Dragon Fruit
 

I saw some Dragon Fruit on the market today, and as it looked exciting and I've never had it before, I bought some and decided to share it with you - visually at least.

The skin is tough but pliable - easy to cut like a banana skin. Inside the fruit is very soft and watery. There isn't a great deal of flavour - just a general fresh fruitiness. The little black seeds crunch nicely between the teeth so you feel like you're eating something worthwhile.

Please note in first picture I am showing off my Valentine themed nails from yesterday....!

Where is it from?

oh and your nails are lovely!

Thank you!
The short answer to your question is Leicester Market.... I think they may be from the Far East, as I recognised some of the other fruit for sale as Eastern. Actually, yes - just wiki'd it - official name Pitaya:

I suspect that growing such an oddity is more satisfying that eating one.

I always thought to grow something for the aesthetic appeal would be fun. Like the small pepper for instance.
http://www.virtualitalia.com/recipes/hot_hot_plant.jpg

Oh, the Pitaya is the moonflower cactus that the bats pollinate. I saw that on Public Broadcasting.

SG, did you pilfer the wine stewards knife? :haha:

We call those things prickly pear fruit. They're not native to Australia, but they grow all over the place anyway. They're a pest! I've tried them before and don't find them very satisfying. Quite bland and not really worth the effort it takes to eat them.

I have a small chilli tree growing with my other herbs in ceramic pots on my front porch. Aside from being great for cooking, they look fantastic too. :)

That's my Stella Artois promotional knife & corkscrew. It was part of a gift set including a glass and beer - I left it at my parents by mistake and my Mum posted it to work. It's surprising how useful it is in a work setting!

Prickly pear fruit is something different over here. The Spanish speakers call them tunas and they are the purplish fruit of the prickly-pear cactus, that usually low-growing paddle-shaped stuff you see in Westerns. In season the fruits bud off the edges and tops of the cactus paddles and have the same bristle pattern on their skin the paddles do, but no needles -- or at least not by the time they make it to the markets. They make a good jam, the fruits do, and the paddles themselves are picked, de-needled, peeled, sliced into strips and boiled as a vegetable. They come off somewhat like stewed okra but not so slimy, tasting generally, well, green. No doubt full of vitamins and antioxidants and all that good stuff.

I have a nice hot chile de arbol bush in a pot on our patio that I need to harvest the chiles off of. They are pretty much dried -- no parrots flying around to eat them off the plant -- and should serve nicely for kicking up the next batch of chili powder -- see recipe in the Most Recent Recipe Thread.

Prickly Pear, here. The fruits have needles, very fine ones. Took me a full day to work them out of my tongue. No blood or pain, just annoying as all hell. They probably clean them before they are handled in the marketplace. ;)

Bruce, you just made me :lol: at the notion of you bending over and eating 'em off the paddle! Hard core, baby!

No, picked and a half hearted effort to peel it with my incisors. Didn't work well, but I ate it anyway. If we hadn't been in the grand canyon (boating), I'd have had a pocket knife. :smack:

You can burn off the spines over a gas cooktop.

Or a campfire, sterno, candle, any fire will do except the fire from yesterdays chilli. ;)

Sounds like you need that knife to halve 'em, then a spoon to dig out the pulp.

I remember really liking the cactus-fruit jam as a kid, when we came home from Carlsbad Caverns having picked up a jarful in the gift shop. Haven't had any since. Wonder if you can google up a good recipe -- we have plenty of prickly pear growing wild and in gardens around here. There's this huge patch at the foot of the Conejo Grade...

Yep, you can. This one's simple.

Okay, pilgrim, if you've got any saguaro cactuses in your neighborhood, this recipe ought to come in really handy.

And one more, very like the first. Some more hints on removing the little spinies.