{"id":758,"date":"2010-10-01T11:58:14","date_gmt":"2010-10-01T03:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/?p=758"},"modified":"2010-10-01T12:03:02","modified_gmt":"2010-10-01T04:03:02","slug":"another-milestone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/?p=758","title":{"rendered":"Another milestone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another milestone<\/p>\n

On Mid-Autumn festival evening several students visited bringing fruit and moon cakes.\u00a0\u00a0 The fruit included pears, persimmons, oranges and grapes in addition to some chestnuts.\u00a0\u00a0 We sat around talking over their bounty and the college\u2019s moon cakes.<\/p>\n

The grapes provided a bit of a challenge as health information for countries such as China tells traveller\u2019s to wash fruit and vegetables well, avoid salads and to peel fruit.\u00a0 I\u2019ve made the occasional exception, but rarely deviate from such advice.\u00a0 It makes fruit eating boring at times as rarely can I be bothered peeling fruit I would normally eat with skin on such as apples and pears.\u00a0 I never buy grapes or stone fruit so bananas are the staple fruit.\u00a0 I love oranges, but I have always found the flavour of Chinese oranges to be a great disappointment.\u00a0 I bought mangos in Jinghong and they, apart from a really delicious one in Hue, Vietnam, were the best mangos I\u2019ve ever had.\u00a0 I could never understand how people could rave about mangos because the few Australian ones I\u2019d ever had never encouraged me to have more.\u00a0 The further north I travelled in Yunnan the less tasty they became.\u00a0 I had a truly scrumptious pineapple in Jinghong too.\u00a0 I bought it from a roadside seller who slashed the skin off in a trice using a vicious looking machete and soon I was walking down the street eating a pineapple pieces from a plastic bag.\u00a0 So the secret, which really is no secret, is to eat fruit at their source.\u00a0\u00a0 However, it\u2019s not guaranteed as the apple from the orchard a couple of weeks back was nothing special.<\/p>\n

I grew up eating grapes from the vine as we had several grape vines in the back yard when I was a kid.\u00a0 It was always a race between humans and birds to see who could get them first.\u00a0 One year my father ordered a giant long filament white web arrangement from Sydney or Melbourne and I still remember being fascinated by its uniqueness.\u00a0 It was thrown over the vine and pulled down to cover.\u00a0 \u00a0I guess the birds lost that year; I don\u2019t remember.\u00a0 Grapes have never had the same allure since those days of flavoursome old fashioned varieties.<\/p>\n

I learnt to eat grapes in a different way on one of my many train or bus trips in China.\u00a0\u00a0 I was sitting behind someone who was eating giant grapes.\u00a0 All I could see were two hands held over the aisle peeling a grape one by one.\u00a0 Again I was fascinated because I\u2019d only ever read of it happening or maybe seen it in a movie like a Cleopatra<\/em> a million years ago.\u00a0 Australians don\u2019t peel grapes and it was quite beyond my experience.\u00a0 It was really into the realms of decadence or \u201cwhy on earth\u201d as I\u2019ve not seen Chinese worry about salads or seen too many peeling fruit.<\/p>\n

Now I had my own grapes to peel.\u00a0 They were large and juicy and peeled easily.\u00a0 While it was messy it was not the slow laborious task it could have been.\u00a0 Taste wise they were a disappointment.\u00a0 They are all gone now. \u00a0So now I have passed the peeling grape milestone.\u00a0 I have no idea what it means apart from being able to eat grapes in China.\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019ll judge future grapes by their potential peelability and flavor rather than simply consign them to the category of not worth buying.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The persimmons are still unripe so I will try them later.\u00a0 Australian friends have a persimmon tree, introduced me to persimmons and used to supply me with fresh and dried persimmons every season.\u00a0\u00a0 I used to enjoy them so it will be interesting to see what the Chinese ones taste like.\u00a0 I have a peeler so guess I\u2019ll be using it on my persimmons.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of the nuts and fruit.\u00a0 The chestnuts had a beautiful fresh green sheen to them when they arrived.\u00a0 All\u00a0of the pears I’ve seen have been of the hard flesh variety rather than the\u00a0soft flesh varieties\u00a0\u00a0common in Australia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another milestone On Mid-Autumn festival evening several students visited bringing fruit and moon cakes.\u00a0\u00a0 The fruit included pears, persimmons, oranges and grapes in addition to some chestnuts.\u00a0\u00a0 We sat around talking over their bounty and the college\u2019s moon cakes. The grapes provided a bit of a challenge as health information for countries such as China […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[93,94],"tags":[10,15,20,29],"class_list":["post-758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-xingtai","tag-agriculture","tag-culture","tag-food","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=758"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":761,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions\/761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kerry.net.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}