Freshly picked fruit…

Life has been quite busy, and my mind has been elsewhere, but I just had a ‘stop & smell the roses moment’.

I called a friend last Saturday to invite her over for dinner.  She had family from out of town visiting, so she declined, but pushed me to come by to raid the trees in her yard. There are 3 Italian prunes, a Bartlett pear and a couple of apple trees, and she’s just too tired overwhelmed to do anything with them.   I stopped by the next day with a market basket and spent 20 minutes picking

Oh. My. God.

We’ve been eating the plums a few at a time all week.   They’re insanely flavorful, juicy & sweet, but so much more than just sweet.   These are all organic and SO much more delectable than what’s in the market.  Now I live in farm country, & obviously this stuff grows here commercially, but I can’t remember enjoying plums so much.   There are subtle flavor notes beyond the sweetness & maybe it’s my imagination, but I don’t remember this degree of flavortown, to quote Guy Fieri, who’s both local & a native son, in anything I buy at the market.  

Well the pears were rock hard when I picked them.  I just had my first one. Sweet! Floral! Subtle, yet complex.   I’m talking about a piece of fruit, not a glass of wine. Just like the plums, there were delicately delicious undertones of flavor, I just don’t find in commercially farmed fruit.   I had initially planned to make pear butter, but now I need to rethink that.   I don’t want to hide that fresh complexity.  Won’t do the pears justice.