Keen on Fruit

The verdict is in. I knew it in one bite. I have now decided on my favorite fruit.

Once upon a time Facebook invited me to make a quiz about myself so that my Facebook Friends™ could consider how well they know me. Here's one of the questions I made up:

I have some issues with:
a. ants
b. driving
c. fruit
d. the Dutch
e. the ZIP code system

I must be keeping my fruit problems to myself because not many guessed that "c" was the correct answer. Here's the deal: if it were left to me, I'd eat fruit about as often as I eat cake--maybe 4 times a year. I LOVE cake. And fruit seems similarly exotic. It's not something you'd eat every day, good heavens! Is this the expression of some northern European gene? I feel like I spent a previous lifetime on some windswept sheep-laden island where all we ate was sheep products and kale and seafood and potatoes and more sheep products. Fruit is just... not my type.

Also, fruit is cold and not usually covered with melted cheese, so there's two more strikes against it.

An exception to my fruit problem is that when I was pregnant I craved and consumed fruit all the time. My body-mind seemed willing to waive the usual hesitation about squishy fruit so as to provide vitamins or something to my baby. Is there more to this fruit thing, I wondered? Could it be... good for me?

I made a resolution. I would Eat More Fruit. Maybe even every day. (Sometimes.) And maybe I would get to LIKE fruit. Here are my findings so far:

Strawberries: very yummy. They are a good size for getting several bites in, a nice texture, and not too seedy. However, their natural season in Vermont seems to be about 3 weeks long, which is not really enough to form a steady relationship.

Blueberries: nice, but there is something a little snail-like about their insides. Blueberry flavor is not a big winner with my taste buds. They seem a little insipid, frankly, plus they are covered with a tough little skin.

Raspberries: frontrunner for my favorite fruit. I LOVE the flavor, also the color. But the seedy texture is a little annoying, and they are also very small. If there was a large seedless raspberry the size of an apple, it would get my vote.

Apples: too cold and too crunchy for my taste. The amount of chewing you have to do makes them practically a vegetable--that's a whole 'nother blog post. When apples are baked and warm (with melted cheese!) that's another story, but I'm trying to love a fresh fruit here.

Peaches! I LOVE PEACHES. A free-stone peach that just melts in my mouth and drips down my arm and takes many bites to finish is my fruit perfection. There's enough of it to really worship (not gone in a gulp like a little berry). A peach is an afternoon picnic in France, pulled from a shiny paper bag where it was nestled with sister peaches. It's a walk in a summer meadow dappled by sun and shade, listening to the cicadas chainsawing in the trees and the crickets bleating earnestly among the grasses. It's a simple breakfast on a cool misty morning when others are sleeping and the pure blue day is still waiting for the sun to burn off the fog. It's a tart, it's a cobbler, it's for cereal, yogurt, pie, it's this summer's To Grill Item. It's generous yet silky yet meaty. It's a peach.