Letter from Austin: Weird fruit. Weird, wasted fruit.
cherimoya
Anina writes:
I happened to visit the East Side Café, one of my favorite restaurants in Austin, during the first fall weekend under 100 degrees. The cold snap meant I was primed to buy their soup cookbook (It was only 80 that weekend! Soup time! Sweaters!). It’s organized by season, so I jumped right in and started making autumn’s soups. The first two were fabulous, and each fed me and guests through most of a week, but the third one is bland. Sorry, East Side, but split pea soup without ham is kind of like eating green paste (even if it has fresh herbs in it). I can’t add enough salt to this thing. However, it’s healthy and vegan, and it was cheap to make, which made me cocky.
I had extra money in my budget, and clearly, this was my chance to go wild.
When I’m feeling spendy, I cruise the exotic fruit area of the grocery store looking for old friends from my California youth. My Rosebud has been the cherimoya, which I (and my friend Audra) remember as the best fruit I/we ever tasted, kind of like a strawberry-pineapple hybrid, but somehow monumentally better. I had recently been so obsessed that I read about cherimoyas on Wikipedia, which lead me to the monstera deliciosa, which was touted as The Most Delicious Fruit in the World [citation needed]. I found both in the Whole Foods and spent about $13 on them.
Some things should be left in the past, it turns out, and other things are just too inscrutable for me to decide when they’re ripe. Monstera deliciosa, according to Wikipedia, takes a year to ripen on the tree, is poisonous until ripe, and, once picked, is ready to eat when its scales start falling off. When I bought it, it looked like an elongated green pinecone. Some of the scales were loose (hard to imagine I’m talking about a fruit rather than, say, a sea monster), but I deemed it not ready yet. In successive days, I still felt doubtful about it, and kept waiting until it became apparent (I think) that the damn thing had rotted. Here’s what it looked like just before I stuck it in the compost. Kind of like the product of an armadillo and a corncob and, you know, feces. It was like buying a fancy dress and saving it for a special occasion but getting too fat to wear it before a special enough occasion comes along. Yeah, just like that.
But most disappointing was the cherimoya, which I ate ripe, at the right time. It was fine, but it didn’t live up to memory (I have to admit it was my second attempt at reclaiming cherimoya bliss.). Rosebud was just a sled, and I guess food is just food. It’s okay. I know how to make some tasty soups, and where to buy some excellent chocolate for under $13.
#1 by cari at October 29th, 2009
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Vegan split pea can be delicious. (Just ask Adam, who has sampled mine.) How many onions does the recipe call for? Maybe you need more onions in there. And carrots. And what did you use for the stock?
#2 by Anina at October 29th, 2009
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Although I love most things vegan, I think I just need ham in my split pea soup. Split pea w ham is a comfort food for me more than chicken noodle. But for the record, I used a box of vegetable stock plus water to make up for the difference (because I usually use bullion cubes, but Whole Foods didn’t have those, and I wasn’t thinking about how much stock I’d need to buy, and water’s free). I think it was 1 1/2 c onion, 1/2 c carrots, 1/2 c celery. But I could be wrong.
#3 by Anina at October 29th, 2009
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PS– love how you’re avoiding the fruit elephant in the room!
#4 by cari at October 29th, 2009
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1.5 onions etc to how many cups stock and peas?
#5 by cari at October 29th, 2009
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PS: The fruit disturbs me. I refuse to look directly at it.
#6 by Anina at October 29th, 2009
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Uhhh, let me check when I get home to my cookbook. And again, I think I just need ham with this one.