The 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival

On Friday night, September 22, we held the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival. (If you're looking for accounts of the 2nd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival or the 1st Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival, click here and here.)

We decided the harvest has been big enough this year that we could introduce the pawpaw revelers to a pawpaw cake. So on Thursday night, I took a knife and spoon to a few pawpaws and filled this bowl with pawpaw pulp. 

Here are the pawpaw skins from the fruits I used for the pulp. It looks like it took about four or five pawpaws to make that bowl of pulp. The skins on the left are the ones I've spooned the pulp out of. The skins on the right--those are the ones that NJ got to after I spooned the pulp out of them. NJ eats closer to the rind (watermelon, pawpaws, etc) than I do. 

These are the pawpaws that we had left over after I made the pulp. Just 12 of them, which worried us a bit, since according to the Evite that NJ sent out, there would be 67 people attending the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival.

We comforted ourselves by thinking that we also had these four pawpaws (in the foreground) in reserve--they were about to be ripe and might be right by Friday night. As for the pawpaw in the background--that one fell from the tree a little early and we were sure it wouldn't be ripe in time for the festival, so I committed to give it to a guy who goes to a nearby university and had contacted me about trying a pawpaw. (I met him on campus on the day of the festival and made the hand-off, instructing him not to eat it until it turned fragrant and pretty soft.) We also consoled ourselves by saying that everyone didn't need to have a whole pawpaw or even a half of a pawpaw but could have a quarter of a pawpaw or even an eighth of some of the big pawpaws.

After thus consoling ourselves, I started to work on making the pawpaw cakes. (And NJ started to work on being my life coach while I made the cakes.) Here's the recipe. And sorry the pic isn't oriented well. I've spent too much time trying to get it right-side-up but some type of little ghost in the machine is foiling my efforts and I need to move on. If you want to see a pic of it right-side-up, take a look at when I made a pawpaw cake in October 2016.

Here's NJ cleaning up after me--I told you she eats closer to the rind than I do and she likes to get more of the batter off the spoon than I do. So she's getting the last of the batter, which I missed, off of the spoon and into the pan. And she's doing it with such good cheer.

With the last two drops of batter in the pan, I was ready to put the cakes into the oven to bake.

While we waited for the cakes to finish baking, I snooped around in the fridge wondering if we had happened to have lost any stray pawpaws in there that we could find and use for the festival the next evening. Turns out we had indeed lost one, huddled between the pickles and the margarine. (I know some of you are sneering right now that we've got margarine rather than "real butter" in our fridge, and that's fine. Just know that I'm too generous to sneer at you when I consider the fact that most of you eat many more apples and oranges than you do pawpaws.)

Once the cakes were finished baking it was time to put on the cream cheese frosting (recipe also visible in the photo above).

These are the baked goods we had ready by 6:30 pm on Friday night, a half-hour before the revelers started arriving for the festival: I had made the two pawpaw cakes on the right, and NJ had made the apple-cardamom cakes in the middle as well as the brownies on the left..

And the festival began! There were some repeat offenders at the festival that you may recognize from previous pawpaw festivals. And then there were some new people on the guest list, including friends from the neighborhood and work, and also people who we've met via this blog solely because we share a common interest in the pawpaw.

Fortunately the revelers brought other items to fill up the plates besides just pawpaws. (More fortunate still would be if we had enough pawpaws to fill up the plates!)

In the left corner: a reveler who drove all the way from Ogden to Provo to join in the festivities. Also in this pic is a reveler who garnered an invitation by virtue of the fact that a few months ago he saw the pawpaw trees as he walked by our house and later when he bumped into me said, "Hey you've got pawpaw trees don't you?" We were so impressed that he could identify them that we immediately placed his name on the list of invitees. 

And then it turned out that the guy who goes to the local university also made it to the pawpaw festival.

In the end, we did have enough pawpaws to give some people a pawpaw half. (I took people out to look at the trees before it got dark and was able to harvest a few extras.) It also helped that not a lot of the kids that showed up were very interested in trying the pawpaw--more for the adults!

CSI: Hipster Banana Edition

Yesterday some friends (who are coming to the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival later this week) mentioned that they had seen an article claiming that the new nickname for the pawpaw is "the hipster banana." As soon as I heard that, I looked up what hipsters wear and put on my distressed Chuck Taylors, which I slept in last night just to always be looking the part (and you'll see they make a cameo later in this post).

This morning as I went off to my hipster job while wearing my hipster shoes I realized that, somehow, there had come to be some splattered hipster banana on our driveway. (I know it's very bourgeois to have a driveway and to have purchased a house, but I assure you that we're saving up to be able to afford to rent a place that doesn't have a driveway so that we can just park our tandem Vespa on the street.) 

The splattered viscera of a pawpaw on our driveway. I could barely believe my eyes. Then I realized that the slug-covered pawpaw, which I had simply left under the tree, had disappeared a few days ago. Hence, even before heading off to work I had identified the victim. Sadly, I had a sense it would meet a fate like this, given the invertebrate-types that this particular hipster banana had been hanging out with.

Once I got home from work (see there's my hipster shoe) I needed to turn the driveway into a proper crime scene. So I grabbed a piece of S's sidewalk chalk and got down to the morbid business of chalking things up. With the chalk lines, the method of extinguishing the pawpaw becomes apparent: it fell, or better was pushed, or more precisely was thrown onto the cement. The area without the pawpaw guts in the center (inside the chalk circle) is where the fruit made impact with the ground, and then the chalk marks the extent of the splattering. Grisly, I know.

