The Fruitectives

Guava (baby)

2011-09-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

All the internets and side-of-package says that baby guavas are more fragrant and flavorful than the regular-sized ones, so I should probably have had a guava: original sauce before sampling these morsels.

They look kind of battered and they are PUNGENT but they are sooooer tasty.

Did I mention seedy? Full of tiny, hard seeds. And not tiny like strawberryseed-tiny, but tiny like grapeseed-tiny. So, palpable. But impossible to bite through, so you sort of just swallow them with the sweet, perfumey flesh.

Tastiness: They taste like a pear-slash-berry. Pearberry! Eight.

Ease of extraction: Wash and eat! But not the tops, nor the bottoms neither. And I believe I mentioned the seeds. So six.

Overall nommability: Forty-eight. A deceptively low score, because I would very much eat them again.

Raspberries (yellow)

2011-09-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

Yellow raspberries taste exactly the same as red raspberries

but are janky to look at.

Why should anyone have to SEE all the individual raspberry-hairs? Red raspberries, bless you for your dark complexions.
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Tastiness: usual raspberry perfect score for tastiness somehow lessened by zombie-flesh. Eight.
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Ease of extraction: Ten! You just wash them! Except there is always one or two mashed up near the bottom. Look out for those.
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Overall nommability: Eighty!

Currants (red)

2011-02-21T11:27:00.000-08:00

So pretty!

So gross. Currents are bitter and tart.

Maybe they are good in things?

No. They are apparently delicious as jam, though.

Tastiness: They didn't kill me, so two.
Ease of extraction: Eight! Why can't tastier things be this simple?

Overall nommability: Sixteen. That sounds about right.

Apple (Jonagold)

2011-02-20T11:23:00.000-08:00

Jonagolds! You are huge.

And crispy. And applish.

And, did I mention huge? You are the perfect ferry-snack.

Tastiness: Like backyard apples, but the good kind. Eight.
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Ease of extraction: It's an apple! You eat it. Maybe you wash it first, but mostly you just rub it on your skirt like you're wiping off the germs. Ten.
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Overall nommability: Eighty.

Blood orange

2011-02-19T13:19:00.000-08:00

Deceptively orange on the outside...

Suitably bloody on the inside.

Neat! Except, it tastes just like a regular, bloodless orange.

How disappointing. Ah well. More aesthetically pleasing (or freaky) in fruit salads, maybe.

Tastiness: Exactly as tasty as an orange, which (as has been previously established [see: tangerine]) is delicious. Eight.
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Ease of extraction: Messy like orange, sticky like orange, impractical for places without knives or faucets like orange. But seedless. So, six.
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Overall nommability: forty-eight.

Tangerine

2011-01-24T16:18:00.000-08:00

Oh tangerine, what makes you not-an-orange?

Besides being, if possible, more orange than an orange? You are equally as difficult to peel.

Is it because you are sweeter? Because of your infinite seeds?

What?

Tastiness: Sweeter than an orange. Otherwise, exactly like an orange, which is delicious. So eight.

Ease of Extractability: See: peel. See also: seeds. Five.

Overall nommability: Forty.

Black Velvet Apricot

2010-07-09T17:12:00.000-07:00

Black velvet apricot, hey?

Are you sure you are not just a furry black plum?

Because you look like a furry black plum. On all sides.

And you taste like a furry black plum.

With maybe a hint of apricot.

Tastiness: The fuzz is, I think, part of the taste, and fuzzy fruit gives me the heebs. On the other hand, the flesh is delicious - mostly plum with an apricot great-grandsire. On the other hand, the fuzz. So, six.

Ease of extraction: Hold-and-eat, so...easy. But again with the fuzz. Maybe if someone peeled it for me. Plus it sticks to the pit, which I hate. Five.

Overall nommability: 30

White Nectarine

2010-05-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

White nectarine!

You look like a regular nectarine.

You taste like a regular nectarine wearing too much perfume, and coated in sugar.

Also, you are difficult to get off the pit.

Tastiness: 5. I'm a sucker for nectarines, but this was waaaaaaaay less nectariney than it was just sweet.

