07/19/2026
San Diego County is one of my favorite places to forage and has been for a decade. The variety of flavors and usefulness of their common landscaping plants is completely unheralded in their mainstream culture and restaurant scene. There is very little foraging done in SD despite the immense bounty and that really highlights how lucky we are to have such a rich and thriving foraging culture here in Minnesota.
Queen Palm (Syagrus romanzoffiana) lines many city streets in SD county and drops immense quantities of these beautiful orange fruits The fruit is a thin fibrous flesh surrounding essentially a mini coconut. The flavor of the orange flesh is variable and ranges from tropical apricot smooth, to jammy american persimmon, to sweet pumpkin. Sometimes even a biscuity caramel. I feel like an orangutan mouthing off the pulpy fiber and lazily chewing to extract the luscious flavor.
Cracking open the mini coconut reveals coconut meat. I cracked these open and thought I'd be able to extract a thin layer of oil after boiling, settling, and chilling, but I wasn't able to. These failed experiments are often not shown on polished social media where we usually display our victories, but you'll have many of them in your foraging journey. I would try again with more 20x more seeds, pulverized more, and play with the extraction method.
I did end up with a delightful orange drink that tasted like chocolate milk.
