I love fruit, and trying out new types of fruit. So when I saw kumquats on the shelf at my local grocery store, I just had to try the little fruits out! I took a small bag of the little fruits home.

I’ve never had kumquats before. Before I saw the package on the shelf, I’m not sure I could have told you what a kumquat looked like.

So, first off, a bit about the kumquat – it is a citrus fruit, about the size of a grape. It looks and tastes a bit like a tiny orange. The whole fruit is edible, including the rind. In fact, the rind is the best part! The pulp of the fruit is sour like a lemon, and the rind tastes like a sweet orange

I ate a few of the little citris fruits raw. I just washed them off, and ate the whole fruit.

Unfortunately, kumquats have seeds. And, as I said, the inside is a bit sour. So I’m not overly pleased with the raw kumquat experience.

However, it turns out that you can also cook up kumquats and turn them into a nice sort of marmalade. So I chopped the rest of the little fruits in half, de-seeded them, and then cooked them up with sugar and water. They made a rather decent marmalade! I even put it on a cake.

I’ve saved the seeds in the hopes that I can grow myself a little kumquat tree. I won’t be able to plant it outside, of course. Kumquats are fairly cold hardy citrus trees, but they can’t survive cold Illinois winters! But with luck I should be able to sprout a few and keep them in pots indoors like my lemon trees.