Ease of extraction: 6. Hold-and-eat, but I hate fruits that don't come cleanly from the pit.

Overall nommability: 30. I will stick to regular nectarines, methinks.

Fuzzy Melon

2010-05-14T18:50:00.001-07:00

What is your deal, fuzzy melon?
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Despite the shoddy photo evidence, you are fuzzy.
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But the internet can't decide if you are a fruit or a vegetable, sweet or not sweet.

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You are straight-up a cucumber. How is that hard, internet?

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Tastiness: I guess this depends on how much you like cucumber? I'm sort of coming around to them, so four.

Extractability: Seven! Just peel and eat!

Overall nommability: Twenty-eight! That sounds about right for a non-fruit fruit.

(PS It's a melon so I'm counting it.)

Physalis

2009-09-28T18:29:00.000-07:00

What is in that basket? Phalluses? Syphalis? NAY! Those are physalis...es? Physalii? They're gross, at any rate.

But they come in such a cute little basket! And withIN the basket, the fruits themselves come in such a cute little tomatillo wrapper!

Adorablemente, no? So fragile and whimsical. Like fruited moths.

But the physalis is in the nightshade family and DUDE IT TASTES LIKE IT. Every time I ate one I felt sickly. I should have left them out for the wasps. Would have solved that problem.

These little seedy, tomato-esqe beasts were a serious let-down. They tasted like Citrus-Action Lysol. My camera is garbage. Picture a cherry tomato, that is orange.

Tastiness: Zero. If I could sanction giving it a negative number, I would. It was chemically and gave me the queasy uneasies and I tried to eat them for, like, four days, but could never get past the one.

Ease of extraction: Eight! They were a bit sticky (I tried washing one to see if it was the outer stickiness that was giving me the tangy gut, but no dice) but other than that, you just undress the little bastards and have at them.

Overall Nommability: Uh...I guess that anything times zero is zero, which makes sense. It doesn't matter how easy it is to extract if the extractables aren't worth extracting. The zero stands.

Burro banana

2009-08-24T15:32:00.000-07:00

Burro bananas are the ultimate in gross.

They are hilarious in shape

But they are hell to open. DO YOU SEE HOW THICK THE SKIN!??!?!

Do you see how hideous and mashy once opened? That is because of the skin, and the difficulty i opening.

And while the top was all chalky and bad, the bottom was soft and awkwardly yellow.

Although that's really the only part that tasted ok. I more licked it than bit it, due to the banana-slug aspect.

But then I looked them up on the intarwebs and the intarwebs told me to let them get good and yellow, with a few black spots.

So...good thing I bought two. But by the time the top was all yellowed up, the bottom was unpleasant.

I threw down a few bites of this one, and it just tasted like the banana's awkward cousin.

Except for the browney bits. Those tasted like eeeeugh.

Tastiness: Two. The top third of the second banana wasn't horrible.

Ease of Extraction: Two. The skin was like leather.

Overall Nommability: Four. Not altogether a pleasant fruit.

Mango(s)

2009-08-11T14:33:00.001-07:00

Yes, this is Robyn's first post on this blog. No, she has not not been eating fruits and yes she doesn't not enjoy double negatives. She is just a lazy blogger. Now that we have been properly aquainted, lets get on with it, shall we?

So. Mangos.

I bought 2 mangos, as you can see. The mango on the right is the 'regular' mango and the one on the left is the 'sweet' mango, also known as the 'olongapo' mango.

I was told how to cut a mango by a friend of mine who said to cut the mango lenthwise along the pit. Then, take a real big spoon and sort of dig in the mango and run it along the stone. Then, the fleshy, fruity part of the mango should easily lift away from the pit. Then, cut the mango fruit into squares while still in the skin and then just cut the skin away. You should be left with delicious squared pieces of mango! Sounds simple, yes? No.

Let's start with the regular mango.

