Weekly Rundown: Taste of the Tropics

It's been a fairly wintry week this week, which has meant I've not been up to very much.

There have been no disasters of the curtain pulling down variety. There have been no trips off the island (not for me at least). I've not been on any nice walks. The weather has been downright yucky so I've been bundling up indoors and only venturing out when it's absolutely necessary.

When it's absolutely necessary includes when my stubborn labrador refuses to poop in her garden, therefore requiring her owner to schlep back inside, swap her jammies for jeans and go out for an impromptu walk. Tara seems to be of the opinion that if it is cold and wet in the garden, some magical process happens outside the garden gate whereby it is suddenly warm and dry. Each time she refuses to go in the garden, she seems surprised to learn that it is just as cold and wet on the rest of the estate. Of course that doesn't stop her trying it every time.

Yes, it's been such an eventful week for me that my Weekly Rundown post is about my dog's toileting habits. Let's try again, shall we?

Yesterday we decided to perk up our weekend with a bit of exotic fruit, courtesy of Tesco and some vouchers they sent me to get £4 off any of their fresh exotic fruit.

I like fruit, but Mr Click and I tend to stick to what we know (apples, pears and bananas mainly) and only try some of the fancier stuff when it's in a tin (I may have a slight addiction to tinned mangoes). One of the main things that puts me off trying unfamiliar fresh fruit is not knowing what to do with it.

Such a happy selection.

I gave Mr Click responsibility for selecting our fruit so he decided to go with a theme when he picked these. From top to bottom we have papaya, persimmon (also known as sharon fruit) and passion fruit. Because we were getting these for free (or nearly free) we weren't too scared to experiment with preparing them, safe in the knowledge that if we messed up, we'd not wasted any money.

And I have no idea what I was afraid of, because it turns out that these are all really easy to prepare.

We started with the papaya. These are prepared a little like melons. Mr Click expertly chopped the top off of one, then cut it in half.

See all those black seeds. You just scoop them straight out. You can either leave it as is, the way you'd eat a honeydew melon, or you can chop it up into pieces. We cut ours up so we could stick it in a bowl with some ice cream, but if you were just wanting a quick snack, you could take a spoon to it and go wild.

The persimmon was even easier to prepare than that. It was so quick and easy, in fact, that Mr Click had finished it before I'd even gotten round to taking a photo!

The persimmon has a leafy bit on the top, which you cut out kind of the way you'd take the top out of a strawberry. The whole thing is edible, skin and all, so we just chopped it up into chunks and threw it in the bowl.

I'd actually had this before, thanks to a friend at work so I knew what to expect. I think it may actually have been my favourite of the fruits we got in this offer. I'm very pleased that I've still got another two to have this week.

Finally we had the passion fruit. Now I like passion fruit in drinks but I honestly couldn't have picked out a passion fruit in a line up. They're quite weird looking fruits. You don't eat the outside, instead you eat what can only be described as somewhat like frogspawn, which is inside.

It's basically what you would get if a coconut had a love affair with a frog. And it tastes really good, even if it looks kind of gross.

This is probably the easiest one to prepare. The outside it kind of tough, you just cut through it and then spoon out the inside (being careful not to get any of the white stuff). By this point we'd added a good old dollop of ice cream to our papaya and persimmon, so this got popped on top.

Perfect for a nice cold wintry day. These fruits are all loaded with Vitamin C and other nutrients which should help to keep the winter bugs at bay.

In the future, I think we'll definitely be a little bit more adventurous with our fruit. It turns out just because it's exotic, it doesn't mean it's impossible to prepare. I'm quite looking forward to another portion of it tonight.