Three Beautiful Things Thursday: Fruity edition
Because food is always, always beautiful:
1. Berries and berry season. I look forward to summer for so many reasons (baseball (duh), sunshine, Screen on the Green, the Shakespeare Festival, fireworks on the Fourth of July, etc., etc., etc.), not the least of which is the return of fresh fruit, especially berries.
The color and contrast in this photo is just gorgeous.
As always, click on the image to get the source photo.
Sometimes I think I love berry desserts more than chocolate desserts, shocking as that may sound. I certainly love making berry desserts. My mother would say the abundance and variety of berries is just another sign of the glory of God, and she would be right.
Click to go to the original Flickr photo.
2. Grapefruit. I know it’s not to everybody’s taste, but I love it. Dark red pulp, surrounded by bitter white pith, surrounded by yellow rind. How pretty is that? Martha uses them for sandwich cookies, and chockylit uses them in cupcakes (seriously, how yummy looking is that?), but they’re also great just by themselves, sliced and sprinkled with a little salt and pepper, or maybe just a pinch of sugar. I will eat them in the rain. And in the dark. And on a train. And in a car. And in a tree. They are so good, so good, you see!
3. Indians are passionate about mangoes. When I was twelve and went to Mumbai for my cousin’s wedding, we came towards the end of mango season, but my grandmother had stockpiled them for us. She’d set aside so many we couldn’t possibly eat them all, so I spent one afternoon with my cousins making mango jam out of the spoiling ones. When I was twenty-two and went to Mumbai just to visit, we came at the beginning of mango season, when the fruit was still mostly green, yet my mother came back from the villages with crates full of mangoes, all of them gifts from family who wanted us to get our fill of India’s prize fruit before we left for the desolate, mango-less American wasteland.
These mangoes are not Indian, I don’t think, but the shot was too
beautiful to pass up. Click on the image for the original Flickr photo.
To a man, all non-resident Indians attest that the mangoes available in the States (from Mexico) are “nothing” compared to what you can get in the villages of India. When given the choice, the NRI will always choose the mango-infused version of a food. Mango ice cream, mango cheesecake, mango juice. It will never be as good as the Indian kind, but they will choose it anyway because mangoes, even the inferior ones, are a temporary passport home.
In the end, I think maybe this TBTT was less about food and more about gorgeous photography… and of course, about the endless bounty of God, which is so large and amazing and beautiful we aren’t capable of fully comprehending it.