Ever Eat a Paw Paw?

Do you remember these lyrics?

Look for the bare necessities The simple bare necessities Forget about your worries and your strife I mean the bare necessities Old Mother Nature's recipes That brings the bare necessities of life

It is a song about living and eating wild.  Our living wild days are long gone but we can still enjoy wild food.  A fellow Bridge player has loads of wild pawpaw trees growing on her property and she kindly offered to let us gather some.  Gather we did.

I found the following information regarding pawpaws on http://pawpaw-fruit.com:

Ripe Paw Paws Gathered from the Forest Floor

"...The pawpaw is native to the Midwest, Southern and Eastern United States and adjacent southernmost Ontario, Canada, from New York west to eastern Nebraska, and south to northern Florida and eastern Texas.

The Pawpaw tree bears fruit that is large, yellowish-green with a hint of brown. It contains many large brown seeds within the edible fruit pulp. When the Pawpaw trees flower, the fruit is first green and then begins to mature in September and lasts through October. During this maturity stage, the fruit becomes yellow or brown."

Our freshly gathered pawpaws sat on the kitchen island all night and when we woke, the most heavenly sweet fragrance was wafting through the house. 

The fruit was peeled, seeded, and pureed.  One cup of the puree went into a PawPaw bread recipe which I found (along with a plethora of other pawpaw recipes) on the Kentucky State University website.

The shiny black seeds were scattered throughout the wooded portion of our acreage.  Hopefully, in four or five years we'll have the Bare Necessities growing wild - right in our own backyard.