April 25, 2004
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La Naranjilla (nah-rahn-HEE-lyah)
Today’s blog is a
reference blog regarding the naranjilla plant. I have begun to
grow a couple of them, and am following their growth, but many people have mentioned they don’t know what a
naranjilla is, so … Here we go: all the info together in one blog:
The
naranjilla is a fruit in the tomato family, but it doesn’t taste like
anything like tomato and has more of a citrus-type flavor. I
can’t think of anything compare it to. It’s difficult to describe
the flavor. You definitely have to sweeten it, or it’s way
puckery sour. It’s thick, and it’s green… (that sounds gross,
but it’s not – honest!)
When the naranjilla is ripe (it turns orange and the outside of the
fruit loses it’s prickly fuzz and is smooth – you can see the one on
the top left is still a bit fuzzy) and the naranjilla is soft, it’s
easy to break open without even cutting it (the pic at the right
isn’t very ripe) It’s almost like a pod full of seeds (if you look at
the picture, the inside looks a bit like a tomato, but it’s really not
at all like a tomato) … and you squeeze the inside fruit out into a
sieve, and push it through the sieve into a bowl or blender (to
keep the seeds from falling into the juice) and then you add sugar to
sweeten it to taste. If you make enough of it, you put it in the
blender with the sugar and it aerates it. OR… you can take the
lazy route and make Naranjilla flavored Tang (which they have in
Ecuador, but they don’t sell here. Go figure. I brought
some of it back with me last summer)
They grow really amazingly quickly! You almost feel like you could
literally watch it grow just standing there sometimes.I read somewhere that if you put vaseline on a
white index card, if you’re having trouble with aphids, they’ll gravitate to the
card’s whiteness and get stuck in the vaseline. I might try that if I find
they’re having aphid problems again. I might also decide to put them out this
summer and see how they grow outdoors. Nasty stickers though… on the leaves
as well as the trunk and branches. I guess it might be one way to teach a
toddler not to mess with the houseplants. (eeks! {cringe})
There’d be no problem leaving them outside if I
were living down south somewhere, but they’d never survive the midwest
winters. Here’s a picture of the flower of the naranjilla, before there is fruit:
I will continue to blog the daily progress of the ones I planted
on my main blog site, with a weekly update here.
photo credits via links
El Tiempo en Quito Hoy: (The weather
in Quito
Today):
(from elcomercio.com)
AM:
Nublado parcialmente (partly
cloudy)
PM: Lluvias aisladas ( isolated showers)
Temperatura:
Máx. 66°F / 19°C
Min. 48°F / 9°C
Humedad:
Promedio. 80%
