Drab and smelly

I thought I would kill several birds with one stone... Stage a comeback on my own blog, for starters. Do Pel proud. (Anita, wipe that frown off your brow for it is an informal expression.) Introduce Medha to new tastes and smells. Take pictures like one obsessed - for Click - where it seems to be rather wind-y today.

I bought jackfruit. I paid $2.99/lb for this little chunk that weighed 2.35 lbs to be exact. Over $7. Plus tax. From which came maybe 20 pieces of pulp and even fewer seeds. Given how way too many bloggers had featured the jackfruit last year, I really don't know what I was thinking. No matter what I tried, the results were not enthusing. I even took some corny shots of the jackfruit in my dogwood tree with lovely bokeh in the background. The rind of the poor fruit started turning brown as every nook and cranny of my home quickly absorbed its sickly sweet smell. The natives also started getting restless, and were becoming increasingly biased against the fruit because of the odor fragrance. Then the sun did what it does every evening, a minute or so later each day now, and my home was infused with a warm golden glow.

Mothership

I also decided to push the boundaries a bit and make it look like nothing on this earth. Alien, if you will.

Alien

The jackfruit was done by this time, too! One critic called it drab, for lack of a better word. I was very amused because if he had been able to smell it, drab would have been farthest from his mind.

We ate the crunchy pulp after much rinsing. Milky sap covered my hands, my table, my plates and even on some parts of my camera. Intuitively, I rubbed my hands with vegetable oil and then washed them with warm soapy water and the sap washed off rather easily. That's a Handy Tip, people! I just don't fancy doing the same to my camera though.

I roasted the seeds but they weren't very popular. I am very hesitant to throw them into the trash. Maybe the birds will eat them?

The smell pervaded everything in the house. And to get rid of it, I did the next best thing: added another dimension to the smell. If the jackfruit is a sensational fruit from the land, then this is an exotic flower from the ocean. Baby cuttlefish. Come on! Stretch that imagination a little bit, will you‽

Flower from the Ocean - my entry for Click

Not everyone's smelly cup of tea. And certainly not spring bounty. But it is Au Naturel.

Cuttlefish are really mollusks and although they lack a skeleton, they do have a inner porous structure called the cuttlebone which is made of calcium carbonate. This provides them with buoyancy. Squids and octupi are also cuttlefish.

The natives became restless again, not sure which of the two was worse. Medha appreciated Jai's strategy of walking around with an agarbatti stuck to her nose. But it backfired when the strong artificial scent of jasmine almost sent her lungs into shock.

The cuttlefish is currently marinating in soya sauce, garlic and some mirin sauce. A quick stir fry might be in order, unless someone gives me a better idea.

I was trying to figure out which of these three pictures to send for Click - Au Naturel. Alien might be too weird, Flower of the Ocean is too strange and I can see several vegetarians being put off by it. And Mothership is just another staid shot of the jackfruit. I am not particularly inspired by any of these. Are you?

Updated: The Flower from the Ocean goes to Click. Thank you all for your input!