CSA week five - Things not to do with grapefruit

I tried a couple interesting things with the grapefruit this week neither of which I thought were entirely successful, but you may like them better than I did so I thought I'd post them up for comments or at least as a warning.

First up, broiled grapefruit. I had never heard of this before I stumbled across a recipe a few days ago but the same simple recipe shows up for page after page if you Google for it so maybe it's just me. It's simple enough: just pre-slice a grapefruit half, cutting out the pithy bit in the middle and separating the flesh from the rind, top with a bit of butter and a bit of sugar (Brown sugar is popular. I tried vanilla sugar.) and maybe a bit of spice, and broil for five minutes until browned around the edges. Serve optionally topped with sliced fruit or, in one recipe I just found, a chicken liver.

It looks pretty good but I found that the broiling cooked all of the bitterness and most of the sourness out of the fruit and what's left just isn't terribly interesting. Why cook a grapefruit in a way that destroys all its grapefruitiness? If you don't like grapefruit, eat an orange. Have any of you had this and can explain the appeal to me?


And second, scallop and shrimp ceviche with grapefruit and avocado. In contrast with the first preparation, scallop, grapefruit and avocado is a pretty rare combination. I only had half a grapefruit left by now so I marinated the shrimp and scallops in lemon and lime juice before adding finely chopped cilantro, shallot and jalapeño, grated ginger and olive oil for another hour's marination. And then, just before serving, in goes the diced avocado and the grapefruit supremes. I added an ear's worth of CSA corn too which added some nice color. In this case the bitterness of the grapefruit overwhelmed and ruined a perfectly good ceviche. Maybe the author (Tina Jones, it says here) assumed I'd be using one of those new-fangled grapefruit with most of the bitter bred out or at least something less uncompromising than what we got. I'll try it again tomorrow; maybe a night in the refrigerator will mellow it out.

[Added tomorrow: No, it really didn't. I ended up tossing most of it.]