Exotic Fun By Myself

...OH YEAH.

My latest trip to Harris Teeter was also my first since the snowstorms, and after six days of ground beef, bread, and fried stodge, I went a little bananas buying produce (though ironically I didn't buy any bananas). Asparagus! Organic vine tomatoes! Peeled red onions! Mesclun greens! Fresh cilantro! An entire carillon of bell peppers! 2 Many Avocados! Spicy spicy jalapenos!

Then I stopped in awe in front of the exotics shelf. At long last, I thought, this would be the week that I Tried Weird Fruit.There were only two I had never heard of in my life: something called "Uniq Fruit" (above, left) and "Sharon Fruit" (right).

Tonight I had a little one-woman tasting party. First came the Sharon Fruit. I had no clue how to eat it--looking it on the Internet first would have taken away all the fun--so I just cut it in half.

It was weirdly solid inside: no pulp, no seeds, very stringy. I kept cutting, hoping to get a seed pocket or something. Was this, like, some kind of pomegranate? No dice. A weird smell filled the room, like oranges mixed with flour and corpse. And did I smell...overripe avocados?

Time to taste!

GROSS. No wonder no one was raving about these babies.

Once, when my sister and I were little, under the supervision of our nanny, we made our mother a “birthday cake” to surprise her when she got home from work. We dumped indiscriminate amounts of flour, milk, sugar, salt, lemon juice, and egg into a bowl and microwaved it together for about 2 minutes, creating an oddly gelatinous end product. I remember Mom trying to eat it and Catherine bursting into tears when she couldn’t quite choke the whole thing down.

That’s what a Sharon Fruit tastes like: what happened when Nature played “let's make God a birthday cake while he's out." It was a nice try, guys.

(Here's what I found out when I Googled: it's a kind of sweet and juicy persimmon, and I probably ruined its flavor by putting it in the fridge and letting it ripen for too long. Also, it's supposed to taste like a mango; its nickname is the "Korean mango," and boy do I not like mango.)

Next there was the Uniq Fruit. After the Sharon disaster, I didn’t hold out much hope for its shelfmate, but a glimmer remained. It was obviously citrus: how bad could it be? We were talking Osage at worst, Clementine at best.

Hooray! The result was pure deliciousness, like a very mild and juicy heart-shaped orange. Vitamin C *and* a thirst quencher—the only downside was that juice ran everywhere. I felt like I was eating something friendly but mischievous.

Turns out I'd heard of this fruit before. I didn't realize that these were otherwise known as the Ugli Fruit. My guess is that team Ugli Fruit thought their product had more of a chance with a cuter name. Like Greenland!

I'll be getting this one again soon.