Persimmon Hunting

As the leaves have fallen, the abundant harvest season is coming to a close, but in multiple trees around my neighborhood I noticed a bright orange fruit left dangling from tree branches even after all the trees leaves moved on.  I had no clue what kind of tree these were, but with a little research I figured out that I was looking at persimmons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persimmon

I immediately wanted to knock on doors and gather in the persimmon harvest, but my wife was adamant that I finish the large variety of non-quite complete projects that were cluttering up the pantry. 

A week later I had some things complete when my brother stopped by.  We took the two boys out for a jaunt through the neighborhood to get hot chocolate and coffee, and among other things I mentioned my persimmon obsession.  It was too early to knock on doors to ask permission to pick any, but my brother and I surveyed the abundant supply through the neighborhood. 

Persistence is the key!  Around the corner we found a persimmon tree in a mortgage company parking lot.  It was fairly small, about 10' tall, with about 50 persimmons hanging off the otherwise bare branches.  Across the alleyway we could see a 50' persimmon tree in someone's backyard with tons of fruit hanging from the branches, so we assumed that at some point this small tree had been seeded from that larger tree.  Either way, we knocked on the door to the business, but no one was there.  These were the bell shaped persimmons, versus the pumpkin shaped persimmons we saw in other areas.  As fruit was falling to the ground and rotting, we decided to help out their landscapers and collected a couple of the persimmons from the lower branches. 

The taste was interesting - very sweet and tangy, but immediately followed by the dry mouth astringent  taste.  Almost like an aftertaste, but it makes your mouth pucker up.  Definitely not good for eating in the raw form!

So what to do with persimmons that you cannot eat raw?  I had to turn to the internet and found several recipes for persimmon bread, persimmon pudding, and persimmon pie, but I settled on making persimmon cookies.  You can never have too many cookies around over the holidays!

Persimmon Cookie Recipe