notes on fruit

I have a crush, apparently.

On persimmons.

Yesterday at the market my manager and I were shopping at the market and she was going to grab our fruit from Blossom Bluff while I dropped our eggs off inside, but she stopped and said, No Wait, I Should Let You Do It, You're Just Like A Little Kid With The Persimmons.

Maybe a week ago I asked her to teach me her tips for dealing with pomegranates. Being Persian I figured she'd know some good hints. There had to be an easier way of getting to the pomegranate seeds that just cutting it open and trying to scoop them out, right?

Well apparently what you do is use a knife to cut through the skin at the top, all around the pomegranate. Not through the whole thing, just the skin. Then when you've gone all the way around you can use the stem end to pull off the top. Kind of like a pumpkin. After this you'll see that pomegranates are really constructed in an orderly fashion; much like citrus, it's segmented. So you can cut through the skin only along the segments and pull it apart without cutting through the seeds and making a juicy mess. Each segment can be seeded individually and maybe you'll lose a few seeds but you'll keep the juice intact and the mess to a minimum.

Now, for picking pomegranates, you want ones with thin skin and a long stem, and the ones that have cracked open are really good.

One of my persimmons is almost ripe, but the rest have a long while to go. What to do with them? Cookies? Sorbet? Eating out of hand?