BIG Pawpaws

Over the past two days, we've been having some pawpaws fall that are as big as "heck" (to draw on a term that former President Obama used during a recent and welcome speech). The biggest are tumbling from the KSU-Atwood. Yesterday we drove up to the house after going and getting some burgers, and we found these two monsters in the grass. S got a hold of them and started posing. 

Then NJ took them from S and wanted to start posing too.

We've got several POH (pawpaws on hand) right now, all labeled so we know what we're getting when we cut them open (labeled or not, I always know what we're getting after we cut them open, since it's easy to tell the different cultivars apart on the inside). These three pics are of the POH but also snapshots of where we're at in terms of how many fruits from which tree. (A little outdated now, though, since I just went outside at 10:15 pm and found two more big Shenandoah pawpaws on the ground).

This is kind of extra-curricular for me to be mentioning on Expatriate Pawpaw, but last week NJ and I drove about 45 minutes to our "little sister" town up north and saw the Smashing Pumpkins on their reunion tour. You can see Billy Corgan and James Iha up in front and then Jimmy Chamberlin is behind the drums. Still missing (literally, I'm missing) D'Arcy Wretzky on bass. (There's a pawpaw-related tie-in, don't worry.)

One of the fun things about the show was that we had pretty decent seats for seeing the band members on stage, and then behind Billy and the band, they had a lot of big baroque projections on the screens. At one point, it looked like (as you'll see on the left) the steampunk projection of Billy had three big pawpaws growing up from behind his head.

But I zoomed in and it was just five cobras. Heck.

A New Image for Expatriate Pawpaw

This pic is the one I've been using for the cover image of Expatriate Pawpaw since August 2015.  But this year I got an email from a student at a nearby university and he was wondering if I would trade a pawpaw for something, maybe some acorns that had been boiled several times. But then he said that even after boiling, they still weren't very good. I wasn't surprised to hear this, since I myself once tried boiling a bunch of acorns several times, unsuccessfully hoping to drive away their astringency. Based on that experience, I would have given him a pawpaw for not giving me any acorns. But what I admire about his acorn gambit is that we're an elite few in the twenty-first century who have been dedicated enough to eating unconventional plant-matter that we've even tried boiling acorns. So in the end, he had me at "boiled acorns," and we simply agreed to meet and I handed him the pawpaw, which he carried home, by his own report, "like it was the last egg for some endangered species." He ate it this morning, reporting by email: "It definitely had a tropical taste, but I'm thinking it might not have been the best one because I had read some descriptions of it as a mango/banana, which are both pretty sweet, but it was pretty mild (sweeter than an avocado, but in the same realm)." He's right--I bet it wasn't the best. I gave him a Shenandoah pawpaw, and though usually this is my favorite cultivar, this year it's producing a handful of insipid pawpaws along side its normal fruit fireworks. (We ate two small insipid pawpaws and one roman candle pawpaw this evening, for instance.) 

In return for the pawpaw, sub-par though it may have been, he emailed me a design, which he was too politick to suggested I ought to use as the front page image for my blog, but which was so clearly based on the former front page image that I couldn't help but think that I definitely should. So with his permission, I'm now using it, and very happy about it. I'm hoping to give him a better pawpaw later this month.