What Kate Ate

I often wonder where grapefruit got its name. I mean, which came first, the grapefruit or the grape? The two look, smell, and taste nothing alike. Grapes grow on vines, and grapefruits grow on trees. And both are fruits, right?

Vegparadise.com tells me that grapefruits were so named by a naturalist who observed that they grow in clusters. I was skeptical, so I found a picture:

Lo and behold, clusters. Fair enough, fair enough. But here are some more grapefruit fun facts!

• The grapefruit was long referred to as the “forbidden fruit.” It’s scientific name is
  Citrus paradisi, which might be my favorite scientific name next to Bison bison.
• The grapefruit is less than 300 years old, and the pink and ruby red varieties didn’t come about until the 1920’s.
• There have been many attempts to change the grapefruit’s name to make it more appealing. The name “pomelo” was once suggested, but people feared it would be confused with “pummelo,” its father fruit.
• In French, the grapefruit is called pamplemousse, which has nothing to do with mousse, really.

Grapefruit is one of my favorite fruits. Some people think they are too bitter and tart, but I love bitter and/or tart things: namely, super dark chocolate, dry red wine, and grapefruit. I don’t even add sugar to my grapefruit. I’m a bit of a grapefruit purist in that sense.

The only downside to grapefruit is that I eat it so often that I become bored with it. So, the other day, I searched around online for a different way to eat grapefruit than scooping out the little sections and then drinking the juice from the empty rind like I always do. So, I give you baked grapefruit!

You cut the grapefruit in half, score out the sections, sprinkle it with cinnamon (and maple syrup or sugar if you like), and bake it at 375 F for 15-20 minutes. During this time, the peel shrinks away from the fruit a bit, and the insides get all warm and gooey. I especially liked eating it in the morning when it was all chilly.

Grapefruit is so pretty! When I have a house, I am going to have an entire room whose decor is inspired by the colors of grapefruits, I think. It will be the grapefruit room, and we will sit there and eat only grapefruits while our faces and hands get all sticky. It’ll be nice. You should come over.

This tofu scramble is doubly scrambly (say that out loud, please) because I made it in a hurry. It is really more of a veggie scramble with tofu than a tofu scramble with veggies because of all the vegetables–broccoli, onions, mushrooms, zucchini, yellow squash, and spinach. Well, mushrooms aren’t a vegetable, they are a fungus. But they might as well be an honorary vegetable because it’s lonely in the fungus food group. Heck, it’s not even a group, it’s just “fungus” in the singular. Poor shrooms.

Tofu scramble makes me nostalgic because it is one of the first recipes I made after going vegan. It is, I think, one of my favorite dishes to make. You can use any ingredients you have, you can use any spices you like, and you can make it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. So much awesome in one little meal.

I used turmeric to make it yellow, which got me thinking about this enigma of a spice. Does anyone really like turmeric? Does anyone actually use it for its flavor and not to color foods radioactive yellow? Honestly, by itself it tastes like powdered sidewalk chalk that’s gone a bit stale, if such a thing were possible. But it does turn tofu into sunshine, and that’s what matters here.