The Fruit of Dragons

My roommate and I signed our lease renewal form, and as a thank you our landlord gave us a gift card to the grocery store. Since we had a gift card we decided to buy a few treats. Our eyes landed on the unusual fruits section of the produce area. We ended up buying a pepino melon and what we now know is a dragon fruit. When we bought it we were under the impression that it was a prickly pear that I had once had in Spanish class, and thought my roommate might like. Well, we were wrong prickly pears are smooth and red cactus fruit, dragon fruit are red cactus fruit with spiky leaves that kinda look like scales coming off of them.

Prickly Pear

Dragon Fruit

The mistake is somewhat easy to make if you only remember eating the prickly pear after it was cut up. Luckily searching Google images for red cactus fruit tells you what you have pretty quickly. Dragon fruit are supposed to be pretty good for you and show up in a lot of health smoothies and juices because they are mostly water and blend well.  We found a tutorial on how to prepare this thing and followed it.

I was not expecting it to be white on the inside. I'm also going to guess that the nutrients are found in all of the seeds (They're edible just like a kiwi.) In fact My roommate and I decided this whole thing is kinda like a white kiwi. Anyways according to the internet, once you cut it in half you scoop out the edible part with a spoon.

Then you cut it up, and if you want to be fancy looking you can put it all back in the rind for serving, just don't eat the rind it's bitter.

So we went ahead and tried it. It was not fantastic. It looks so pretty and colorful, but has nearly no taste.  It is extremely similar to kiwi in texture but not in taste. It really doesn't have one, there's a faint cactus undertone, but that's it really. It''s not sweet or tart or sour or anything. Just kinda cactus flavored water with seeds. We decided that if you wanted to be fancy you could mix this up with kiwi and serve it in the rinds, but other than that we wouldn't eat it again.

The rest of dinner on the other hand, was absolutely delicious.