Without Reck: Wounded Dragon cocktail

This week's theme is Chinese New Year. I'm a little late but the Super Bowl took up last week and I hadn't planned far enough ahead the week before that. For this episode I've got a bunch of Asian fruit I'm not sure what I'm going to do with.

This is a dragon fruit.

It has a tough and leathery exterior, but I soon learned dragon fruits don't like to be left on their sides. The side I left it laying down on for a few days is soft and mushy.

Yeah, it's a sick dragon.

I was wondering how I was going to cut this thing open, but my dragon fruit has a wound that makes it easy.

My knife slices right through the soft side. Who knew dragon flesh was bright white and speckled?

The other side is still tough and difficult to cut, like the artichoke I cut a few weeks ago. But I've got enough to dig the dragon flesh out.

It's got a weird flavor. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. But the discarded skin could be easily mistaken for bits of a dragon corpse at a distance.

Next up I have a pomelo. It's big.

Unlike the dragon fruit, the pomelo is easy to cut into.

It looks like a grapefruit inside.

It smells like a grapefruit too. I think I prefer the name "giant Chinese grapefruit" to "pomelo."

And it tastes exactly like a grapefruit.

Now we have some kind of Asian pear. It's not too much to look at, it's just a pear.

It cuts like a pear and tastes like a pear too.

The inside of the other one has some kind of brown mushy stuff I scraped out.

Next up is a tamarind. What is a tamarind you ask? This is a tamarind.

They're like the pea pod version of coffee beans or something? I was going to cut into them but the crack in one of them gave me an idea. I tried pulling the shell off...

AUGHHH!!!!!!!!!!! A WORM!!!!!!!!!!!!

Actually I think it's the edible part. Let's try pulling it apart...

It has these tendril-things that keep it together. The pea-things are sweet and taste like dates. The have a hard nut inside. I'll go ahead and crack the rest.

Another weird fruit to figure out what to do with.

Lastly, we have something more familiar! A coconut!

Just a regular coconut. I'll just hack off the top with one melee knife swing...

Mee.p. My knife didn't go far. Let's try again.

A little better but it's still stuck. Maybe if I try sawing?

It's still not open. Do I need a machete or something? I can try pulling off the shell around the knife cuts...

Hmm, I can cut away pieces to get it open then.

On the inside is an even tougher shell that my knife can't cut. It's like a coconut within a coconut! I'll peel away as much of the shell as I can...

So now I have this mini-coconut ball that I can't cut any further.

I've heard of cooking coconuts, maybe that's how they get the shell open. I'll try boiling.

Wait. Did the water just turn red?

Yep, it's definitely red. I'll assume that's coconut blood.

After a bit of boiling I have a hot coconut with it's blood boiled out.

But I still can't cut the thing! I can hear liquid sloshing around inside but my knife won't go any further!

In a moment of inspiration I find a tool to solve this quandrary.

There! Now I have a way to the coconut milk!

It drains too slow into the shaker so I'm going to drill some more holes.

Now it will drain nicely.

There's not very much milk in there considering all the work I had to do... Maybe it somehow osmosis-ed out into the coconut blood in the pot?

Now, I have to figure out what to do with this stuff. The easy solution when I don't know what to do is to blend! I'll have to take the tamarinds out since they have nuts.

So we have dragon fruit, pomelo, some kind of pear, and coconut milk. Let's blend!

It's a lot thinner liquid than I expected.

It's also really bitter so I'm going to add a spoonful of sugar to it.

And for this to be a proper cocktail I need alcohol. I would use rice wine to keep with the Asian theme, but I don't have any. I'll have to settl e for regular red wine.