Oct 17 - Photo a Day - Fruit

The Saddest Drawer

Pssst... Don't Forget the Fruit

Dragonfruit, bananas, melon, peaches, kiwi, plums, cherries... There are so many delectable fruits in the world, and so few that those in this household eat.

Our produce drawer regularly looks like this. It is often the place where fruit (and sometimes tofu) goes to mush. Usually lemons and limes are cut for adding to water, beer, guacamole, or fish, but many times the last slices grow a slimy, white mould before we return to them.

We love the taste and crunch of apples, but if you look closely, you'll see that both the red- and golden delicious (probably imported from Eastern Washington) are covered in weeks-old wrinkles, and are undoubtedly mealy inside. The sunken-in pomegranate under last weekend's grapes is likely filled with dried kernels that, far from being a delicious juice ingredient, may soon masquerade as a handle-less maraca.

Why do we do this to these fabulous fruits? Waste makes me nuts, and I'm famous (at least with Pierre) for my leftover-kichen-sink-glop dinners. But many of the tender, sweet, vitamin- and mineral-rich fruits that come to our house tend to wither away rather than be crunched, blended, juiced, or savoured. (I'm hoping, in case you didn't know, that confessing this weakness in our dietary habits will help us change our careless ways.)

The one fruit family whose photograph could probably never be captured here is berries. There hasn't been a berry picked that is safe in our house. Sometimes a basket of blue-, straw-, black- or rasp-berries lasts a full twenty-four hours. More often they make their way into that night's dessert bowl and disappear in a hundred bursts of dazzling flavour.

If you have any motivating ideas that could save the inhabitants of our produce drawer from an extended, non-nutritive death, please feel free to pass them on. For now though, I think I hear that last honeycrisp apple whispering my name.