THINK FRUIT

For the past couple of weeks, the inner monologue (IM) has been giving me the message "think fruit". Ok, mmmn. done. Thought about fruit.

When I think about fruit, I mostly think about the lousy fruit I have purchased lately. I bought a beautiful bag of red delicious apples at Costco, pretty enough to photograph. They were also dry as dirt and tasteless. Last year, I bought a gorgeous crate of peaches, that were mealy, with no tase, also at Costco. You would think I would give up on Costco, but no, again today, thinking fruit, I bought strawberries, bananas and watermelon, also at Costco. I'm giving them another chance. I just tried the strawberries and they are delish! Hurray!

Thinking about fruit, brings me back to my childhood. We spent the summers at my Grandmother Laila's in Seattle. Staying with Grandma was a culinary treat, not that I appreciated it then. Her backyard garden had raspberries, apples and grapes. Anytime we kids felt like it we could pick an apple off a tree or grapes from a vine, or take a bucket and pick wild blackberries or the delicate raspberries. Yum.

When I was in grade school in Lakewood, I used to walk around the block and take fruit from the kumquat or pomegranate trees on neighbor's property, maybe even steal a few carob pods. I don't remember getting "shooed" away or anybody calling the police on us "hoodlums"

In Westminster, we had apricot and plum trees to pick fruit from. My mother took all us kids "gleaning"at strawberry fields that were being plowed under, and we, of course, could eat ourselves silly, and mom got free labor for the pies or jams she made.

I don't expect fruit from the store to taste as fresh as hand-picked from the tree or vine, but does it have to be so tasteless, mealy, and lousy? How about expense? It's mind boggling how expensive fruit is. No wonder, it's easier to eat junk food, cheaper by far.

Thinking fruit, I know I need to get back to the source. The tree or the vine. This is Southern California, and I need to seek out the sources, take a trip to the farmers markets, or even to Julian for the apples. When something as delicious as fruit, gets trucked miles, or smashed up into boring 'fruit bars", or sprayed to death, it's easy to get bitter. Packed into cans, with high sugar, or frozen, it ain't the same folks.

So, that's my goal. I don't think I will have a berry patch or apricot tree anytime soon, so I need to seek out fruit from the source, locally grown, because it is just plain better than the stuff in the supers.