I have been introduced to so many interesting fruits since coming to Japan! At many of my schools there are gardens or wild plants that bear fruit, and the teachers routinely harvest them and share the produce with the staff room.

Several of my schools have goya vines growing around them, so I have received goya from several of my schools. Goya, called bitter melon in English, is a squash size fruit with a green or orange rind. But the striking this about this fruit is that the skin is not smooth, it is bumpy all over! The flesh is extremely bitter but I have heard from many people that goya is very good for your health. Usually the fruit is green, and that is the kind that I have cooked with. But as you can see below there are orange fruits too. When I was at my school we sucked on the red seeds inside the orange fruits and they are surprisingly sweet.  But when you cook with the green variety you remove the seeds. It's most well known use is in Goya Chanpuru, an Okinawan stir fry dish that I have made three times since moving here. But I also found a recipe for a tofu goya salad that I found to be quite tasty.

Today, I tried a fruit called akebi. It has a beautiful bright purple rind which actually splits open when the fruit is ripe, to reveal the seeds and soft white flesh inside. You can scoop it out and eat the inside flesh and it is quite sweet and tasty! At my school, the teachers told me that the rind is sometimes made into tenpura (fried) as well. This fruit is apparently native to Northern Japan and grow wild on the mountains. It also ripens during and signifies the approach of Fall. I read that it can be bought in upscale produce shops for usually only about two weeks right before Fall begins. However, only in the past twenty years has it been grown domestically, before that it was only harvested from wild plants.

The Asian Pear. My new favorite fruit, it tastes like a cross between an apple and a pear. It has the delicious taste and sweetness of a pear and the shape of an apple, with the texture of the flesh somewhere in between. This fruit is native to Asia, grown mostly in Japan, China, and Korea. But this fruit has also been brought to America and is grown in California.

At my cooking class, I was given two freshly picked persimmons. Apparently these persimmons are so special, that this variety only grows in that village. Not just specific to my prefecture, or my town, but one of my town's villages is where these persimmons are found. You cannot even buy them in the grocery stores!

Japanese grapes- Grapes are a big deal here. They are huge, like the globe variety and they have particularly thick skin. Many Japanese people apparently pop the meat out and eat just that. There is nothing wrong with eating the skin though and it does not taste bad, so I still eat it even though it is quite thick. Some varieties of grapes grown here are a high quality luxury item. They have some special grapes rumored to cost around 15 dollars for one grape. Not one bunch, for one grape.