FieryFoodsCentral.com has quite a collection of articles in the category of Fired-Up Fruits. Each article has history, legend and lore, recipes, and photos. Pick your favorite fruits:
Avocado Madness: Don’t believe all those people who tell you that the avocado is a vegetable, because it’s not. It’s a fruit just like mangos, pears, tomatoes, chiles, and apples. It just happens to pair well with some vegetables like lettuce, especially in salads, so that’s why people think it’s a veggie. It’s one of my favorite fruits, along with mangos and peaches.
Blazing Blueberries: Don’t be fooled by the cool blue color—blueberries are rapidly becoming one of the hottest fruits around. Touted as a “superfood” that can fight high cholesterol, heart disease, cancer, and a host of other maladies, blueberries are medicine that’s good for you…and delicious too!
Mango Madness: Legend holds that fresh, ripe mangos are so juicy that they are best eaten while nude in a bathtub. In his Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana advises lovers to drink mango juice before making love.
Mulberry Madness: During the late spring and early summer there are certain specific destinations I go to on my long walks in the South Valley of Albuquerque: fruiting mulberry trees. I carry along a plastic bag and spend some quality time harvesting the ripe berries and staining my hands reddish-purple. But the stains are worth it–they wash off easily and the berries are used in surprisingly varied recipes, including both spicy ones and cool-down desserts.
Perfectly Pungent Peaches: The peach was premier fruit at Monticello, and undoubtedly Jefferson’s favorite fruit; he wrote “We abound in the luxury of peaches.” At Monticello the cooks made mobby, which was peach juice that was later distilled into brandy. Jefferson recorded that “20 bushels of peaches will make 75 galls. of mobby.”
Pomegranate Passion: The globe of a pomegranate is a treasure chest filled with fruit rubies. Each of the hundreds of seeds is encased in its own translucent capsule filled with sweet, tangy (did I mention staining?) juice. The seeds are packed together in a mystifying structure that always makes me think of a geodesic dome.
