98. Try an exotic new fruit that I've never eaten before.

I was wandering aimlessly around the produce section in the grocery store one day, when I happened upon a vicious-looking nest of spikey orange fruit, daring customers to approach. The sign said dragon fruit, and that sounded plenty exotic to me, so I carefully picked one out. No idea how you pick a good one of these, so I just went with the one I could grab with the least amount of impaled fingers.

At home, after a quick search on the old intertubes, it turned out that the grocery store had it wrong. Dragon fruit is reddish pink with green tendril leaves, and the inside is white with black seeds. This was quite different. What I had here was a kiwano, or horned melon, or African cucumber.

You obviously can't eat these like you would an apple, so I looked up the proper procedure. I ended up just cutting it in half, lengthwise, then scooping out just a bit of goo/seeds at a time. You have to kind of bite or slurp the goo off each seed, so you can spit the seed out. Apparently, you're supposed to be able to eat the seeds, but they seemed kind of hard, and I didn't want to chance having a kiwano tree grow in my stomach. Because that's what happens, dontcha know?

Anyway, the taste was really interesting. My best attempt at description is that it tastes something like a kiwi, something like a lime, and something like a cucumber - not at all bad! Sadly, the seed thing was a lot of work, and I ended up only eating about half of it. I just read that you can use them to make smoothies, which seems like a great idea. Bet it would taste even better with some vanilla ice cream, and you wouldn't have to work your way around the seeds!