Hey folks…we’re going to be at Atlanta Local Food Initiative’s Incredible Edit Fruit Tree sale this coming Saturday, January 23rd. Stop by, say hello and talk maypops, pawpaws and mayhaws with us!

Well folks, the daylight has been saved, and it’s hunkering season once again. We’ve got some walnuts drying under the porch, some pecans here and there, and a few leftover prickly pears scurrying to get in before the door closes on summertime and all its bounty.

We’ll be tending to various odds and ends throughout the next few months, but for the most part, it’ll be a nice hibernation. We hope to return with vigor, and pick up a few gadgets from our wishlist. So be warm, enjoy the clear air, stay fed, and we’ll see y’all next spring!

-Craig

Maaaannnnnn! I didn’t even know pomegranates grew here, and I just happened to drive by a beautiful 60-year old tree that was full of weird-looking apples. This was a wonderful and very generous donation, and we’re thrilled to get it!

We’re going back on Sunday to pick some black walnuts and hopefully a few more pomegranates, so you should come along!

Short of making our own acorn flour, prickly pears are probably about as fringe as we can get for things that grow readily in Atlanta.

Well, that, or eating the actual green cactus pads.

I once had some delicious licor de tuna (prickly pear liquor) from the heart of Mexico, and it was supremely delicious: sweet without being overwhelming, and a unique, pleasant taste.

Such is always the curse of high hopes, as prickly pears we’ve found growing in Atlanta to be less then supremely delicious, with a taste somewhere between a beet and a cucumber. Perfectly edible of course, but it doesn’t do a whole lot to make you want to keep eating it. And since it is covered in tiny thorns that can be carried by the wind to your most delicate of extremities, the fruit is actually in solid negative territory right now.

We’re hoping that the fruits we picked were simply not fully ripe, but we don’t really know. Do you?

20 lbs of nice, fat little native persimmons. We don’t need no Fuyu or Hachiya to get down in A-town (not that we’d turn them away). Diospyros virginiana all the way. Yeah…

These little fellows were growing out in Tucker, GA at a car repair shop. A fellow there talked our ear off about topics far and wide, and was in love with persimmon bread. Our recipe unfortunately ended up tasting like spice cake and had no resemblance to anything with fruit in it.

Anyone got some good persimmon recipes? They’re delicious as is, but this dude really sold us on the bread. In his words, it’ll make you wanna slap your grandma, which I think is good.

We had something really weird happen this past week.

Some of us here at Concrete Jungle are beekeepers, and this is about the time of year we harvest our honey. Not many more flowers are going to bloom, and after taking the honey we can make the hive smaller, which makes it easier for the bees to keep it warm during winter.

One of our hives is known as a top-bar hive. It’s basically a big trough covered with wooden slats, each of which has a separate honeycomb hanging from it:

It’s a nice cheap way to get in to beekeeping, since you can make a trough out of anything, and harvesting honey consists of crushing the wax and straining the honey out, with no need for a honey-spinning centrifuge as with other hives.

After checking in on the hive recently, we noticed something very strange. Something white in the honeycomb. It didn’t have a shape to it, so it wasn’t bee larvae. It flowed like honey and wasn’t transparent, so it wasn’t plant nectar. And it tasted amazing…kind of a maple flavor to it. Very sweet. Best honey I’ve ever had.

This is of course very different from normal honey, which should probably at least look transparent, if not amber as well. I attempted to figure out what this honey was, but couldn’t turn up many clues. We were very excited about sending some honey off to get tested and figure out what made it so distinct. Very few plants make white honey, and most of them grow in Hawaii. Maybe it was acacia, or honey locust growing in a neighbor’s yard. Whatever it was, we wanted to plant a lot of it for next year, cause this was some seriously bumpin honey.

Then it dawned on us.

These bees, located in Tucker, Georgia, happen to be about a half-mile away from the world’s largest wholesale manufacturer of icings and glazes. Not only are there no exotic plants contributing to this honey, but it isn’t even honey! Somewhere over at Brill there’s an open window, or a big pallet stacked with frosting or a barrel full of expired glaze, and my intrepid little dumpster-diving bee agents have found it and greatly capitalized on it. For all that we were trying to evoke in naming our organization “Concrete Jungle,” I don’t think we ever had anything like this in mind…

By the looks of things, they’ll be just fine through the winter, but I’m not sure we can harvest from this hive next year. Somehow, honey + honey = honey, but honey + frosting honey doesn’t. The grand muddy mixture is pretty cloying, unless you happen to be a food scientist that works at Brill Laboratories, in which case, it would probably make a great addition to your glazing product portfolio.

There’s an episode of Discovery Channel’s Man vs. Wild in which Bear Grylls is dropped in to the Amazon to wander through the rainforest to civilization. At one point, he pauses, struck by the beauty of a purple flower hidden in the foliage. He reflects:

Nobody’s ever going to see that flower. That’s God’s extravagance. Even though no one’s ever going to see it, he just can’t help but create something beautiful.

Now I’m not a religious man, but y’on’t have to be to appreciate what he’s saying. I get from it just a reverence for nature, regardless of who or what created it – that things of great beauty and complexity go in and out of existence regardless of us, and it’s special to get to witness them.

