Feijoa (pineapple guava)

When I was in college, my boyfriend told me about these magical and mystical fruits you could find in California, the Promised Land of Milk and Honey. Being a naive and sort of sheltered girl from Toledo, Ohio (the Industrial land of Glass and Jeeps), I believed everything he told me about this wonderful place called California.

One day, he described this mysterious fruit called the Pineapple Orange that LOOKED like an orange but TASTED like a pineapple!

I was so enamored.  I eventually married this guy.

And then one day, years later, we were in California and I excitedly asked him to show me the mysterious pineapple oranges. We went to the market and looked and looked and looked.  Albertson's, Ralph's, Ranch 99, Seafood Palace . . .

And we kept looking and looking and looking. Finally, dejected, he pulled out his iphone and tried to convince me that the fruit indeed must exist because he saw it on the internet.

To this day (and we've been married for eight years now) I still have yet to see a pineapple orange.  I'm starting to wonder if they really exist or not. You know what they say about believing everything on the Internet . . .

He still insists they're real and he's had them.  I won't believe it until I taste it.

On the other hand, these beautiful guava pineapples (also known as feijoas) DO exist. I saw them at the Farmer's Market in San Francisco at the Ferry Building on DAY 2 of our Foodbuzz Festival.

I've never tasted anything quite like this before. Yes, it reminds me of a guava, but juicier and sweeter on the inside and more tart and bitter on the outside. The inside is fleshy, sort of like . . . a pineapple, I guess, while the outer ring is characteristically grainy, just like a guava. 

Apparently most cultures do not eat the skin, and instead scoop out the sweet, inner flesh with a spoon. I personally love the tartness and bitterness of the outer ring. I think it balances out the fruit nicely. So I chopped up these babies and ate them WHOLE! Yum yum yum.

I guess even if pineapple oranges don't exist, these guava pineapples are pretty yummy, and frankly, I'd probably like them better than any orange that tasted like a pineapple.  :)