Archive for the ‘Taste Test’ tag
Taste Test: Prickly Pear Cactus Margarita
Today’s taste test comes to us from the deserts of the Southwestern United States and Mexico: The fruit of the prickly pear cactus. This small, red fruit is commonly used to flavor drinks, candies, syrups and jellies since it has a lot of small, inedible seeds that make it tough to use whole. Not to mention the fact that the skin is covered in small, very irritating spines called “glochids” that need to be dealt with carefully before the fruit can be used. This is a plant that resists being eaten. All that aside, the fruit itself has a very pleasant, floral, sweet flavor and a bright, crimson color. It turns a regular margarita into something festive (and native, given that tequila is a cactus distillate).
Prickly Pear Margarita
Taste Test: Ugli Fruit
As I’ve mentioned in some of my previous entries, I have an affinity for strange produce. Strange food in general, really. If I run across something new at the store that I’ve never seen before I am powerless to resist the temptation to buy it. And so you, my lucky readers, will get to hear all about the new and exciting foodstuffs that find their way into my kitchen.
Thus, I found myself in possession of an Ugli fruit. The sticker on the fruit said “Uniq” fruit, which I came to find out is the commercially trademarked name under which this fruit is sold in the United States. Native to Jamaica, this fruit is a hybrid of the Tangerine and the Grapefruit. It really isn’t all that ugly, but when the tangerine and grapefruit trees woke up after that fateful night when they both had far too much Jamaican rum to drink, I think there may have been a bit of a moral hangover when they saw what they had done:
The Ugli, Ugly, Uniq fruit
