UFO

Unidentified Fruity Object…too cheesy?  Sorry.  I guess I just couldn’t help myself.  But in all seriousness, what the hell is this:

And for you smarty pants who can identify a tree by its leaves, a more distant view:

So far my best guess is Soursop – a clever deduction made from googling “spiny tropical fruit” and following the scent from there.  The other guess is jack fruit, but it doesn’t seem to quite match the images I can find on the web.  I’m still not 100% sure and probably won’t be until I am brave enough to pick one and cut it open.  I tend to shy away from slicing into things that I cannot identify – something about a slight phobia of poisonous sap that I never got over after growing up around oleander bushes and the horror stories we were told to keep us away from them.  “See that bush?  The sap will make you go BLIND!  Don’t touch them.”  To this day I am not sure whether that is actually the case but I do know that roasting a hot dog on their branches will kill you, like it did that family that went on vacation in New Mexico and unwittingly used those nice straight branches as roasting sticks.  Or did they?

Despite the usefulness of the internet in dispelling the myths we were told as children to keep us from doing just plain stupid things, I am still wary of things that can be loosely categorized under poisonous berries or toxic sap.  I can’t help myself – we’re all victims of the scars on our innocence in one way or another.

I wasn’t enough of a sissy not to enthusiastically bite into one of these beauties:

That’s because these are very clearly identified as very tiny and subsequently very tasty tomatoes.  Fresh tomatoes are a million and one times tastier than frozen and shipped tomatoes. I personally verified that fact by plucking one of these, dusting it off on my pretty white tank top and popping it into my mouth.

So far the bounty I have come across in our jungle of a back yard: Papaya, mango, bananas, tomatoes, tamarind.  Reputedly, there is also spinach growing back there, but I haven’t hunted it down yet.  That is for another day.