Hami Melon & Recipe

My most recent produce haul post featured a quick mention of my purchase of a hami melon, a variety of melon that I hadn’t heard of before. It’s a good lookin’ melon, don’t you think?

Hami melons are named after the Chinese region where they were cultivated, in the northwest part of the country, near the Mongolia border.

Not A Cantaloupe

This post is basically an extension of yesterday’s post, which was about a giant killer sandwich (‘killer’ as in ‘amazing’, not ‘killer’ as in ‘one who murders’) that I made for a weekend picnic.  In addition to the sandwich, I also showed the other food I brought along for the picnic – vegetables and hummus, and two containers of fruit: one of which contained strawberries and blackberries, and one of which contained…

…well, that’s the focus of today’s post.

Here’s the fruit photo I ran yesterday:

Then I teased that the item on the right isn’t cantaloupe, which is information I didn’t even tell the other picnic attendees (well, I told Heather and John hours and hours later, but Jen and Dave are still in the dark).

So what is it, you ask?

It’s CRENSHAW MELON.

I had never heard of crenshaw melon before, and had certainly never tried it.  But there it was, in the melon section at Whole Foods on Saturday, waiting for me.  I knew I wanted to bring melon on the picnic, and the cantaloupes at Whole Foods weren’t anywhere as ripe as I needed them to be, and I knew one of the picnic attendees doesn’t care for watermelon, so… conveniently right next to the watermelons and cantaloupes were the crenshaws.

Here’s the entire crenshaw I ended up buying:

It was about the same size as a honeydew, but the stem end tapered and has more of a teardrop shape, as you can see in the picture above.  I assumed I could tell if a crenshaw is ripe by using the same trick I use on cantaloupes and honeydews, and I found one that seemed pretty ripe.  How I learned to tell if a melon is ripe or not is to press the flower end of the melon – which is the end opposite the stem end, where the melon was attached to the vine.  If the melon ‘gives’ a little bit when you press the flower end, it’s ripe.  If it doesn’t give, and it’s just as hard as the rest of the melon, then either pick another melon, or buy it and leave it on your counter for a couple days before you dig in.

After finding a ripe crenshaw, what I noticed next was how heavy it was.  It seemed much denser than either a cantaloupe or a honeydew, and the scale at the register weighed that sucker at 5.8 pounds.  I haven’t been paying attention to the weight of the cantaloupes I’ve been buying recently, but I don’t think I’ve bought a cantaloupe that weighed more than 3 or 4 pounds, tops.  This crenshaw was a heavy mofo!  In the spirit of my fun weight loss comparison posts, I’ve lost 28 crenshaws!

I had no idea what to expect when I cut the crenshaw open, and I didn’t bother looking around online first, as that would take all the surprise out of it, but I treated the crenshaw like a cantaloupe, and first cut both ends off of it, and cut down the sides, removing all of the rind:

Looks like a cantaloupe, huh?

It still looked like a cantaloupe when I cut it in half and scooped out the seeds:

And it still looked like a cantaloupe when I chopped it up further:

As for the taste, well, the crenshaw is not all that different from a cantaloupe in flavor and texture.  If anything, the taste is a little milder, and the flesh of the melon is a little lighter (which seemed strange to me, as the melon as a whole was so heavy).  Some folks on the interweb say that the crenshaw is a little spicier than a cantaloupe, but I don’t really know what spice means in regards to fruit, and I don’t think that’s true.  Or, at least it’s not true with the particular crenshaw that I ate.

If you have the opportunity to try a crenshaw, I hope you take it, and let me know what you think!  They’re a great source of Vitamins A & C (3.5 ounces of crenshaw provides 100% of your Vitamin A for the day, and 80% of your Vitamin C), and you can impress your friends by stating that the crenshaw is a hybrid between a casaba melon and a persian melon – both of which I’ve never tried, but will be on the lookout for at the store.

The crenshaw is the third new melon that I’ve tried in recent months – the others being orange flesh and gaya melons – and since I’m a melon fan, I’ll keep looking for other new melons to try, and when I do, I’ll share it all with you!

Keep it up, David!

Gaya Melon

It’s been a great week for trying new types of produce.  Earlier this week I tried a cherimoya for the very first time, and now I have another new fruit to share.  Does anyone know what it is?

It’s a Gaya Melon!  Duh.  That’s also the title of this post.

If you want to get really technical, it’s an Ivory Gaya Melon.  There’s another type of Gaya Melon that has a dark green exterior, and it’s called a Chameleon Gaya Melon.  I just learned that from the interwebs – but at the store, this guy was labeled as a Gaya Melon, and since I had never heard of it before, I bought one.

I love that it’s about the same size as a large grapefruit or pummelo – the perfect size for a household of one.

