The Night of Fruit Experimentation

So tonight I got this great random idea that I passed by Miguel. He of course thought it was one of the best ideas ever, so we went with it! We decided to go buy every kind of weird, rare fruit we could find from a grocery store and then eat them all. Now if you know anything about rare fruits, you know that not only was this a rather scary idea , but also an expensive one. But it was worth it for one night of experimentation with a totally cool kid who's willing to try ANYTHING.

We went to Harris Teeter because it happened to be the closest grocery store to our current location and we found many rare fruits - cactus pears, horned melons, pepino melons, red tamarillos, and quinces - and also some more common ones - papayas, guavas, mangoes, kiwi, and starfruit. We bought them all! Miguel had a little cart, the kind that are made for little, little kids that he thought was one of the coolest things he'd ever seen. As he pushed it around, people kept coming up to him saying things like, "Wow you have a lot of tropical fruits in there!"

The coolest looking one by far was the horned melon. Here's a picture of it. Even on the inside, it looked really cool! If you look in the second big picture at the top, the one with all the fruit on the plate, you'll see this orange fruit with green stuff inside. That's the horned melon! It actually was slimy like gelatin on the inside! The green stuff was just like jello! The cactus pear was also neat but it kept giving us little espinas (prickly spiny thorn things) in our fingers. I still have one in one finger.

Some of the fruits were better than others. We liked the kiwi best and the guava, pepino melon, papaya, mango, and horned melon weren't bad. Actually the cactus pear wasn't bad either (although Miguel said that "cactus pear" in Spanish is "tuna" which is really confusing) except that it has TONS of seeds inside that you have to eat because they're spread all around the inside like watermelon seeds except way more dense. And the seeds are very crunchy little round balls, so that's kind of weird. Some of the fruits were really sour. Our final advice is to stay away from the red tamarillos - unless you want your face to look like mine in this picture!