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.

So, I’ve never really liked mangoes. It’s not that I was scarred by a bad mango encounter. But they’ve always tasted….chemical-ish….to me. Like a delicious fruit that’s been dunked in a bucket of bleach. I do, however, like mango-flavored things, though it is often the case that fruit flavors taste nothing like the fruits themselves. Take banana. Banana-flavored things are, in general, nauseating. One exception to this rule are banana Runts. Are these vegan? I haven’t yet had the opportunity to check. It’s a shame if not, because they are the only example of delicious banana flavoring I know of. Don’t even get me started on banana Laffy Taffy. It is evil and putrescence in candy form.

Did I say this was about mangoes? So I really want to like mangoes. It’s silly, really. But they’re so darn pretty with their greenness and their pinkness and their yellowness. And lots of recipes use mango. So, I’ve been buying it. And I must say, it’s not half as bad as I remember. I learned from videojug.com how to cut it into pretty cubes, which already makes it twice as yummy as it would be otherwise.

So, I’ve been enjoying mangoes in my fruit salads and sometimes (blasphemous!) by themselves. They’re nice for something different. They’ll never come close to my beloved pineapple, but I think we can get along just fine.

Update: Runts are probably not vegan.  They contain stearates, which often come from animal fats.  Le sigh.