Fruit, an update - and some links

[heliopausa]

Summer! I really, really don't like the heat, but oh yes, I love the fruit! Right now, in this very kitchen (and the kitchen update comes later) there are:

• plums - small, sweet, red plums, but not so sweet as to forget that a plum's essential mission is delivering the tartness hit.
  
• lychees - fresh! still on the twig
  
• watermelon - well, watermelon!
  
• mangoes - which drop free from the tree next door! :)
  
• and lastly... pineapple! this time, very little ones - just about fist-sized, once peeled (I bought nine!)

So there you go - summertime!

Meanwhile, in the kitchen... the floods have gone,and the mysterious well has been utterly transformed; instead of a well, we now have hidden under the floor a neatly tiled (around the edges) miniature Roman bath, and leading from it, an open channel cut down through the floor tiles, with two pipes in it, running away to underneath the sink. Which will be covered over like the bath, they say, with all due dispatch - but I have a gloomy feeling that the covering and retiling is going to wait until they can find tiles to match, the tiles which formerly ran along that bit of the floor having been used to tile the hidden Roman bath, of course. What chance will there be, of tiles to match for a decades-old house? I wait excitedly to find out!

Links, links.... here's two from australia, of very different life-forms:

a video of a joey koala, emerging from its mother's pouch.

and some still photos of an ethereally blue bioluminescent bloom in Tasmania. I especially like the one where someone has walked away across the sand leaving glowing blue footsteps.

Syrena_of_the_lake has curated a second collection of stories from rthstewart's 3SF -  this time it's the Wings But No Feet (Dragon!Sherlock) collection - so far six stories are up, and I think about the same number still to come.

When I put up the two for Kangarooverse, by the way, I deleted them from my own 3SF post, which left me two chapters short in what was billed as a six-chapter collection.  So I added two more, offering a reason why Susan might have been thought to be no good at schoolwork. (Chapters 5 & 6)

Comments

[redsnake05]

That all sounds delicious. When I lived in China, I used to eat pineapple nearly every day. It was so good, and so very reasonably priced, and someone else used to do all the hard work of getting the skin off. What more could I ask?

I must admit, I love the thought of a miniature roman bath in/under your kitchen floor. Now, if only it was a whole roman bath house, complete with mosaics! Good luck on getting the tiles sorted.

[heliopausa]

It is all delicious - and I love having the pineapples peeled. I don't think we get them all year round here, but I'm sure if we did, I could eat them every day. :)

[autumnia]

The best thing about summer is just the endless variety of fruits and vegetables coming from the garden. You should definitely make a tropical (except the plums) fruit salad out of all that fruit.

[heliopausa]

Fruit salad - I hadn't even thought of that! Thank you! :)

[marmota_b]

I'm jealous of the mangoes. The mention of plums reminds me that there are these rows of wildly growing ones in my hometown, and that when I get back, I should check them out. And use those in the freezer and make fruit dumplings! Do you ever make fruit dumplings? It is, I suspect, a very Czech way of dealing with excess fruit - but plums are perfect for them!
Good luck with the... what's the word? Refurbishing? I hope your house and life in it isn't in too big a mess at the moment!

[heliopausa]

Yes, yes! for checking out the wild plums! :) and for making much of them.
The dumplings sound great - the australian way (or at least the one I grew up with) is to make plum sauce, plum jam and chutney, but stewed plums are also pretty good. I was thinking of stewing some of these ones to have with yoghurt.

[marmota_b]

Plum jam is another popular option. :-)
The blue kind of plums are most popular in the Czech Republic, and thick, thick jam made of them, called "povidla", is an old thing that goes on bread and koláče and into buchty and those appear in fairy-tales. It would traditionally be stewed, often communally, without any additional sweeteners, for days, until the stirrer could stand in it. Definitely somewhat mythical!

[heliopausa]

I have stewed plums in the fridge right now! Red plums, and the juice is... so beautiful!
The trees I grew up with were blue plums - well, there was a stray greengage, as well, but only one of those. :)
We live in a stunningly lovely world, hey?

[marmota_b]

Oh yes! Sometimes, it's a surprisingly Narnian world. :-)
Too early for plums in my quarters, but I can wait. I can never remember when the small yellow & red ones ripen... The blue ones are an August/September thing, so I should not be so surprised.