Summertime Fruit

 Summertime is fruit time and with all this global warming and the climate change people forget to tell you about one good thing about global warming.  Global warming can cause fruit to be cheap depending on the El Nino or La Nina affect going on.  With the warm winter this year oranges have been so cheap that I have been constantly finding them under a dollar for a pound and for a while they were 30 cents a pound.  When I was a youngster my favorite summertime fruit was always the cantaloupe and not to brag about myself but I can pick out a perfect cantaloupe every time I am at the store.  I just have this sixth sense for looking at the sugar burns on the rind to the right squish of the melon.  Watermelon was always a good summertime fruit, just that my sister tortured me with the story of if you eat a watermelon seed it will grow in your stomach and eventually come out your nose.  Ever since then I love to eat watermelon, I just am always scared of how many plants are currently growing in my stomach.

When I met my wife years ago she turned me onto the greatness of fresh cherries.  My only childhood memories of fresh cherries is one time my mother bought some and I was young and dumb and bit right into a cherry thinking they had small seeds but instead found out that the seed was huge and hurt my teeth really bad in that experience.  Ever since then I never ate them until my wife convinced me to get some one time when we were headed to an Indy Car race at Texas Motor Speedway.  She wanted something besides my fruit chews, diet coke, trail mix, and beef jerky.  So we picked up a huge bag of cherries.  From that day on I look forward to the 4th of July season where our local grocery stores reduce the price of cherries from in the four dollar a pound area to around two bucks a pound.  Over the holiday I picked up two pounds and my wife picked up two pounds and between the two of us we polished them off in three days.  What makes cherries so good in the summer is how they are easy to eat (just always find the seed first) and they are refreshing without the mess of watermelon or the hassle of cleaning a cantaloupe.  The bad side to fresh cherries is they do jack up my blood sugars but if it is a nice 100 degree day and you have a bag of cherries it feels like 80 degrees and the wind is in your face of cherry freshness.  Even if I get a not so sweet bag of cherries they still hit the spot every time.  Now I always pick up a bag of cherries for any summer gathering, watching a baseball game, or simply hanging around the house.  Let me know what your summertime fruit is that cures the 100 degree days.