La Platicona Habla: Tastes, Passions and Pursuits

There have been some strange fruit showing up at the grocery store lately, and naturally, they ended up in my grocery cart. Dragon Fruit, a member of the cactus family, was easily recognized by my boyfriend who ate them regularly while he was in China this summer. The fruit has a beautiful fuscia outer skin, and looks like an overgrown egg with petals. The Dragon Fruit is also called a Pitaya, and blooms only at night. When you cut into the fruit, it looks nothing like the outside and nothing like you'd expect it to, especially if you've eaten other cactus fruits like Nopalitos. The flesh is white and freckled with little black seeds. The flavor is not strong, but reminds me of a soft fleshed jicama. The fruit would make a great mixed drink or sorbet - but frankly, on its own it is sort of plain.

Now my second purchase, Monstera Deliciosa, had to mature before I ate it. Whoever named this fruit certainly had seen no other fruit as ugly and abnormal as the Monstera. Yes, its name means monstrous, but its second name indeed means delicious. The fruit is found in nature on the Monstera plant vines that grown throughout the tropical regions of Latin America. These monstrosities are creeper vines that can grow as large as trees and drop roots from the forrest canopy to the forrest floor. The fruit is the shape of an overgrown banana with a scaley texture - the scales are bright green when immature, but left to ripen they turn black and fall off revealing the flesh beneath that is only edible when ripe (if you cut it open while unripe, it will expose oxallic acid which is inedible and dangerous).

I left my little monster fruit to mature. The picture to the right here is when I frist bought it. It took about two weeks to fully mature and the "kernels" fell off on their own (scaley nightmare to the left). The taste was uniquely "banapinapple" and sort of mushy. You couldn't really cut it up, rather, it is like eating corn on the cob in the sense that you eat the flesh off of the core which is inedible. I frankly did not like the fruit because it burned the edges of my mouth, but the smell is fantastic - perhaps I'd prefer it in a breakfast drink with some yogurt, but I don't think the Monstera Deliciosa will grace my counter ever again. I guess I just don't have a place in my heart for a fruit that sheds before becoming consumable.

Labels: dragon fruit, fruit, monstera

An afternoon of hiking around the Barker and Gross Reservoirs with my boyfriend left me hungry for something spicy and refreshing. The Kathmandu wasn't very far (it sits in the middle of "town").

The menu seemed to have everything I could ever want - chile this, chile that - and the aroma of every plate that passed you by made you want to sample each item on the menu. I decided to order the Chicken Tika Masala, extra spicy, and my boyfriend ordered the Lamb Chili, also extra spicy. While a Left Hand Porter sounded appetizing, I opted for another local favorite from the New Belgium Brewing Company - Fat Tire. The lightly spiced amber ale paired nicely with the pieces of chicken stewed in curry, cream, tomatoes, and peppered with peas. In my greedy state, I also managed to eat a siginificant portion of my honey's Lamb, jalapenos and all. By the time I finished the second helping of Garlic Naan bread, I had to be rolled out of the restaurant, all the way down the mountain, and stuffed back into the car.

Needless to say the Kathmandu is perhaps the best curry I've ever eaten. If you like Indian curries, the Nepali version is slightly more hearty and rather spicy. If you've never had curry, than the Kathmandu is about the best place to start.

Labels: curry, Nepal, restaurant

Labels: chili, green chile, harvest, New Mexico, roast, traditional