Already, it is a disaster. The fruit did not come so easily from the pit. This is the finished product:

On the left you see the mango skin and pit. And on the right is the amount of actual fruit that was in cube-sized pieces all ready to eat (this pile is minus about 4 pieces which I ate before I remembered I had to take the picture). I know I'm no mango expert but it just shouldn't be this hard to eat fruit!!!

Moving along.

Sweet mango:

Sweet mango halved easier but I think it's because I didn't cut right along the pit with the result being that I just shaved off half the mango from the pit.

Definitely a higher fruit to skin-and-pit ratio. Sweet mango was sweet and more perfumy than regular mango. The texture was firmer and, unlike regular mango who mushed in my mouth and got stringys caught in my teeth, eating sweet mango was like eating a good solid piece of fruit.

Later I looked at this video: http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-cut-a-mango-2 (I hope I did that linking thingy right...). Trust me, it's not as easy as the professional chef makes it look.

Now, I really thought I luuuuuuurrrrved mangos. Like, lurved them a lot. And yes, I like mangos. They're tasty and exotic and fun but more I think I just like mango flavoured things. Like, mango-and-other-exotic-fruit juice or mango chutney or mango ice cream. Mango the fruit? Not so much worth the effort.

Tastiness: 7 - yummy, but not melt-your-face-off-eat-every-day yummy.

Ease of extraction: 2 - fruit sticks to pit and skin and is a bit mushy and juicy and incredibly sticky. If you said I could have as many mangos as I wanted for free any time I wanted but I had to cut them myself I would probably go ahead and pass.

Overall nommability: 14. Not a good score for Robyn's first post.... but seriously, it's hard to imagine a harder fruit to get at. I don't want to work at it I just want to eeeeeet it!

PS - This counts as 2 fruits right? I would score them the same anyways.... yes, I think it counts as 2.

Pluot

2009-07-28T15:57:00.000-07:00

Dear ~~Pluot~~ ~~Plucot~~ Apricot/Plum lovechild,

Firstly, what is wrong with your face?

I mean, seriously. You should get that checked out. It's...unappealing. You are not a nice-looking fruit. Actually, you look way better in these photos than you do in real life.

And it's not just you, either. Your friend, The Other Pluot, is similarly gross-looking.

Ok, and secondly, where have you been all my life?

Seriously, you are amazing. You are an apricot without that horrid fuzz, and a plum without the tendency to juice down my chin. You are firm and you are sweet and you are nectary.

This is me, smiling at you.

The Ratings:

Tastiness: *slavers* Seriously, SOOO GOOOOOD. 9, easy.

Ease of extraction: A little bit you stick to the pit, and that makes leaving said pit lying around a bit messy. But YOU are not messy. So, 9 again.

Overall Nommability: 81

Papaya

2009-07-16T19:25:00.001-07:00

Papayas are emminently holdable.

Look how palm-sized that is. And they slice like a dream, and the colors are gorgeous.

But those bastard seeds are EVERYwhere!

They don't just clump together in the middle like the sensible squash. They make little cave-homes and they hide, and you have to chase them down with your Gouging Spoon, and papaya flesh is so soft and yielding anyways that you lose a good bit of it with all the scooping and peeling, and then you lose even MORE with all of the gouging.

Ratings:

Tastiness: If you took all the exotic-type fruits you could think of and threw them in a blender, but left the peel on one of them so that there was a squidge of unidentifiable bitterness, and then extracted all of the zip and zing and pow, you'd be left with something mild and bland but more or less tasty. So, 5.

Ease of extraction: It'd be an 8 if not for those hide-and-seek seeds. 7.

Overall Nommability: 35

Canary Melon

2009-07-16T18:47:00.000-07:00

Hey Raych, what is that oblongey yellow thing you have in your hand?

Oh this little old thing? Only the latest in exotic fruitstuffs, the canary melon.

Sounds island-y. Revel in awe, at any rate. It is a whole new thing.

.Except...that soothing green color looks vaguely familiar. As do those seeds...

You're in for a world of spoilers, my friends. Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze, Soylent green is people, and a canary melon is a honeydew.

