Well, we were right about our dragon fruit all ripening at the same time. In the past few days we’ve picked 60 or so of the purple and white ones, and probably thrown away 20 that the birds got to. There are still a bunch more on the plants, some will be ready in another week, and others might take another month. They are delicious just the way they are, but It’s time to start looking up some more dragon fruit recipes. Of course, we will only be using the purple one in the recipes, the white ones just wouldn’t be as much fun.

Since the dragon fruit is in abundance right now, it’s time to enjoy it as much as possible. The other night Kelley made some Pollo Fundidos for dinner, and what goes better with Mexican food than Margaritas? So dragon fruit margaritas it was. They were just like a regular margarita, but a little fruitier and a beautiful purple color.

We found an interesting recipe for dragon fruit chocolate chip cookies. Since we grow dragon fruit and chocolate, this sounded like something we needed to try. The dough was a bright purple color with big chunks of dark chocolate mixed in it. By using the dragon fruit as a binder, the recipe needed no eggs. They turned out soft and delicious. The interesting thing was that after a day or so, the cookies lost their purple color.

We’ve been wanting to try smoked cream cheese because everyone says how good it is. There are two thoughts on how to make it, either sweet or savory, so we did one of each. The sweet one we coated with cinnamon, sugar, and granulated honey. After it came out of the smoker, we topped it with some dragon fruit puree and then we used graham crackers to scoop it up. It tasted like a cheesecake with a slight smoky flavor,

For the savory one, we coated it with a cajun type bbq rub. After a couple hours in the smoker with some cherry wood, it was ready to try. We used Ritz crackers for this one, and it was delicious. They were both so different from each other and each delicious in their own way. If you are looking for a different appetizer for your next get-together, you might want to try this. It only takes a couple hours in the smoker, and your flavor choices are unlimited.

Kelley had made a chicken pot pie and she had some crust leftover. So one morning for breakfast we took some of our sweet smoked cream cheese with the dragon fruit preserve and stirred it together. Then topped it onto some of that pastry dough. This might have even been better than just scooping it up with graham crackers.

We still had a few sheets of our dehydrated dragon fruit left that we did a while back. Since we’d just processed another batch of chocolate, we thought we might as well make some more of these delicious candies. We’ve made a bunch of different types of candies with our home-grown chocolates, but this is one of my favorites. Deep dark chocolate with a sweet, chewy dragon fruit filling – who wouldn’t love that!

Since we had a rainy weekend, we decided to make some more chocolates. We ended up molding some just plain dark chocolates as well as a couple more that were a little more “fancy”. The first one was chocolate crunch bars. The store didn’t have any plain Rice Krispies, but we did find some chocolate ones. And since they were going to be covered in chocolate we didn’t see a problem with that. The next ones were caramel-filled sea salt dark chocolates. These were a little more time consuming to make. We had to put a little chocolate on the mold and coat the sides with chocolate so that the filling wouldn’t run out. After that, we piped in caramel and topped with more chocolate. Some of the “fancy” chocolates we make are a lot more time consuming, but usually very worth it.

Did you know? If you take a can of sweetened condensed milk and take the label off and simmer it for 3 hours, you get a rich caramel (dulce de leche). We haven’t personally tried this because they sell it already done in the grocery stores here. It comes in a condensed milk can with a black-and-white printed label on it, like somebody made it at their house. Try making some next time, or if you’re down here pick up a can. Stop wasting money on name brand caramel sauces, this is the way to go, and it’s delicious!

Last month we brought back a bunch of fish from Placencia and it was time to have some sashimi. We got out some small packs of Snapper, Yellow Jack, and Barracuda, which are all great for sashimi. Kelley got it all sliced thin and chilled while I got the soy and wasabi ready. To go along with this we needed a cold beverage. A while back our friend left us some homemade limoncello. So I looked up some drink recipes, and guess what? There was a recipe for a Dragon Fruit Limoncello Spritzer. The drink was sweet and sour, and we thought it went well with the sashimi.

When you have an abundance of things growing, it’s fun to experiment with them and make something totally different. We’ve made avocado brownies, mango cobbler, custard apple ice cream, homemade peanut butter, everything we could think of with bananas, grilled rum-soaked pineapples, more things with chocolate than you can imagine, and a few things with dragon fruit. A lot of the different recipes we tried turned out great and we’ll make them again. Of course, there were a few that were just okay, but we think those will be one time recipes.