Jackfruit

When I came home this afternoon, I could smell the sweet smell of the ripe jackfruit at the door. As I came into the kitchen, I could see that the jackfruit had turned yellow with brown tips and was weeping a bit. It was clearly ripe. It took about an hour and a half to get all of the pods and seeds out. It was a great cooking workout breaking the ribbons of flesh to get the sweet pods out of the fruit. I wore disposable gloves, so I didn't have much clean up to do on myself when I was done, but the natural latex from the jackfruit coated most of my knife even though I had oiled it before I started. It took me another 15 minutes to emulsify the latex off the knife with canola oil. I managed to get about 10 cups of fruit and 3 cups of seeds out of the 10 pound fruit. The flavor of the jackfruit is a combination of coconut, pineapple, banana and something more tropically exotic like lucuma. I'm looking forward to my bulk spices and foods order arriving on Thursday. I want to try to make a jackfruit agar agar. I also think it would make a great cream pie. I haven't decided if I'm going to roast the seeds.

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Healthy Snacks

This weekend I organized the pantry, went grocery shopping and went fruit picking. I now have a cornucopia of healthy snacks. I put my Weight Watchers and other low calorie packaged snacks in a basket and surrounded it with fresh fruit. In addition to oranges, bananas, limes and grapes, I picked up some more exotic fruit, lychees and jackfruit the Asian grocery store. We picked peaches, apples and plums straight off the trees at Schnepf Farms.

Jackfruit is the largest tree fruit similar to breadfruit. I've never eaten it fresh so I couldn't resist buying one. I'm waiting a couple of days for it finish ripening. It's a good thing I did a little research on it because I'll have to oil my hands and knife to protect them from the natural latex the fruit produces.

We went fruit picking in the last hour of the U Pick season. I'd been talking about going picking for a few weeks, so I'm glad we went yesterday and didn't miss it. All the fruit is good, and the plums are especially fantastic, sweet and crisp. I'll be sure to go earlier and more often next year.

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Weight Watching

I joined Weight Watchers a few weeks a go and have been making good progress so far. Tracking my food intake has been an important part of the process. I use the Weight Watchers eTools to track my food, exercise and weight. It's also been helpful to keep me on track with my medications, which I add as 0 point foods. Once in a while, it doesn't have a food I'm looking for or I am looking for more detailed information. Usually NutritionData.com pops up as the resource in my search to find nutrition information on specific foods.

NutritionData.com provides much more in depth analysis than just the standard FDA nutrition label. You also get a Nutritional Target Map which charts the food's Fullness Factor against nutrient density, a Caloric Ratio Pyramid to verify how balanced the macronutrients - proteins, carbohydrates and fats - are in the food, the Estimated Glycemic Load, the Inflammation factor, the Nutrient Balance chart and Completeness Score, the Protein Quality chart and Amino Acid Score, detailed Nutrition Information, and NutritionData's Opinion on how suited the food is for weight loss, optimum nutrition and weight gain. If the food you're looking for isn't in their database, you can add information from an existing nutrition label and get as much of the analysis as possible. NutritionData.com is a great resource for helping to manage any kind of diet. Try it out in the search widget I've included in this post.

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