Update

[desperance]

Is boring, waiting for a cat to pee. Barry has been trying to bust him out of the bathroom; at least, there was much door-banging and when I went to investigate they'd got it two inches open, and hence up against the barrier I'd built. Maybe they were just playing paw-tag through the gap, but I like to think they were working together to free the Prisoner of the Bathroom D'If.

Me, meanwhile, I have written fifteen hundred words, chopped melons and sugar together to dejuice 'em for jam tomorrow (we in the UK knowing only too well, it's always jam tomorrow and never jam today), and meantime made some nectarine relish out of sheer tedium and needing-to-be-busyness.

I have to say, I am appalled by supermarket fruit. Ordinarily, I buy very little fruit, and when I do it's good stuff. For chutneys, I thought I'd grab whatever the supermarket had. It's abominable: peaches and nectarines both, deceptively red on the outside and hard as rock within. By the time it ripens inside - if peaches & nectarines even do ripen once picked, which some fruits simply don't - it'll be rotten on the outside. Why the hell would anyone buy this stuff, after the first time...?

Comments

[julesjones]

People buy the stuff because they don't know any better.

Really. There are plenty of people out there who have been raised on such fruit, and they really don't know that it's not supposed to be like that.

Or they buy it because they do know better, but that's all they have access to. If there's nobody local selling the good stuff at a time you can get to the shop or at a price you can afford... When some of the supermarkets experimented with late-picked tomatoes shipped on the vine, I was willing to pay double the price of the red ping-pong balls to get something that actually tasted like a tomato, but a couple of years earlier it wouldn't really have been an affordable option. (Alas, alack, one or two of the supermarkets then figured out that they could use "on the vine" as a marketing tool, and make a tidy profit by selling ping-pong balls still on the vine for double the usual price, rather than the late-picked ones that were the whole point of the exercise in the first place.)

[wishus.livejournal.com]

Don't the underripe fruit have higher pectin levels? I always seem to miss optimum jam-time with the plums from my mom and dad's tree, but they always have lots of happy, drunk wasps about in high summer.