#SOL19 Day 2: Popcorn and Dragonfruit

If there’s still popcorn in the bucket, it’s hard for me to stop eating it. The only reason I was able to show any restraint was that it really was my daughter’s popcorn and I was the one sharing with her. She said I could share her drink, too, but blue raspberry Icee is definitely more her thing than mine.

So, as you can probably guess, by the end of the movie, I was feeling pretty thirsty. I sucked down a lot of chilled water from the drinking fountain before heading out to the car, but I still needed something different to counter the effect of all that salt. I couldn’t shake the idea that something from the Starbucks Refresher menu would do the trick.

I ended up deciding on the Mango Dragonfruit Refresher, which, to me, is a huge step up from blue raspberry Icee. It’s such a delicious chilled, fruity drink. The real fun is using the straw to pull out the dragonfruit chunks and eat those after the drink is gone. They’re a little sweet and, if they don’t sit in the drink too long, a little crunchy. The pieces in my drink kind of look like a mix of a raspberry and a kiwi. Raspberry because of the color and how delicate the fruit is; kiwi because of the tiny, black seeds throughout the pieces. That got me thinking that I have no idea what an actual dragonfruit looks like. So, off to do a little research and writing…

It turns out that dragonfruit, also known as pitahaya, is the fruit of a variety of cactus. It’s described as a cross between a pear and a kiwi. If the skin is pink or yellow, the flesh of the fruit is white, but there is also a variety of dragonfruit with red skin and red flesh, which is probably the variety that Starbucks uses.

Now I need to see if any of our grocery stores or fruit markets sell dragonfruit!

By _e.t – https://www.flickr.com/photos/45688285@N00/3055187/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=323119;

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pitaya_cross_section_ed2.jpg#/media/File:Pitaya_cross_section_ed2.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yellow_dragon_fruit_(50831s).jpg#/media/File:Yellow_dragon_fruit_(50831s).jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hylocereus_polyrhizus.jpg#/media/File:Hylocereus_polyrhizus.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pitaya_Colors.jpg#/media/File:Pitaya_Colors.jpg