It's strawberry season here in southern Ontario and we opted to buy a flat of berry goodness from our organic food people. Of course, when we ordered a flat of strawberries, we were really ordering hypothetical berries. Berries that would show up LATER. Not berries that would appear at our door in all their pungent goodness last night at 6 o'clock.
Nothing motivates one to complete domestic tasks like the possibility of several pounds of rotting fruit in the living room. And so last night, Katr sat down with a paring knife and trimmed 12 litres of strawberries. I was tempted to just sit there and watch, but I've noticed that Katr seems to feel that me pouting, flaunting my bruised hands and saying "But I was in the HOS-pital!" is no longer cause for special treatment. So I hauled out the entire pile of our unfolded laundry and we trimmed and folded and watched a CBC special about decadent Berlin in the early twenties. There was a great deal of titty in the documentary, so there were a few times there that Katr caught me inappropriately gripping pairs of balled up socks and there were other times when Katr's grip on the red, rosy strawberries was just a little too . . . firm.
Anyway, the pungent smell of unexpected strawberries brought me back to when I was living with Jesk in an apartment over a restaurant on Dufferin Street nearly 10 years ago. I came home one afternoon to find the apartment smelling quite pungently of citrus. Usually, the apartment smelled of three-day-old lentil loaf that our eating disordered roommate had left to moulder, so the citrus scent was a welcome change. "What's that smell?" I asked Jesk, who was sitting at the table with her head in her hands. She looked up at me and said, in her "Please don't kill me" voice: "You . . . you like oranges, right?"
It seems that young Jesk, excited by fruit season, had stopped in a the little family-owned fruit market next to our apartment. She (like me) had never been there before, having a surburbanite's suspicion of non-chain stores, but their glittering, fruity wares spread out on the sidewalk proved too tempting. Their baskets of oranges, in particular, were quite fetching and Jesk decided to buy some. So she went into the store and said "I like to buy a box of oranges."
The lady behind the check out said "Wonderful! Would you like the 18 or the 24?"
Jesk thought "Wow, 24. That's a lot of oranges. But I sure like oranges and maybe Roro will eat some." So she said, "I'll take the 24," and pulled out her bank card. The lady handed her the debit thing and that's when Jesk noticed that the cost of the "24 box" was $24.00.
"Hmmm," thought Jesk, "those sure are expensive fucking oranges. What are they, golden oranges? Stuffed with diamonds and David Duchovny's phone number? That's the last time I come HERE." Naturally, she was too embarrassed to say any of this to the sonsy lady behind the counter, so she meekly punched in her code.
The lady said, "Wonderful. I'll have one of my boys help you out with them."
"Help me out?" thought Jesk, "I can carry my own oranges 20 feet!" Instead, she said reluctantly "Oookaaaay." The lady's son came out and said to Jesk, in a friendly way, "Do ya got your car here?"
Jesk said "Nooo . . . I just live next door, so don't worry about it -"
"Oh no," the fellow said, "It's heavy. I'll carry it up for ya. I'll be right behind ya."
"Um . . . great."
Confused, Jesk walked out of the store, then turned around and saw the young gentleman staggering under the weight of an ENORMOUS BOX. "Lead the way!" he said, in a strained yet macho voice. Horrified, Jesk beetled over to our door and let him up into our apartment, where he deposited the box of 100 oranges she'd just purchased in our kitchen. Then he strutted out, leaving Jesk alone with her gigantic orange collection.
Jesk swears her first thought was "Oh my god. Roro's going to KILL ME!!" Which is funny, because when she told me the story, MY first thought was "Well, at least we won't get the scurvy." And hey - we didn't! So it all worked out.
Back to the strawberries; our freezer is now stuffed full of them and the possibilities are delightful. Will we make jam? Daily smoothies? Delicious fruit topping for ice cream? OR should we go with my brilliant suggestion and just make ONE GIANT DAQUIRI?
