Orange you glad I didn't say pummelo?

We have a (relatively) new grocery store in Rockford called Valli Produce. There are a couple in the Chicago suburbs, but ours just opened within the last year. I took my sweet time getting there to check it out because when I took those vows with Woodmans, when Woodmans and I promised to love and cherish each other forever, I meant it, dammit.

But my father goes to Valli a lot and he talks about it a lot, and he's almost as OCD about his groceries as I am. Last Friday I was in the neighborhood and needed fresh green beans and an onion, so I stopped by. Oh man. There were like 7 different varieties of fresh beans and an entire aisle of onions. There were fruits and vegetables that I had never heard of, and a lot of them. And cheap. Even the meat seemed to be a great price. But I was in a hurry and only needed a couple of things, so I did not devote much time to exploring.

Enchanted by the fruits and vegetables, today I returned to Valli. The canned and dry goods are not a threat to my beloved Woodmans, but I would definitely make the extra trip a few miles down Riverside for the fruits and vegetables. Wandering somewhere in the vicinity of giant cactus pads, I decided that I should buy something new and weird every time I'm at Valli, or at least something I've never attempted cooking at home before. Because I have had a craving for citrus fruits since yesterday when I poured a batch of kuzu scented candles, I struck off to the citrus aisle, a few city blocks north of the aforementioned cacti.

It was there in the citrus metropolis that I found the pummelo. (I am going to use the spelling on the sticker of mine, but there are many variations out there, it appears.) The description made me think it would be similar to a grapefruit, but the size of it made me think it was more like a prosthetic head. I even tried doing math, because the price was per pound, not per fruit, and I was convinced that this fruit weighed at least as much as Wrecks. I could have located the scale but I didn't want to know.

Walking away with my pummelo, I happened across a box of "Delites", which upon further scrutiny turned out to be mandarins. Now I know full well what a mandarin is, so why can't they just call it that? Why do clementines have to be "Cuties" and mandarins have to be "Delites"? C'mon now. Just because it's tiny doesn't mean it has to have a stupid name. Anyway. Much smaller, but also much fresher and better looking than the last box of clementines I took home, the mandarins went into my cart.

So there I go, with the largest citrus fruit and also the smallest citrus fruit that this store sells, right next to each other in the cart. I decided that this would make a great blog series, the weird fruits and vegetables that I buy at Valli, but I have one problem. I recently discussed this problem with MBinMaine, how hard it is to show scale in a photo on the internet without falling back on the overused things like quarters and dollar bills. We talked about it while looking at a photo where a seashell was being used for scale, and she confirmed to me that the shell could have been 1/2" or 4' tall, so it was totally useless.

I got home and put away my groceries and got out my pummelo and one of the mandarins and set them on the table next to each other. But how should I show how big they are?

Well, here's a pummelo on a plate.

And here's a mandarin on a plate.

Oh wait, this is also a mandarin on a plate.

And the pummelo on a plate.

I should probably use the same plate, huh?

That's still not really that helpful because you have no concept of the size of my plates. Here's a pummelo, a mandarin, and Minica.

Okay, so I could go on like this forever it seems. Here, finally, a measurement I'm sure you're all familiar with. A pummelo, a mandarin, and a can of Tab.

Yes, we have leftover cans of Tab from the 80s party. We should have known there would be almost a full case left, seeing how Andy was the only person who drank one and I think somebody paid him. Moving on.

I am pretty sure that a pummelo would be best eaten like a grapefruit but I figured that for the sake of comparison, I should peel them both and see how they measure up afterwards. (I have ALL DAY to waste like this on Tuesdays, y'all.) The mandarin peeled very easily, because of the "zipper skin" advertised on the package, right next to "bite sized" and "on the go snacking" and "it's really tiny, see? SEE? SEEEEE HOW TINY IT IS??" The pummelo doesn't want to be peeled and I almost gave up.

The rind is foamy and thick and welded to the fruit. I had to peel the thing 8 times, each time removing more of the foamy pithy junk. While I was peeling it, my mind lost track of whether it should be concentrating on peeling a citrus fruit or formulating a plan for packing and shipping a bajillion cancer candles, which is what I spent the other half of my day doing, and it dawned on me that this impenetrable pummelo spongey rind would make a great packing material. So if any of you order candles and you suspect I used rotten grapefruit rind for the packing material, you better think again, because it's rotten pummelo rind. Gosh, get a clue.

(Note to self: Stop calling them "cancer candles", you genius.)

So here is what it looks like when it's completely peeled.

And here is what a section of each fruit looks like. Isn't that cute?

Oh, and here is what Wrecks looks like when I spend 40 minutes unwrapping but not sharing food. The joke is on him, because he doesn't even like citrus fruits. He did eat a section of mandarin, but he honestly cried when biting into the pummelo, so ha ha sucker.

The pummelo is not easy to eat in sections. The skin on each section has to be peeled away too. If I had sliced it in half and eaten it like a grapefruit, this post would have been over 47 paragraphs ago. When I sat down to write this all out, it occurred to me that I could google Pummelo for the link and find out it's not even supposed to be eaten, that you're supposed to plant it somewhere in the yard to kill groundhogs or something, but it looks like I lucked out. Yummy pummelo. Yummelo. Hey, there you go, citrus people! Make the big fruits have stupid names too.

Ahem.

Thus concludes another episode of Midwestern Girl Leaves the House Once a Week.