fruit

YES this is about fruit.

There are fun fruits here that people eat and make jam out of and make tarts with and they are pretty yummy.

We have a quince, or membrillo, tree growing in Zelma's garden and when the summer holidays are out kids buzz the buzzer loads asking for fruit from it. Having lived a sheltered London life my only experience of quince was of that "jelly" that slightly weird archaic people eat with cheese? [It is worth noting that I am now incredibly into eating sweet stuff with cheese. Quince jelly, any kind of jam, and honey too.]

Sadly for quince, it does tend to look a bit like apple's slightly deformed cousin...

Membrillo - quince

Haven't had one on it's own yet, which I feel sort of ashamed about, what with the tree outside... Zelma's downstairs making something out of what remains of this year's batch right now, jam I think.

There's also the custard apple, chirimoya. It goes so well with oranges that when you have them together it's called chirimoya alegre (meaning happy).

It has a soft, almost milky, taste but in a nice fresh way, and it has a really soft and melty flesh that you can kind of rip off of the fruit. I haven't had anything like it before.

Chirimoya - custard apple

There's also lúcuma, which I haven't tried actually, I know it first and foremost as an ice cream flavour [which is delish]. They sell it everywhere. Now looking at the photo I'm pretty sure I haven't seen them for sale as fruit in as many places as I have seen it frozen and in a tub next to Carte D'or.

Lúcuma - eggfruit (apparently?)

Another real ice cream fave is mora crema, mora being blackberry.

They also have non-furry peaches, and the very flavoursome durazno plátano (literally banana peach?), which are smaller peaches with a more white and pink colour scheme going on, rather than, well, peach. A favourite of Zelma's.

Durazno plátano

Ary and Danny have nisperos in their garden - loquats. The skins can be a little bit sharp so some peel them off before eating them. The stones are pretty big, really smooth and hard. The dogs eat them loads, sometimes a bit too much...

Nispero - loquat

Anyhow. That was a post about fruit. I doubt I shall do one ever again.