I treated it like I do cantaloupes or honeydews – and let it sit on the counter while it ripened.  When it seemed ready to go (you can tell because the stem end of the melon gets soft and gives a little bit when you press it with your thumb), I cut off the top and bottom.  That’s when I noticed that the melon had a very thin skin.  Usually I would cut down the sides of the melon with my knife, removing the rind, but since this one was so thin, I used my wonderful peeler instead.  Here it is half done:

After I finished that, I cut it in half.  Here’s what the insides look like:

Yep.  Looks like a melon.

I scooped out the seeds and cut off a piece to try it.  And that’s when I learned, the hard way, that…

…the skin wasn’t so thin after all.  Under the skin, there’s a full-on rind, but it’s exactly the same color as the edible flesh.  How annoying is that?  So I went back with my knife and cut down the sides, trying to differentiate between flesh and rind (while the color the same, the texture is slightly different).

What a pain in the ass.  That’s strike one, gaya melon.

And now did it taste?  Not very good.  Not much flavor.  Not very sweet.  Kinda like a really boring, bad honeydew.  Nothing special.  Nothing that made me want to jump for joy or rush to write this post.  It’s complete mediocrity was especially annoying given the fact that I already been tricked by the melon into thinking the rind was edible.  Such trickery would be acceptable if the end result was delectable.  My gaya melon was not delectable.  That’s strike two.

After chopping it up into pieces, I ate about half the melon, and saved the other half for work the next day:

In this game of baseball, two strikes is enough.  The gaya melon is out.  I’m not gonna be buying another one.

Wanna see what other new fruits and veggies I’ve tried for the first time?  They’re all archived in My Favorite Posts at the top of the page!

Keep it up, David!

 

Orange Flesh Melon

Last week I brought home a new item that I’ve never tried before from the produce section at Whole Foods: An orange flesh melon.  I mentioned its purchase in this blog post, and shortly thereafter, a buddy who posts comments under a pseudonym posted this comment:  “MMMMMM. Flesh Melons.”  His goal, when he comments, is to make me laugh, and this one did the trick (most of them do, actually).  Seventh-grade titty humor gets me every time!  Since then, every morning when I saw the orange flesh melon sitting on my counter (it needed to ripen), my mind went straight to the gutter, and I tried to come up with a stupid pun or double entendre, along the lines of “David got kicked out of Whole Foods for squeezing other customers’ flesh melons.”  Stupid dirty jokes aren’t a bad way to start the day.  You should try it sometime!

Yesterday, the flesh melon seemed plenty ripe – time to dig in!  Here’s the melon:

See? An orange flesh melon!

After I bought it, I did some research on the interwebs and learned that the orange flesh melon is a hybrid between a cantaloupe and a honeydew.  The orange flesh is (obviously) a trait inherited from the cantaloupe side of the family tree, while the taste and rind comes from the honeydew side.  It’s also smaller than both cantaloupes and honeydews… although I don’t know if that’s true of all orange flesh melons, or just the batch that were at Whole Foods when I was there shopping.

Time to crack this sucker open!

The suspense is killing me!  Is the flesh really going to be orange?

YES, IT IS!  I scooped out the seeds, and gave it a taste:

Delicious!  It’s kinda bizarre, actually – I’m so accustomed to orange melon tasting like cantaloupe, but the interwebs was accurate – this orange flesh melon tasted just like a honeydew.  It was sweet and perfectly ripe, and I felt like I was getting punked by some farmers somewhere with every bite.

It didn’t stop me from eating half of it in a matter of minutes, though:

The other half is sitting in my fridge – it’ll be part of my breakfast tomorrow!

One more double entendre:  “Joanie always felt a little insecure about the size of her flesh melons, but still liked showing them off in the checkout line.”

A couple links before I wrap this post up.

1) This morning, my mom emailed me to gave me a heads up that they were making kale chips on “Down Home with the Neelys” on Food Network.  Since my mom lives three times zones ahead of me, I was able to tune in a little while later and watch for myself.  It’s basically the same recipe that I used in my recent kale chips post, with one notable addition: Gina Neely sprinkled brown sugar on them after they came out of the oven.  She said they counterbalanced the kale, since kale is naturally a little bitter.  Brown sugar on kale doesn’t sound appealing to me at all – and, as my mom pointed out, it didn’t really stick to the kale anyway.  But if you’re looking for a way to sweeten up your kale chips, give it a whirl!  You can find the recipe here.

2) Do any of you read Jack Sh*t, Gettin’ Fit?  Jack is a really wonderful weight loss blogger who uses humor to motivate himself and others, and he’s really funny.  He does a really inspiring recurring post called W.I.D.T.H (Why I Do This Here), where other bloggers and readers share, via photograph, the reasons why losing weight and/or healthy living are so important to them.  Guess what?  Yours truly is featured in this week’s W.I.D.T.H. post!  You can check it out here, and, while you’re there, look around on Jack Sh*t’s site – I bet you’ll enjoy it!

Keep it up, David!