It's the week I wait for all year. Pawpaws — the largest fruit native to North America, custard-textured, tasting like banana crossed with mango — are dropping in the Chicago-area floodplains right now, and almost no one knows.

What I'm reading

• The pawpaw, explained — Kentucky State runs the country's pawpaw research program. Everything you want to know about the fruit nobody at the farmers market has heard of.
• How to find a pawpaw patch — they grow in clonal thickets in rich bottomland, often near rivers. The drooping tropical-looking leaves give them away even before the fruit.
• Why pawpaws never went commercial — they bruise if you look at them and last days, not weeks. Which is exactly why foraging is the only real way to eat them.

Field note

A patch along the North Branch, leaves already yellowing, a dozen ripe pawpaws in the leaf litter under one tree. Ate one standing there, spitting out the big brown seeds like a kid. If you try one forage this fall, make it this. The window is two weeks, maybe three.

— Jenna