Persimmons! November 1, 2006

We have four kinds of fruit trees in our yard. Mandarins, sweet lemons, lemons and persimmons. I had never heard of persimmons but apparently they grow in Indiana and other parts of the upper mid-west. Here I am not-so-affectionately calling them the slime bombs. We have a tree that is in one corner of the yard and has started to drop the over-ripe fruits to the ground in a mass of sticky slimey goo. They drop just outside of my kitchen window (which has no screen) attracting a wonderful variety of flies and other bugs. Hmmm…

Albanians love these fruits. You can pick them when they are still hard and if they have developed enough black seeds at the time they were picked they are decent to eat, otherwise they suck all the spit right out of your mouth (really)! Sunday our landlord Zemani came over with a ladder to pick the fruit from the tree for both his family and ours. He picked at least 20 of the really ripe ones (just about ready to become slime bombs) and gave them to me. These are like jelly inside, Albanians (I’m told) scoop it out and eat it with a spoon. Now mind you, he speaks no English and I speak “pak Shqip” (little Albanian). So what exactly am I supposed to do with 20 ripe “hurma” (persimmons)? Then he gave us another bag of the not yet ripe hurma and gave us a bag of about 30-35 of these. He took at least as many for himself and still left HUNDREDS on the tree.

I had coffee with Sue on Monday and told her the saga and “what am I going to do with all these hurma?!! She told me that I could find a recipe for Persimmon Bread by looking online at allrecipes.com (Sherri, this has become one of my favorite sites!). You just do an ingredient search and it came up with 25 recipes of things to make with persimmons! So we tested out the Persimmon Bread…. tasty treat!