The flower of the maypop, Passiflora incarnata
I always think of this quote when maypop season comes around, because not only does its flower rival prized orchids in beauty and intricacy, but it also has a hidden-in-plain-sight secrecy to it: it is found not in well-tended gardens and climate-controlled greenhouses, but rather amongst thorns, weeds, poison ivy, and in the case of this particular flower, along the North Druid Hills interstate access road.

Blooming maypop flower, with immature fruit in background
The maypop is the North American relative of the passionfruit, and bears fruit similar to its southern cousin, with the edible portion surrounding the numerous seeds inside of the actual fruit, similar to a pomegranate. The name “maypop” refers to the fact that many of the fruits develop without seeds, and are filled only with a pocket of air that pops when trampled under foot. Of all the maypops I’ve ever seen in Atlanta, none have been edible, and I’m very curious to know what it’s like. So keep your eyes out…they’re growing right now and they’re a real diamond in the rough of Atlanta’s roadside bramble.

In today’s version of Side of the Road, we’re going to take a look at the flying dragon fruit, just in time for you to get some for yourself, since they are in season right now. I have marked some on the Food Map – they’re on Clairmont Rd, just south of Buford Hwy, where the following pictures were taken:

The flying dragon is by no means a pleasant fruit. The plant is covered in ferocious thorns which are not only long and sharp, but also incredibly sturdy. We were able to completely puncture wooden branches using the thorns, which suffered no damage in the process. So if the apocalypse happens tomorrow and we have to restart civilization from scratch, keep flying dragon in mind for making sewing needles. The plant gives the impression that it could survive a variety of end-of-the-world scenarios in order to provide high-quality pokey things for fledgling humanities.

The fruit is also pretty serious. It’s at least as sour as a lemon, but has a distinct pine taste to it as well. Sure, they’re not as easily appreciated as say, an apple, where you can just pick it off the branch and bite right in to it, but it would probably make a very refreshing lemonade, or add a very interesting taste when used in place of lemon juice in cooking.

And really, this is the only citrus fruit that grows well in Atlanta. Let’s have some love for this exotic marvel. After all, just look at what happened with a similar sour citrus fruit, the yuzu – it’s now the darling of la-dee-dah chefs the world over, is extremely expensive, and very difficult to obtain in the US.

If only there were some sort of saying about how to proceed in life when given sour citrus fruit.

If you happened to see our donation statistics page recently, you might have noticed the appearance of the muscadine. And you might be wondering just what it is. I was recently talking to a friend of mine about muscadines and scuppernongs and she thought I was quoting a Dr. Seuss book.

Now is the time to learn about muscadines, because they’re in season, they’re native to the southeast, and they’re fully delicious. So all the more reason to satisfy that southern pride and your belly in one fell swoop.

Muscadines are relatives of the grape, but with a thicker skin, and usually with several seeds in the center. They have a taste similar to a grape, but there’s no confusing the two. Many suck out the tasty middle of the muscadine and discard the sour skin, but I like to eat it all. I swear that muscadines taste like the artificial grape flavor found in a lot of Japanese candies, but others have been slow to agree with me on this point, so perhaps it’s something you just have to experience for yourself. There is also significant back and forth discussion concerning the amount of the resveratrol meganutrient found in muscadines. You should probably be on the safe side and eat lots of muscadines.

As far as finding muscadines, we’re starting to get a few points labeled on the food map, but you’ll also be able to find some on your own no problem. The difficulty with finding muscadines is that, being native to the southeast, they grow absolutely everywhere, but only a few vines actually fruit, and then of those vines, even fewer actually fruit to the point of it being worthwhile collect them.

One thing to know about muscadines is that they like to grow at the edges of wooded areas. Living in the beautiful, lush city that we do, we have a lot of roads cutting through wooded areas, one of the easiest ways to spot muscadines is just to watch the ground. You will eventually come across a scene like the one below, spotted from a moving vehicle near Briarcliff and Clairmont:

Fortunately, muscadines’ thick skin means that they usually suffer no damage (despite having fallen 20+ feet in the case of this particular picture) and you can successfully harvest lots of pristine groundling muscadines.

Well, we had a lot of things up against us this year: small apple harvest (1/3 of last year’s monster 3100 lbs), discovering the night before that we’d lost up to 40% of our apples in a faulty freezer, late-night screen printing issues, exhaustion, and even rain during Ciderfest proper, but all-in-all, everything worked out and everything worked well. Even the grinder! For all of our fussing and fretting, it was no sweat. It might be the kind of “no sweat” that requires two nights to catch up on sleep, but no sweat nonetheless.

Thanks so much to everyone who came out, and everyone who donated money and bought T-shirts. It was a great time as always, and we got to meet lots of new and old friends, plenty of stomach gurgles from too much cider, lots of dogs, lots of swimming, and general mirth.

Also, for anyone that missed it this go around, we’re planning on making cider for the Faster Mustache 24-hour relay going on next weekend from noon Saturday to noon Sunday at Elliot St. Pub in Castleberry Hill. Come on out in the heat of the day and cool off with some refreshingly brown liquid!