Unusual Ingredients

In my CSA box last week I got a branch with leaves and sort of prickly pods on it. I’m thinking..what the…and check the label on the box. It lists only one thing that I am unfamiliar with: Lychee.

What the heck is a lychee? I immediately googled this strange food. Apparently lychee is a tropical fruit. You peel it and eat it. Or make it into any number of incarnations. How it made its way into my LOCAL CSA box was a bit of a mystery that I intended to investigate. Someone in the Georgia or Florida area has successfully grown lychee…

I found this in the CSA newsletter on the lychees: “Last week I came across a find that I just could not pass up as they are one of my favorite fruits. Lychee  – pronounced lie – chi or lee-chi  depending on who you ask are a wonderful tropical fruit found throughout Asia. They have a thin shell that can be easily peeled, underneath is a juicy eye-ball looking fruit that is similar to the taste and consistency of a grape. These are hard to find fresh but we ran across some being grown in South Florida so we went out of our regular sphere a bit just to get a taste.”

So I cut upon a lychee fruit and examined it. The white interior was kind of spongy. There was a dark oblong seed in the center. (Could I grow my own lychee tree? Maybe, but I doubt it would bear fruit…) As I munched on the fruit, it kind of reminded me of canned fruit cocktail. Does anyone know if lychee is a common ingredient for fruit cups? Very interesting. Anyway, I didn’t have the energy to turn these little fruits into anything so I just ate them. And they were good.

I also recently got some duck eggs. I don’t know what I was expecting, but they were pretty much just like chicken eggs except huge. Only other difference I noticed was a slightly gamey flavor and that they tend to toughen up faster when scrambled than chicken eggs. One of my favorite I-don’t-have-time-to-cook dinners is scrambled eggs and salad. So I scrambled up a few of my duck eggs and served them up with a salad of CSA greens and tomatoes drizzled with olive oil and vinegar.