Operation Fruitalicious Part III: Raspberries

Luckily for those of you who are enjoying my Operation Fruitalicious posts, I happen to live very near to a fruit and veg market of world reknown. Which means (oh joy of joys) there isn’t really any excuse not to keep pressing on with my mission.

Now, you may remember I still have a pear which is ripening in my fridge as we speak. To be honest though, what with all this fruit excitement, I didn’t really feel up to it. For all I know, it may be gone off by now anyway. So by way of a displacement activity, I decided to choose something else from the vast array of fruits with whom I have yet to become acquainted.

 

After some deliberation, I chose raspberries.  I would have gone for strawbs, but they didn’t have a lid.  They look nice, don’t they?

The thing I thought was good about berry-type fruits is that they come in bite-sized pieces.  This means that if you want to try them, you don’t have to commit to a whole great big thing, you can just try one, with no harm done.  I must say though, that close-up and personal, raspberries are rather funny strange things.  I think they might even be hairy, if that is possible. From a visual inspection, one can see that not all the raspberries are the same, but of course, one has no means of telling a good one from a less good one, so you’ve just got to take pot luck.  And if you inspect them too closely, they all look potentially revolting in one way or another.   

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I popped one in my mouth, albeit I had to pop it out again almost immediately.  Now, like with the orange, what you find is that the thing is basically sealed, so it’s quite hard to get a feel for it just by having it in your mouth.  Again, too, you’ve got to be careful to keep it only at the very front of your mouth, to minimise or postpone the wretching as much as poss.  You can taste some taste of raspberry from the inside at the top, if you try, but what overwhelmed me was the tasting of the outside of it.  Because of course you’ve got all the plantiness and none of the juiciness.  Still, I kept trying.

I’m afraid I didn’t get very far in terms of biting raspberry.  I mean, I did try, but I was getting pretty close to being sick again (not my most favourite pass-time).  I have to say that I am still amazed that what my instincts told me as a toddler (that such things would make me vomit) is as true as it has so far turned out to be.  Still, I thought, there has to be a way to get to grips with the inside of a raspberry, so I took one and cut it in half, and popped that in my mouth.  I’m sorry to report that this caused instant vomiting.  The texture/structure is what did it.  An hour later I went back and tried again.  You know, just to see.  I had to spit it out almost immediately, but the post hoc recollection of that juicy raspberry feeling was that it was actually quite nice.  Something wholesome and wonderful that’s been missing from my diet all these years.  And it did taste a bit like raspberry jam, only purer.

So, I didn’t manage a swallow this time.  Maybe I am getting slack and lazy, and losing my verve.  But I would definitely try these again. 

The more I do this, the more I am convinced that it’s all about gaining familiarity.  And even having tried just these three fruits so far, the trying of things in general is becoming a more familiar thing to be doing.  I’m learning how to try things just as much as I’m learning about the specific fruits in question.  I’m beginning to think that once I’ve got the hang of the trying, the whole thing is going to suddenly get much easier.  If that should be true, then we might have a “cure” on our hands…