I further surveyed the driveway and found other evidence. An archipelago of evidence.

Whoever did it, it wasn't a clean job. It was a crime of passion, with the pawpaw (based on cold hard evidence) being thrown repeatedly onto the cement. Bludgeoned even.

For the most part, the criminals disposed of the body, leaving only splatters, but I did find this genetic material.

As I applied the final chalk lines, the neighborhood kids were walking home from school. Several of them watched me as they walked by, and I saw a few with guilty looks in their eyes, as if they had been surprised that when they returned to the scene of the crime, I had made it into a genuine crime scene with chalk. This photo is another splattering with an absent center, where the absent center shows the place of impact.

Not for the weak of stomach, this type of work.

FYI: Not only was I wearing my beat up Chucks while I conducted the investigation but I also had my hair dyed pastel for the occasion.

Oh the Waste! Slug Sheen on a Fallen Pawpaw

This morning I went out for a run. It was still dark but in the street light's glare I could see that a pawpaw had fallen in the grass. And the pawpaw looked uncommonly wet, given that I've turned off the sprinklers for the season. I had my suspicions about what it might be... 

...So after my run I did some inspecting. The pawpaw hadn't been wet--it had been covered in slug sheen! Absolutely covered! As if a pack of slugs--or a solitary slug with OCD--had descended upon the fruit after it had plummeted from the tree, determined touch each square millimeter of the pawpaw with a slimy, disgusting slug foot.

Pawpaws are often found in hollows, in their native range, but here the hollows had been opened up on the pawpaw, the habitation of roly polys.

In another spot, I found a slug/roly-poly communal watering hole.

I added this sad pawpaw to the list on our pawpaw harvest tracker. The 19th pawpaw from the Shenandoah. Yesterday, we had intimations that it could be this way with pawpaws that fall during the night (though it wasn't this way last year). But I had no idea that the lowly creatures of the yard could ramp up their efforts so quickly. Slug sheen all over a pawpaw?

Not wanting to give the slugs any other windfalls, I went out and shook the Shenandoah before heading off to work. Seven more fell and I was able to pick them up from the lawn within just a few second, not enough time for our aggressive slugs to coat them in slime. Here's NJ holding a big fruit that fell this morning.

The 15th Pawpaw and Slugs

As you see from the pawpaw harvesting chart, since Sept 8th, we had endured a severe lack of ripe pawpaws. The only relief came yesterday, when NJ found a lone pawpaw on the ground. But we knew some ripe ones were on their way, preparing for for their plummet to the earth, since just walking past the Shenandoah we could smell the ripeness.

And so, as you saw on the pawpaw harvesting chart above, this morning we harvested five pawpaws. They fell during the night and most of them had generate some interest among the lowly creatures (no offense to them) of the lawn: slugs, some ants, and a roly-poly. Not wanting to eat from the same parts of the pawpaws as the lowly creatures (no offense), I used a spoon to scoop out the areas that they had been eating. You'll notice that the pawpaw on the right has the biggest chunks removed. That one, I think, had the most slugs, and among ants, roly polies, and slugs, slugs are my least preferred to eat after. 

One of these was the fifteenth pawpaw to fall this year.

A pic from the recent long weekend we took to the southern part of our state:
better the pawpaws plummeting from the trees than me from this cliff!

The Fruits of a Windstorm

This morning, Sept 8th, as I left the house for work I saw that the final raspberry of the season was ripe on the cane. I texted NJ and let her know she should come out and pick it when she got the chance.

The raspberry was gone by the time I got home. Also, while I was at work there was a big rain and windstorm, so I was expecting some pawpaws on the lawn as I walked up. The only tree that dropped any was the Shenandoah. So the Wells and Atwood are stubborn this year!

The two pawpaws that fell from the Shenandoah. The lower one is ripe (and I ate it first thing for dinner) and the upper one is not even half-ripe and I hope it ripens.

First Pawpaws of the Year!

Last year the first pawpaw fell on September 1st. But this year we kept waiting and waiting. Then on Tuesday, Sept 5th, we were backing out of the driveway to go pick some neighbors' grapes and NJ gasped in kind of a loud way. I worried she had hit someone's pet...

...but she jumped out of the car and pointed to three (count the fingers, THREE) pawpaws that had fallen from the Shenandoah cultivar.

Here I am being melodramatic--okay, deadly serious--as I smelled the aroma of the first three pawpaws of the year. (I'm very humbled to brag that if you notice some extra flush in my cheeks, it's because I had run 15 miles that morning in prep for a marathon that's coming up in October.)

As far as S was concerned, there was too much melodrama in all this. She said, "Ugh, go ahead and put on your black hat and fake mustachio and tie me to the train tracks already!" I took her point, and we took this more festive pic.

The Shenandoah has so many pawpaws this year that the branches are spreading every which way.

We went and picked the grapes (green concord I think) and made a still life composition titled Pawpaws with Green Grapes and Daily Pill Box (Containing Calcium Supplements and Multivitamins).

Then I got down to business.

At one point in my life someone showed me a video about manners that said you should never lick a knife--never, never ever. Never. But..I'm finding it harder to be a gentleman every day.

Twist!

And there it was--the first pawpaw of the year!