The Fruit processor

“Morning”

“Morning”

“What are you making?”

“A strawberry smoothie. Want some?”

“I don’t get you. Why do you take perfectly good fruit and turn it into mush?”

“I like it”

“Why don’t you just eat the fruit…there’s nothing wrong with it!”

“I’m lazy.”

My former roommate Sasha never understood why I like making smoothies. Being the good Indian boy he is, he never thought twice about throwing 5 dollars worth of yogurt into the blender to make Lassi, but he never empathized with my desire to ingest fruit without chewing it first.

I have to admit that Sasha is right…most of the time I take perfectly normal fruit and subject it to the blades of my Osterizer. The only time when I actually used fruit in dubious states was when I lived in Japan. Fruits and vegetables were really expensive and my local grocer would sell me soon-to-be-rotten fruit at a discount. I’d then throw it in the blender with yogurt and honey to mask whatever was wrong with it. The grocer also unloaded weird things on me. I once walked away with 200 overtly ripe tiny bananas for 5 bucks?!

Yesterday I bought discounted cherries with every intention of having them for breakfast without passing them through the blender first. However, I ended up having too many Mojitos and I forgot to take the cherries out of my backpack when I got home. When I re-discovered them today morning, there was some dubious juice oozing out of the bag.

My first instinct was to throw them in the blender with yogurt and honey, but I held back and decided to cook them instead.

Pitting cherries is boring. It is far more entertaining to spit the seeds at anyone within reach. I started to pit the cherries in a calm and civilized manner with a knife, trying to carefully separate the seeds from the flesh. Bah…it is far more efficient to squeeze them with your hands, get the seed out, and avoid spraying cherry juice all over. I almost didn’t spray any juice…

I added ginger, orange segments and lots of sugar, and turned them into a spread. Tasted good–not a single trace of the fermenting juice they were starting to ooze.

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Is that what I think it is?

Oh yeah! Wild blackberry bushes growing in Vancouver.

I spent more than an hour eating every ripe blackberry within reach….mmm

Blackberry hedonism