Not 'tastes like,' not 'can stand in for if the supermarket is out of,' not 'is the marginally juicier identical twin of'...oh no wait, yes. That last one.

But I've always felt that honeydew would be a little bit awesomer if it were a little bit more likely to splash onto my shoe. The universe has heard my cry.

Ratings:

Tastiness: The tastiness of a honeydew + 1, so 7

Ease of Extraction: Reasonably thin-skinned and easy to cut, the seeds practically scrape themselves out, I own a melon-baller (of sorts), 8

Overall Nommability: 56 (right? Math is hard)

Donut-peach

2009-07-13T14:39:00.001-07:00

Let's get fruitecting!!

Seeing as how this is our first fruitection, I thought I'd start things off slow and easy with a donut-peach.

Ha ha what? That thing is not real, you say. I have somehow photo-shopped a furless peach into flatness.

No, seriously, can you not tell by my tortuous photo-taking skills that my photo-and-things-photo-related-including-shopping skills are, on a scale of 1 - 10, somewhere around 0.75?

Donut-peaches are as real as steel, kiddos.

And they're, like, a zillion times easier to eat because there's none of this trying to get your mouth around a thing that is bigger than your mouth. It's like a peach-flavored cookie.

With a pitty center.

And they taste exactly like you would expect them to. So...peachy.

Ratings:

Tastiness: 9 - all the deliciousness of a peach without that shudder-inducing fuzz.

Ease of Extraction: 9 - as previously mentioned, easier even than regular stone-fruits. Kept from a perfect score by the fact that the pit doesn't come away clean, resulting in inevitable loss of fruit-matter.

Overall Nommability: 81!!

An excellent score for our first fruitection. Rachel out.

Who are these kids?

2009-07-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

Greets!
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This is Robyn:

And this is Rachel:

If there is one thing Robyn and Rachel are good at doing, it is eating.

The year that they were roommates, they did copious amounts of eating.

They also made a low-fat flan, which will never be discussed again.

Flan aside, these two are excellent eaters.

They are also, when the occasion warrents, capable of drinking.

Skilled ingestors, these two.

Anyways, after many happy years of eating, Robyn got married and then Rachel got married and then Rachel moved over some water.

Now they live too far apart to do sufficient co-eating.

Luckily for them, there is the internet. Also, blogs.

One of Maggie Mason's (from whom Rachel shamelessly cribbed this idea) life goals is to eat 1000 fruits before she dies. Because she's doing it, it must be cool. Because Robyn and Rachel are only half this cool, they will jointly attempt to eat 1000 fruits before they (collectively) die.

The hastily-cobbled-together rules (such as they are):

1. Tomatoes do not count as fruits.

2. Fruit in question must be tasted and documented by the Fruitective with the following corollary: If Robyn finds herself in potential possession of a RARE AND EXOTIC fruit to which she may be allergic* she has permission to nominate a surrogate taster.

3. Fruit cannot be tasted retrospectively. Rachel cannot go back in time and document the mangosteen from 2006. She must locate a 2009 (or later) mangosteen.

4. Sub-fruit-categories count as different fruits. Par example, a Spartan apple is a different fruit altogether from a Red Delicious apple. However, a Spartan apple that I eat in Wyoming is no different than a Spartan apple that I eat in BC. Similarly, a frozen banana is no different from a fresh banana or a banana chip.

5. Fruits will be ranked in three categories:

- Tastiness (out of 10, 10 being Very Tasty, 1 being Not Very Tasty At All)

- Ease of Extraction (out of 10, 10 being Very Easy to Extract, 1 being Not Very Easy At All)

- Overall Nommability (out of 100, being a product of T x EoE. A pomegranate, while ranking high on the Tastiness scale, would score fairly low on the Ease of Extraction scale, giving it a lower Overall Nommability score)

*Robyn is allergic to all fruits that grow on trees of which you eat the skin. So...oranges are fine because, though they grow on trees, you do not eat the skin. Strawberries are fine, because though you eat the skin, they do not grow on trees. Apples break all available rules, and are therefore Not Fine.

Join us, won't you?

Fruitectives, ha cha cha!