Prior to moving to Cape Town I had only ever eaten passionfruit once before, at great expense, while living in the London. I chanced upon these purple piquant wonders in an up-market Food Hall and I just had to know what passionfruit really tasted like. At £1.50 a fruit my knees buckled at the price, but I just had to know. Gripped by curiosity, I dug deep and bought two. At the time it was money I could ill-afford to spend, especially on luxury fruit, but to my mind it was money well spent! Eating my first passionfruit was a moment my taste buds will never forget, it was as if they had awoken for the first time. In a word: electric.
So it was with much excitement that I discovered that my new garden came with its very own granadilla (passionfruit) plant. I tried to grow one in my old garden in Cape Town but without much success. So, our expectations were high as we eagerly waited the start of the fruiting season. I had hoped to get a couple of fruit a day, enough for the two of us to enjoy as a daily tangy treat. Little did I know what a prolific season awaited us, within weeks it began to rain granadillas! At the peak of the season, we were collecting between 10 and 15 granadillas a day and I soon found myself with a glut of these purple delights. It didn’t take long before I had run out of ideas of what to do with them.
With my granadillas mounting, I trawled through my cookbooks for ideas and found a recipe in Nigella’s “How to be a Domestic Goddess”. It was prefect, it combined two of my favourite things; curd and passionfruit! I had never tried passionfruit curd before, but being an avid childhood fan of the lemon variety, I figured “Why not?”. The curd took a while to make, but the results were sensational. Not since my first taste of passionfruit had my taste buds experienced such a wake up call. These days they may not cost me a dime, but made into a curd, passionfruit still makes me curl my toes and roll my eyes in delight. After all these years, it still tastes electric.
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