Enjoying the bounty of feijoas (pineapple guavas) – muffins, smoothies and more

Sing along with me, to the tune of “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?”

“What do we do with too many feijoas,
What do we do with too many feijoas,
What do we do with too many feijoas,
In the month of April?”

Ok, enough silliness. Seriously, at this time of time of year, everybody with a feijoa tree is frantically trying to give away bags of them, as you just can’t eat them fast enough.

If you don’t even know what they are, see this recent post from @jockey

Tonight I’ve made a batch of feijoa muffins – a few to eat fresh and the rest into the freezer – but what else are they good for?

Enjoy them raw

• Fresh fruit - cut them in half and eat the middle with a spoon
• Mix them into your favourite breakfast cereal
• Eat them with yoghurt
• Make a smoothie – here’s my Feijoa, pear and avocado smoothie recipe from this time last year or I found this Superfood smoothie from @faisalali734
• Before the weather gets too cold, enjoy feijoa icecream. Here’s a recipe for Instant Feijoa and banana ice cream, from NZ’s Nadia Lim or this more traditional ice cream recipe from NZ site FoodLovers

Cook them

• Baking. You could take pretty much any recipe for banana cake or banana muffins and replace the banana with feijoas. Though they’re not as sweet, so you might need a little bit more sweetener.
• Pudding! Take your favourite apple crumble or apple sponge recipe and substitute feijoa for about half of the apple.

Preserve them for the winter

• Freeze them whole for smoothies or puddings later in the year. Our easy way to store them for winter is to just throw a bag of them whole into the freezer. You can’t defrost them and eat them like you would a fresh one, as the texture isn’t that great. But they’re excellent for smoothies, or also to spice up an apple crumble or pudding. To use, just take a couple of frozen feijoas out of the freezer and put them in a bowl of hot water for about two minutes. The green outer skin can be easily peeled off using a knife or peeler, and the still frozen inner flesh can be chopped up with a sharp knife, and go straight into your blender.
• @andysantics48 isn’t as lazy as me, and she scoops the middles out, and freezes just the flesh in small containers
• She also bottles them – let’s ask her for the recipe!
• Jam, chutney or relish – we gave a bag to someone the other day, and she asked if she could make jam. She doesn’t have internet herself, but it was the work of seconds to find a recipe and print it out for her. Here’s a selection of jam, chutney and relish recipes on NZ website Bite

If they’re not very nice or you’ve can’t be faffed any more

• @andysantics48 feeds them to the pigs!

Read about her pigs here

Right, onto the baking.

I actually have a confession to make – I don’t like feijoas very much. That’s one of the reasons it’s hard to get rid of the surplus. @sift666 can’t eat them all himself. I don’t even make feijoa muffins very often. But I’ve successfully used them in two of my starch free recipes.

Here’s a recipe using coconut and almond flours, which I’ve previously posted as a Paleo Easter bun version. For another option, you could leave out the dried fruit and spices, and maybe stir in some chopped apple or pear for some texture.

Tonight I adapted my Banana Cashew muffin recipe by replacing the banana with feijoa and adding a little bit more sweetener. It took 6 large feijoas to make 2 cups. You can see that they’re starting to go a little brown, so I wanted to use them up while they were still ok.

Here’s one of them chopped up, if you haven’t seen inside them before:

And here’s how they turned out. I even had a bit myself and enjoyed it!

Thanks for reading

Images by myself or @sift666, unless otherwise stated.

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