per-sim-mons.

I went to H-mart last Saturday & got so many delicious things, including persimmons. C had never tried persimmons (or Asian pear, for that matter), and we spent a glorious hour walking through the aisles & picking up cookies/crackers, banana milk, and delicious pastries (melon bread, cream puff's and chestnut bread mmmm). I swear, this boy likes Korean food as much as I do.

I think it's fascinating how tastes are like a collection of colors forming a palette: once you taste something, you know how it tastes. If you've never tasted anything like it, no matter what analogies or comparisons to have it explained to you, you'll never completely get it.

Same with persimmons:

Persimmons are grown all over the world, from Mexico to southeastern Europe to Asia, but the persimmons I've grown up with are the Asian kind, native to China. They are really bitter when they are not yet ripe (and hard), and gradually become softer as they become sweeter. My friend A described them as being "sweet, with texture between apple and peach", and suggested they may taste like sweet potatoes. Interesting, but I somehow agree...

I grew up eating numerous of these persimmons (called gahm, like "palm") growing in my grandma's house. We'd pick literally hundreds of them when it became fall, and my grandma would let them dry in the sun for a few days, and they'd turn dry/sweet, and I'd eat them as snacks throughout the winter. These are a common fruit associated with autumn in Korea, along with the color-changing leaves. Oh, if you let them ripen (but not left to dry), they become soft enough to eat with a spoon.

This angle of me cutting the persimmon makes it look like I'm on a TV show! My suitemate and I will be baking up a delicious pie for our Thanksgiving potluck in a dorm room with neither hot water nor heating. We're going to pretend we're on Survivor fused with Top Chef. 

By the way, there's a new TLC show called "Sarah Palin's Alaska"! First Bristol, and now Sarah Palin herself? A new emerging family of reality stars to come.