Grilled Apricots

Apricots grill nicely, because even a lot of heat and smoke won’t overwhelm their natural tanginess. And they have enough moisture that you can’t really burn them.

I put them right over the coals, at a low to medium heat, for a few minutes, turning once. I usually sprinkle a bit of brown sugar over them first. The sugar will burn, but that’s part of the flavor profile.

Grilling an apricot even has the ability to turn a mediocre grocery store apricot into something truly special!

The perfect accompaniment is a chilled glass of Tokaji desser wine. Tokaji is the famous dessert wine of Hungary, with noble rot concentrating the sweet tanginess of the grapes and producing distinct apricot notes with a little bit of herbal undertone.

It is the perfect late spring/early summer dessert for a grilled meal.

eating fruit and the evolution of intelligence

This news story about chimps and fruit is, well, profound.

Chimpanzees remember the exact location of all their favourite fruit trees. Their spatial memory is so precise that they can find a single tree among more than 12,000 others within a patch of forest, primatologists have found….Acquiring such an ability may have helped drive the evolution of sophisticated primate brains.

Emmanuelle Normand and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany teamed up with Simone Ban of the University of Cocody in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire to investigate the spatial memory of chimpanzees in the wild.

"We were amazed by the apparent easiness by which chimpanzees discover highly productive fruit trees. Or how after being separated from other group members for hours or days, they could join each other silently at a large fruit tree, like if they would have had an appointment at this place," says Normand.

Remarkably, as well as remembering the location of their favourite trees, the chimps also recalled when each tree would be in season, producing the most fruit. They would then often walk further to reach these more bountiful trees rather than make a shorter journey to a less productive one.

I can relate to this. I still remember the exact location and appearance of fruit trees I ate from decades ago. Is that my chimp brain at work? Apparently so:

In one respect, it is not surprising that chimpanzees have developed an
outstanding ability to navigate their home range, says Normand.

One idea, known as the 'ecological hypothesis' proposes that the need to remember
and find food resources, such as fruit trees, could have driven the evolution of
primate brains. In particular, it says that a preference for fruit eating, or frugivory, would select for intelligence compared to leaf-eating, or foliovory.

"That's because the distribution of fruits is more scattered, less predictable and fruits can be more difficult to manipulate than leaves, the nut cracking by Ta chimpanzees being an extreme example," says Normand.

Compared to monkeys, chimpanzees live in larger territories and are highly frugivorous, suggesting that developing an outstanding ability to navigate to fruit trees could have a key driver in the evolution of ape intelligence.

Frugivory! What a word! Maybe I’ll have to change the name of this blog.

And it sure is nice to know that eating fruit made us all smarter.

Source:
Chimps mentally map fruit trees, by Matt Walker
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8086000/8086246.stm

mango season

A nice feature of Los Angeles is the many enterprising fruit sellers positioned around the neighborhoods:

At this time of year they sell good mangos. Not those softball sized green and red things that usually aren’t as good as you think they should be, and seem to have no season. I’m referring to the smaller, yellow, sort of paisley-shaped flattish mangos that are both seasonal and delicious:



They are usually called manila mangos, but they go by many other names too. And although the aren’t exactly local, they really don’t travel too far compared to many other fruits. The ones we get in L.A. often come from the Ciudad Obregon region of Sonora Desert long the Gulf of California, several hundred miles away.

They are the best mangos, but you kind of have to search them out. If you buy them by the case when they’re in season they are not too expensive.

And the boxes have useful info, too. Check this one out:

exotic European fruit

There is a springtime fruit that almost every European knows but few Americans know, which is surprising since the climates are so similar.

The fruit is a currant.










It has a refreshing tartness, and it probably is the first fruit to ripen in most of Europe after the spring thaw. It is native to Europe and grows wild in all kinds of environments, including alongside train tracks.



I was lucky enough to be in Paris the other day where I bought some at a street market. It was I think the only locally grown fresh fruit on offer. Everything else came from the tropics or the southern hemisphere.

So it set me wondering why it is so rare in the U.S. I was surprised to read in Wikipedia that currants were once popular in the U.S., but currant farming was banned about 100 years ago when it was discovered that the bushes were a host of white pine blister rust, which damages north American pine forests. So there aren’t any domestic currants. And I guess they just aren’t good enough to be a common import. I have occasionally seen them at expense grocery stores, but not often.

So if you’re in Europe this time of year, enjoy an exotic fruit!

when god invented candy, I think it was because kumquats were out of season

For years I didn't know how to eat a kumquat. Then a Chinese friend told me to eat the whole thing, all at once.

Wow is that a flavor explosion!

If you haven't done it, try it. Put a whole kumquat in your mouth, chew it up, and swallow. You won't forget it, and you won't regret it.

Can you think of a better candy?

A nice way to eat a persimmon

1. Start with a soft ripe hachiya persimmon
2. Slice the top off with a sharp knife (you'll probably need to pull hard on the stem to get it to come out)
3. Cup your hand to hold the fruit, open end facing up
4. Pour heavy cream into the fruit
5. eat spoonfuls of the flesh and the cream

This is the most luxurious fresh fruit experience I know of.

Tejocote

One of my favorite things is discovering fruits that I've never seen before.
Last week I discovered something new at a farmers market in the San Joaquin valley of California.

Most of the vendors and customers at this market are Mexican and not much English is spoken. Amongst the varieties of cactus fruit and persimmons for sale I found a small orange fruit called Tejocote. I suspect the name is a Nahuatl word. The woman I purchased them from told me not to eat them out of hand, but said they are used to make a punch for Christmas and New Year's.

Of course I ate one out of hand anyway. It is a fragrant fruit, with citrus-like notes, and a flavour a bit like apricot, but a pithy flesh and a large pit. The flavour is fresh and pleasant, but bitter. I can see why she recommended not eating it out of hand, but I can imagine the punch is nice. I wonder where I can get some?

There is a lot more info on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crataegus_pubescens