Fruit Salad!

Today is the first day of the Vegan Month Of Food! Prepare yourself for as many posts as I can manage, in the space of a month... it's going to be hectic, so I'm starting out slowly.

This is the kind of food I eat a lot of. Yep, I know, you're probably about to close the window and chastise me with your internet buddies for being so boring as to talk about fruit salad. But I think that fruit salad is one of those foods that gets ignored for being mediocre because it's generally prepared in a mediocre fashion. You know the salad I'm talking about: apple, orange and banana, mushed about and slightly browning, with a texture reminiscent of baby food. Ugh. No thankyou, I'm not a fan of those sorts of fruit salad. Texture is important, so I peel any fruits with tougher skin, like apple and pear. Tough and membranous sections get removed from citrus fruit, and I quite enjoy mixing frozen berries into my salads, for a little icy crunch.


Above are a couple of Elstar apples (with crisp and acidic white flesh), Conference Pears (which are a cross between my favourite Comice and another variety), which have tough skins but buttery and juicy flesh, a mango (not local, but on sale for 50c!), a handful of small valencia oranges, and a green-skinned grapefruit. The grapefruit is sweetener than ordinary yellow varieties, with less of that powdery-astringent aftertaste. The flesh is easily separated from the segments, much like a Pomelo. Everything was peeled, diced, segmented, and mixed with a handful of frozen berries. Then it was topped with a generous handful of quick-cooking oats, to soak up the juices, and a tiny drizzle of agave syrup, to brighten the sour flavours. The berries turned everything pink (I secretly love when they do that!) and it was an absolute delight to devour. Now, if you don't think that's delicious, then get off of my blog. ;)

A tribute to Summer.

Ok, I'm going to attempt to write out the last of my Summery posts, simply because the weather has significantly changed here in central Germany. Summer was short-lived, a burst of sunshine spread over the course of a month, which faded all too fast into the drizzly, grey days to which I've become accustomed.

However, in that short Summer, I ate an awful lot of berries. These gorgeous ones were only 2 Euro from the Dom Markt.

I'm going to explain first, that I can be a very simple sort of person. The sort of person who mixes fresh fruit, oats, and soy yoghurt for a favourite snack. Because, really, if you're onto a good thing, why change it?

With such a simple snack/breakfast, however, I think I have license enough to be picky. I want my fruit to be fresh and beautiful. I want my oats to be earthy and crispy. (I find that rolled spelt fills that criteria particularly well.) I want my yoghurt to be tangy, sour, and made from soymilk. Not the sickly, over-sweetened variety (though the vanilla flavour is pretty good, too!)...

I have to confess, neither the peaches or blueberries in this photo were overly tasty - it was already too late in the season, unfortunately. Still, bland fruit is better than no fruit, which is probably what I'll be looking forward to this Winter. I'm probably going to develop scurvy.

Ok, physically impossible for someone who eats as many vegetables as I do.

And can I just point out, that these golden peaches were the only food to have ever matched my hideous plastic tablecloth. Mediocre fruit and furnishings go hand in hand.

I guess I always took my fruit so much for granted when I lived in Australia. If I wanted a perfect mango, banana, or avocado, I could just stroll to the markets, or even a supermarket, and pick one up at a (generally) reasonable price. It would be fresh, having come from sunny Queensland, or occasionally the Northern Territory, and it would be ripe. Here, those same fruits come from South America, and they're hard as rocks. I used to buy mangoes, hoping that if they sat in my kitchen for long enough they'd ripen a bit more, but they never really did. Not enough to taste like a mango at home.

So, what did my snacks really end up looking like?

Ahem, point taken. Not ideal for photography. I'll give you something prettier. The following photo is half of the berries that I picked on my wild rampage near the Pb Nord train station. The smaller berries with matte skins are actually dewberries, but the rest are your standard blackberries. Dewberries have larger segments, and they're much smaller than blackberries, but they still taste delicious.

So, I raise my hat to you, Summer fruits. It might be creeping into Autumn a little faster than I'd like, but you can rest assured, that you won't be forgotten. And for those that I missed out on entirely, you can rest assured that I'll be coming for you the second that my 13 months here are over...