Adventures in produce

I have found my favorite fruit. Golden Delicious apples. mmmmm. They are sweet, and the skin is so thin you can hardly tell there is a skin on it. It's too bad it's taken 53 years for me to try one!

My diet consists of about 75 % fruits and vegetables now. I get bored with the same old things...bananas, red delicious apples, grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, carrots and all the usual produce. I have found a market, however, that sells all kinds of exotic fruits and veggies from all over the world.

I had my first persimmon the other day. It indeed lives up to its ancient nickname "food for the gods". Here is a persimmon:

A persimmon almost looks like the fruit version of the sand dollar. It's very sweet and very delectable, however it leaves a furry, orange coating on my tongue for some reason. And it's a weird mind game eating one for the first time because the brain is thinking "tomato" and then the tongue says "sweet like candy" and it takes a minute to process the incoming taste information.

I also love mangos, and kiwi fruits. I want to try a pomegranate (even though they look like more trouble than they are worth with all those seeds), and I would like to try a cactus pear, lychee, papaya, pomelo, and a kumquat. (I have always wanted to try a kumkuat since I was a kid and heard the Three Stooges saying it in one of their episodes.)

I also want to try some vegetables I never bothered to try because I was stuck in a veggie rut and not too adventurous. I have fallen in love with black-eyed peas of all things (those are legumes, though and not a vegetable). I am going to try rutabaga even though friends have warned me about it, I have never had rhubarb either. (Are those two vegetables or fruits?) I've probably eaten a lot of exotic vegetables in Chinese food and not even known what they are.

I am finding out that being on a diet doesn't have to be boring. It's actually kind of fun once you start exploring and trying new things.