A Papaya Adventure

First, it should be said that during spring, summer, and early fall, I can usually be found buying my fruits and veggies from the New Albany Farmer's Market or picking my own at Huber's. I find that the more I get involved with picking my own veggies, or learning about them from the local farmers the more I want to eat them. Plus, it helps out the local economy, and it tastes so much better than the stuff you get in stores.

This week I decided I was going to try out something a little different. At this point in the summer I have eaten more than my fair share, of peaches, watermelon, and berries so I decided to head to the grocery store for something different. I ended up with pineapple, mango, and papaya. I am pretty familiar with pineapple and mango, but I have only seen fresh papaya prepared on TV.

It was time to get acquainted with a real, non-TV edited papaya. I started off this adventure by watching Bobby Flay break down papayas on Iron Chef. It looked easy enough for him so why wouldn't it be easy for me too? The papaya I picked out was rather large and mostly yellow. I was told this is what a ripe papaya should look like. I cut into the papaya lengthwise which was pretty easy, in fact it was a lot like cutting through butter. The inside was filled with small, soft, black, seeds that I scooped out just like I would a cantaloupe of honeydew. I am pretty sure you can actually use these seeds for something, but I was a bit distracted by the fruit in front of me so I ended up throwing them away. The fruit is a nice pink/orange color. It is meaty, but pretty soft at the same time. My next project was getting the skin off of the papaya. The skin is not thick like a melon's skin, but thin, almost like that of a peach or nectarine. I tried to use a veggie peeler, but that failed almost immediately because the fruit was just too big and oddly shaped. I ended up carefully peeling it with my knife. After this I chopped the fruit up into bite sized pieces and mixed them up with the mango and pineapple. There is a reason why these fruits get paired together so often. The mango and pineapple are quite sweet so they go well with the kind of musky flavor the papaya offers. Not to mention each of them have a different texture which makes for an interesting fruit salad!

All in all the papaya made for an interesting retreat from some of the local produce, and it wasn't too difficult to handle! -Danielle