Last week, I went to this amazing grocery store that I'm lucky enough to have nearby with my aunt, and I found something really interesting that I've never heard of before- cactus pear. For only 69¢ my aunt and I decided to just get it. When we got home, my aunt skinned the pear (with much difficulty) and sliced the fruit into mushy strips. We tried some of the magenta seedy substance and then realized that maybe we should do some homework on it before we ate anymore because they were SO many seeds we weren't sure if we could eat them or not and she wanted to know the proper way to cut it because she basically butchered the thing! Wikihow was very helpful in explaining the proper way to eat a prickly pear cactus and we learned a lot about the exotic southern fruit. The prickly cactus pear is grown in parts of South America and Mexico. It grows on a big cactus called napoles and the fruit and the cactus can be used for many different things. The (edible) seeds of the prickly pear cactus can be used for flour or soup, the skin can be used for jams, jellys, and candies and the actual fruit has many uses (the most common seemed to be the sorbet which I can't wait to try!). I definitely think if you have 69¢ to spare you should try the prickly pear cactus! It tasted like a strawberry and watermelon combined and while you might find the seeds annoying to eat, at least you can eat them! Because I learned the hard way that trying to eat prickly pear cactus while spitting out the seeds proves to be extremely difficult!
I'm dying to try prickly pear cactus sorbet but they only seem to sell it in faraway places near Phoenix!
After having fun trying the prickly pear cactus, my aunt and I decided to try a different fruit every week together. So this week (since I picked last week) I had my sister, Kayla, pick the fruit. She never had mango so that's what we settled on. But the store's selection of mangoes weren't ripe enough to eat right away and we were really looking for something we could eat right when we got home. With a little help from a kind employee we discovered the champagne mango. I was really excited of our new discovery because my aunt and I had both had mango but not champagne mango so now everyone was trying something new! We got home and with our knowledge from the prickly pear cactus experience, decided to Google the champagne mango eating instructions first. It turns out they have their own website! Simply and easy: champagnemango.com. I believe from what I read, the champagne mango resulted of a random cross breed between other types of mangoes. The champagne mango tasted good, but not as sweet as I expected it to be after reading about it online. It reminded me of the canned peaches, the ones I used to eat when I was younger... I think they were the Dole jarred peaches...
This is how you're supposed to cut a champagne mango, but it's much harder than it looks!
I really like our new tradition of trying a new fruit each week, it's really fun and you can learn a lot of new things! If you're not the type of person to try things a lot, I really hope you change your mindset! You never know until you try. :)
By the way- thanks to Blogger's new feature you can know simply check off what you thought of my post! Was it cool? Pointless? Or inpsiring?! Just scroll down to the bottom of the post and click the little check box of whatever your feelings were! Hopefully you readers will take a liking to that because I've noticed a lack of commenting and I really love your feedback! Thanks to the mystery reader who checked off 'inspiring' for my "A Look In The Mirror Helps The Medicine Go Down" post! It made me smile.
Song stuck in my head today: "Untouchable" by Taylor Swift
Keep on keepin' on,
Madison
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