I'd just like to take a moment out of my day to talk about the glory of fruit and the beauty of a lunch-box.

Erinn recently introduced me to the delicious pummelo, a large bigger-than-a-grapefruit-sized yellow-green beast of a citrus fruit that has captivated me like none other.

As Erinn so aptly puts it, "The pummelo tastes like what you'd think flowers should taste like." It's a very light taste, but what makes it so much fun is the extreme effort that it takes to actually cut it and eat it. After looking at some of these images of cut pummelos, I feel like we might have been going about it the wrong way.

Here's how we were peeling and eating it.

1. Cut a small X into the top of the pummelo's skin to give you a place to start peeling.
2. Peel the 1-2 inch thick skin off all the way around with your hands until what you are holding remotely resembles a snowball made of pulp and membranes.
3. Randomly stick your knife into the pummelo and attempt to seperate it into two halves.
4. Peel back the membranes that hold the actual edible fruit bits apart deep within the pummelo.
5. Pick apart and eat as if you were a monkey grooming another monkey.

As you can guess, this method gets quite messy pretty fast. In about 1 minute on the internet googling "pummelo" I came across this. The proper way to peel and eat a pummelo. Even though, somehow, I am the worst out of the group at peeling the pummelo in our own "special" way, I thought our makeshift pummelo peeling method seemed a bit dicey. Maybe we will resolve to try a more traditional method the next time a pummelo rolls into Erinn's apartment.

Let us now turn to the opposite side of the citrus spectrum in terms of size. This morning, while at the Newark Natrual Foods Co-Op buying toothpaste, I stumbled upon a fruit that I feel some sort of strange connection with, dating back to before I can remember. I, for some reason, have always loved kumquats, the tiny bite-size relatives of the orange.

These things are just so much fun to eat, mostly because, unlike the fucking crazy 2 inch thick skin of the pummelo, you can just eat it whole: skin and all. You have to spit out the pesky seeds, but part of me greatly prefers the easy access style of the kumquat.

The weird part is that for the life of me, I can't remember where I developed my affinity for kumquats. I think it was from some children's song, or television show; some lost relic of my childhood that's been pushed out by all the mindless online gaming and alcohol that I've taken in over the years. I hope that I can eventually put my finger on exactly what sparked my kumquat obsession. I can accurately pinpoint when I stopped eating kumquats in my childhood; it most likely has something to do with me eating them in lower/middle school, when kids giggled uncontrollably when you said stuff like "do it" and "come here". I'm sure the word "kumquat" drew some fire, and I'm sure I stopped bringing them into school in order to quell the harassment.

All this talk of food is particularly relevant because I have just acquired a new lunchbox. Having recently moved out, I decided that I needed a good way to save money at work by bringing food in from home, so I settled on this kickass bento style lunch-box thing. It has 4 bowls that stack up inside a thermos-thingy, and it keeps your food warm/cold for hours.

Technically it's called:

Zojirushi Mr. Bento Stainless-Steel lined Lunch Jar

I have had good luck with it so far. It's kept noodles, rice, and chili warm, and it's kept fresh veggies fresh all day. Yay. Here's a picture of my first time using it at work: