honey would very tasty over some pan fried chicken or pork.

Anyone got any great Prickly pear recipes they wanna share?

Offbeat Grub

After we had our adventure in eating Rambutan, we decided that it was going to be our mission to try some sort of new food monthly (this is our goal anyways). We officially introduce our Offbeat Grub commentary.

This month we decided to try Bitter Melon. One of Mario's Indian coworkers suggested this fruit. Tonight we decided we'd give it a try. We went to our local market, and bought two. We got this bitter melon for about $3.49 per pound. Two pieces actually weighed in at about 1 pound.

In preparation for eating this new food we did some research and found a recipe. This recipe seemed to be taking us down a yummy path. Mario followed the recipe as suggested.

Unfortunately, it is unanimous that bitter melon is not something The Bubs will be eating again. I'm guessing that the consumption of this fruit is definitely an acquired taste and depends on your culture!

The seeds are a bit tough and require some major chewing. The melon starts off with a very subtle taste that is almost enjoyable, but the more you chew the more bitter it gets. In my experience when I got to that really bitter state of chewing I just wanted to swallow it in order to get away from the taste. After eating the bitter melon there was a little bit of a lingering aftertaste. It was also interesting that after 45 minutes of cooking the texture of the melon was still firm and had a crunch to it.

While this fruit may not be suitable for our pallets, we do not discourage anyone from trying bitter melon. We are actually interested in hearing more about this offbeat grub! Got an experience with it? Leave us a comment.

Strange Fruit...

After being in Hawaii and giving dragon fruit a try we decided we'd try more tropical fruits. So, recently we saw a new exotic fruit at our local grocery. This week when we went to do our Sunday shopping they still had this odd looking fruit called Rambutan. So we picked two up at $9.99 a pound. For two it cost us approximately $2.00.

I did some research on how to open and eat this fruit. So, we enjoyed it with lunch. It has a sizable seed in the middle. Mario ate the seed and I did not (he said it was a little bitter). The fruit itself is an interesting texture (much like stiffer gelatin). The flavor was very mellow, refreshing and very enjoyable! We will be having this yummy fruit again!