Pomegranates

The BG is delighted that pomegranates are in season, and a bowl of seeds is part of her lunch or snack most days. Ms. Macedonia (a former Worldwide nom de plume) wrote about the tree in our yard in 1997, and the fruit was also widely available on the Road 9 markets in Maadi.

Not my favourite fruit, in all honesty,but I do enjoy seeding them; it's like extracting treasure from an unlikely source. I cut off the bottom, and then cut the fruit pole-to-pole into 4 sections. Then I scoop out the seeds with my finger into a bowl of water. Since they sink, any of the pith that comes off, will float on top of the bowl and can be easily skimmed off.

Back in the kid-free days, we were challenged to find uses for the giant bag of pomegranates our Macedonian landlord proudly  presented to us, and I recall some clumsy juice extraction, which made for a decent marinade for chicken. There don't seem to be a lot of documented uses for the seeds (beyond sprinkling a few on a salad) that aren't overly labour intensive (jam or juice) for my taste, so we'll just keep eating them like popcorn until the end of the year, when they disappear from the produce section.

Interesting to learn, via Wikipedia and the Internet, that the fruit is a native of Persia, and that California is the major North American source. Also curious that the etymology of pomegranate, um, stems from "apple of Grenada" (the town in Spain) and that "grenades" were so known because of their similarity in shape to the eponymous fruit. They also bring back happy memories of bedtime stories, when D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths (a childhood favourite of mine) was a starring performer, and the story of Persephone (and those six delicious forbidden pomegranate seeds) a frequent request of both Gs.