Persimmons

My local market has an abundance of persimmons in stock these days, gloriously orange hachiya persimmons.  If your local market has them too, I encourage you to enjoy their sweet, luscious taste.  Just remember, persimmons are ripe when very soft and may need a few days after purchasing to ripen.   Do not eat them too soon or you'll have a puckered mouth for hours.

ripened persimmons are soft and slightly darker than the unripe ones

Wash your persimmons when you bring them home from the market and leave them in a cool, open spot to ripen.  You may also quicken the ripening process by storing them in a brown bag of rice (as my Chinese merchants in Philadelphia taught me years ago).

When the persimmon is very soft, and maybe even has some blackening of the skin, the fruit is ripe to eat.

the blackened skin in natural to the ripening process

The cleanest way to eat the fruit is to slice the top off of the fruit and eat with a spoon, scooping the soft sweet flesh from the skin.  A less delicate but somewhat more satisfying way of eating them is to slice the fruit into quarters and pull the fruit from the skin with your teeth--very messy, very wet.  However you choose to eat them, you'll see they are a natural treasure and treat.  

I like to cut away the center pith of the fruit before eating them by quarters

Currently the persimmons are selling for 49 cents in my market, cheap enough to fill a bowl for decoration only.  Maybe I'll mix in a few pomegranates too.