Last weekend was ACL (for you non-Texans, that's Austin City Limits... a pretty killer music festival that Austin puts on every year), and Molly got us tickets, so we went to Austin and stayed with my lovely aunt Theresa, who happens to live there. Sadly, I had some camera issues that weekend and did not end up taking any pictures at the festival (you just have to trust me when I say that I really was there and had lots of fun... I even won a free T-shirt by collecting recyclables!).While visiting my aunt (who is my mom's sister and thus Vietnamese), I got to enjoy such Vietnamese delicacies as moon cake with hot tea and homemade pho. It was like being home. It also made me all sentimental, and I found myself reminiscing about my childhood a lot. I remembered that when I was little, my mom would often get huge, spiky specimens of whole fresh durian from the Asian market and crack those things open, flooding the whole house with the smell of sewers. The smell was almost intolerable, but I remember watching my mom (and her mom, and any Vietnamese guests we had over) absolutely devour it like Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg might devour Chex-Mix on April twentieth. I never did try the stuff, even though my mom was always trying to convince me to. I just couldn't get past the smell.Maybe culinary school has made me more open-minded about trying new things or maybe I'm just getting more masochistic with age, but I suddenly found myself eager to try the smelliest fruit in the world. And I told my aunt as much. Being the super sweet person that she is, she sent me back home to San Antonio with my very own durian with which I could stink up my apartment. I was thrilled!
Since durian season ended back in June or July, the one I brought home was frozen. I let it thaw in the fridge for a couple of days before taking a crack at it. (No pun intended.)Enrobed in yellow plastic mesh, it was truly glorious:
(A little sidenote: Before I moved into this apartment, some moron decided to apply thick layers of paint to the non-porous counters in the kitchen, so now it's peeling away in places. My counters really aren't filthy. I promise.)
(A sidenote on the side of that sidenote: Check out the groovy Ulu knife my parents brought me back from Alaska!)Anyway... this thing was bigger than my head. Seriously. And although it was odorless when frozen, as it began to thaw, I could detect that unmistakable stench more and more. Here I am giving it some love before hacking it to pieces:
I don't really recommend kissing a durian. It is, after all, covered in what can basically be described as giant, bloodthirsty thorns. Ow.
My original plan was just to saw through the thing with a serrated bread knife.
Did I mention this thing is SPIKY? It was so sharp that I couldn't steady it properly enough to saw through it, so I quickly aborted that idea and tried a different tactic: using both hands and all my strength to just shove the knife right through it.
Fortunately, I'm not strong AT ALL, and it took me about half a second to realize this was not the safest or smartest route to Durian Nirvana anyway. Abort. Retry. I was getting pretty frustrated by this point and just wanted to get the darn thing open so I could taste it already, blog about it, and go to bed. That's when I remembered..... the ethnicity advantage!!!!
Do not - I repeat - DO NOT try this at home, kids. If it weren't for my ninja skills, I could have seriously hurt myself. But since I'm half-ninja (not full ninja... my dad's white), it was all gravy.
As pictured above, after unleashing my ninja fury, I was able to make a nice dent in the durian. At this point, I decided to revert back to the sawing method, this time with protection in the form of a brightly colored oven mitt.
Ingenious. Then....*drumroll*..... the moment of truth:
Is it just me or does that look freakishly similar to the cross-sections of human bodies they have at those Body Worlds exhibits? *shudder*
I was somewhat disappointed. The smell wasn't disappointing at all - that sucker REEKED of moldy community showers and rotting corpses and overflowing toilets in truckstops whose diners serve nothing but beans and gin. It was BAD. I think it was Anthony Bourdain who said that after eating durian, "your breath will smell like you've been French-kissing your dead grandmother." Yep.
The disappointing part was that it was only partially thawed (which in hindsight probably explained why it was so ridiculously hard to open), and so it didn't look quite like the creamy, custardy fresh durian my mom used to enjoy. Ah, well. I would try it nonetheless. I managed to dig out a nice chunk that seemed to be mostly thawed.
Cautious but intrigued.
Okay, despite the look on my face in the photo above, I have to admit that it wasn't half bad. The texture was sort of mushy and slimy... kind of like old scrambled eggs that were placed in Tupperware while still hot and then stuck in the fridge to collect condensation. The taste was pretty good, though - sweet, sort of mango-esque, with a certain milkiness that assured me that had it been fresh rather than frozen and partially thawed, my durian would have been extremely creamy. Like the custardy stuff my mom loved. *sigh* So close to that experience I craved, yet so far away.Molly was then forced to sample the fruit, mainly to avoid ridicule. 
She wasn't much of a fan. It was okay, though... more durian for me!
I do hope that one day I'll get a chance to sample fresh durian. The Durian Experiment taught me that even when surrounded by the lingering smell of cat pee coupled with Amy Winehouse's unwashed laundry, I still want to experience whatever it is about this fruit that makes people go completely ape-shit over it. And I will. One day, I will.
One-pot Wonder and Durian Fruit.... Friends for life! ^_^
I also stir-fried some vegetables...
