(bounce bounce bounce)

Here's another fruit drabble.

Witchcraft

The recipe is simple: a pound of strawberries, washed, dried and hulled. You slice them, and set them aside.

Two pounds of peaches - yellow, please, for while Babcocks are sweeter off the tree, they lose their celestial savour when baked. Pit them, peel them and slice them into wedges. Macerate in half a cup sugar until a syrup forms.

Spread them in a baking pan

Make a lemon-infused shortcrust, sweet-tart and doughy. Drop it over the fruit in spoonfuls; it will spread as it bakes.

Your kitchen becomes an orchard, a temple of the best smell on earth.

That noise you hear is my stomach growling. Damn, Deb.

I have no problem with beginnings, I can generally come up with a good, hooky opening. My problem is endings. I know where the story ends, but my characters always seem to just be standing around staring at each other, waiting for someone else to be the first to walk off stage.

I can do beginnings and endings. It's those damn middles I have trouble with.

So maybe a theme of "defining paragraph in a genre story"?

I really need to make what is officially known - courtesy of my daughter and her Raider - as Hot Fruit, and I need to make it soon. Both peaches and strawberries are nicely in season in California right now, and cheap (a pound of organic peaches locally is about 59 cents), and the peaches don't have to be soft and fully ripe for cooking.

And the lemon-infused crust is glorious stuff. I could eat it out of the bowl.

But really, nothing competes with the smell. It's purely divine.

Did I mention it's served hot, right out of the oven? With ice cream?

(a pound of organic peaches locally is about 59 cents)

Okay, now I'm whimpering. Peaches! We won't have peaches for... oh, a month at the earliest, I think.

I'm just going to firmly remind myself that I am enjoying strawberry season right now, and peaches will be here in their time. Yes. (Whimper.)

Katie, that's one reason I love living here - the farmers markets are year-round, and always stocked with cool and groovy stuff.

There's a wonderful market in, of all places, a mall in Palo Alto. And right now, they have the prettiest, most elegant ciofini I've ever seen: perfect babies, with purple at the base and thorny tips.

I love sauteed ciofini in butter with lemon and garlic. Must. do. soon.

See, if there was still Jossiverse TV on, I'd have a party.

This week's theme is making me very hungry. Want berries now.

I was mulling over this for the blue theme but didn't finish in time - fortunately, it works for both.

You see them in the supermarket nearly every day of the year: enormous, neon-bright blueberries, soft and mealy. Beside them the wild ones seem small and unimpressive, midnight-blue globes with a dusty grey sheen. Their tart-sweet taste brings back red granite cliffs and cold rust-tinged water, thick drifts of bronze pine needles soft underfoot, but prickly on knees.

I could never decide whether to eat or harvest first. In the end it was one in my mouth, one in the pail, alternating as fast as I could. My tongue and fingertips were stained navy long before the pail was full.

Dani, that made me ache a bit, in a good memory sort of way.

And in fact, the blueberry tree that Penny B sent me has wonderful little dusky blue globes all over it. ABout two weeks, and they're mine all mine.

All the fruit drabbles are making me hungry. But for some reason, a bad week at work inspired mine:

In my world, they mean magic, witchcraft, and temptation. They are a symbol of other worlds, imagination, and decadence. I’ve looked for lipstick and velvet with that depth and clarity of red for years, never quite finding it.

None of this, however, is what springs to mind when I see them stacked in an uneven pyramid in the cafeteria one day. All I can think of then is this company’s uncomfortable similarities to Hell, and that I don’t dare eat one here; what if I’m forced to stay?

Pomegranates should not appear at Microsoft.

Jilli, I already giggled like a loon in the lj entry.