I love playing around with food and trying new things! How about you?
Variety is the name of the game. Different fruits and veggies often catch my eye because I love to experiment with new foods and recipes. I play around with varying my diet as well. Sometimes I eat Vegan. Sometimes I eat Vegetarian. Sometimes I eat Ketogenic or Paleo. I find more success when I cycle my diet and then I don’t get bored. The past few weeks I have been eating a whole food, plant-based diet with very little meat. Right now it is a conscious choice to avoid it and reduce inflammation in my body.
A new food I recently tried was jackfruit. The jackfruit is green when unripe, and then turns light brown and spreads a strong fragrant smell once it is ripe. Jackfruit is round or oblong-shaped, and has an outer surface covered with blunt thorn-like projections that soften as the fruit ripens. You might have seen these huge fruits in the produce department and wondered what on earth they were!
Inside each fruit are hundreds of small, succulent yellow lobes. Most jackfruit trees can bear as many as 250 large fruits every season. Jackfruit is an exotic tropical fruit in the U.S., but it’s becoming more popular in the vegan and vegetarian circles as a meat substitute. After about one hour of cooking, unripened jackfruit starts to resemble the flavor and mouth-feel of pulled pork.
I used the jackfruit to make tacos! They were delicious! I purchased a pre-marinated chili lime carnitas version and really liked the texture and flavor. The texture was more like artichoke hearts than carnitas and didn’t taste like pork at all. I added black beans, cabbage, tapatio and cilantro in a sprouted corn tortilla that I sautéed in avocado oil. It was a great new way to eat taco and who doesn’t love having more TACOS in their life? My thoughts exactly!