Glut

Every now and again, I find myself dealing with too much of something, usually food. (Clutter, bullshit and talk are always plentiful everywhere.) Now is one of those times.

We had "customer appreciation" day at the salon on Saturday; we had a Tiki Bar set up, and gave out drinks and snacks to the clients all day. (The Tiki Bar is a vaguely tropical themed hutch, sporting coconuts and parrots and a grass skirt. They make fruity drinks and are killer to hire for a party.) At the end of the day, the guy who runs the Tiki bar, who's a friend of ours, asked if I wanted to take home the rest of the fruit, so he didn't have to load it all up and take it home himself. Of course, I said yes, and found myself leaving work with 3 dozen bananas and all the pineapples I could carry. Now I have 3 dozen bananas in my kitchen.

Getting rid of bananas isn't a problem, because all the Loudshoes like their bananas at differnent stages. Although bananas take a few days to go bad, their window of "acceptability" is fleeting. I reckon that a banana is only "good" for about 20 minutes of it's entire life. Thing 1 likes her bananas on the under-ripe side; one spot of brown and it's game over. Thing 2 likes her bananas to actually be crunchy....they are so green and crisp it's hard to believe she doesn't double over with stomach cramps. It's hard to sit near her when she eats a banana. Because of the noise. She won't eat a banana if it has no green on it anymore. I'll eat bananas when they have spots, but are not squishy. The Mister will eat banans when they are so soft you could probably eat them with a straw.
But 3 dozen bananas is a LOT of bananas. I will freeze them when they are good and ripe. (Which is just about the time that the fruit flies will colonize the kitchen entirely, and run me out of town.) The bananas can join the other couple of dozen bananas in the freezer from the last time Don told me I could take home the leftover fruit from the Tiki Bar. (I can only make so much banana bread.)

A few months ago, when the Mister's aunt went into the hospital after her stroke, she told me to clean out her fridge and take whatever would go bad home with me. I ended up with a couple of bags of milk, 2 dozen eggs and 3 bags of apples and TEN POUNDS of onions. (She lives alone, what the hell??) Since nobody else in the house eats eggs much, it was all up to me. (I've developed a small but intense addiction to poached eggs on grainy bread with a nest of alfalfa sprouts. Thanks, Big Liver Girl!) I've had eggs every day for breakfast, and decided that Eggs Benedict made a fine dinner, too. I'm still working on the onions. The apples went in the composter, I can only do so much.

We worked our way through a flat of strawberries when they came into season, and we happily look forward to our "All Blueberry, All The Time" diet that will come in late July. Too many raspberries is the happiest problem ever, and there's hardly even such a thing as "too many peaches".

I can't freeze the onions, but at least they are good for more than 20 minutes.