Sunday Science – What is this?

Every once in a while, Tornado Dad likes to throw a challenge our way. He knows that I’m pretty tenacious in my quest for knowledge and that if something exists in Google, I can probably find it. In that vein, he brought us home a mystery piece of fruit that was given to him by a co-worker. I was told that I needed to eat it soon or that it would rot. Tornado Boy and I set off on our quest. Here’s a picture of what he brought us:

The fruit was about an inch and a half across and had a somewhat tough, spiny skin on it. The color was changing from green to reddish. It had a bit of a sweet odor when we sniffed it. We sliced it open and peeled it. The skin was thinner than I had expected with an iridescent sheen on the inside.

Tornado Boy and I both took a taste. It was sweet, but it had sort of a weird gelatinous consistency. I’m wondering, based on our research if it wasn’t quite fully ripe yet. Inside of the flesh was a smooth, dark brown fairly large seed. We went to work based on our observations and concluded that what we had was a Lychee fruit. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never had one before. The fruits are native to southeast Asia, so I’m tempted to go down to our local Asian market and see if I can find some fresh ones there.

I’m curious if any of my readers have eaten these before. If so, do you eat them plain or put them in a recipe of some sort?

Thanks to Tornado Dad for our fun challenge.

For more fun science lessons and activities, check out Ticia’s Science Sunday post at Adventures in Mommydom!

The third red lychee image is from the Fresh Plaza Website.