#397 – Splat
Posted on December 12, 2007 at 12:00 am by Chris
For some reason I always have trouble with pears. I can rarely complete the full purchase to consumption routine successfully. The pears are always rock hard when I purchase them from the grocery store. At this point I’m usually excited about my theoretical future pear eating session. I check them every few days to see if they are ripe… usually this takes a few weeks. I finally decide that yes, this pear is ready! … but I’m never right. When I bite into the pear it’s still harder than an apple inside and tastes grainy and flavorless. I’ll wait another few days and check the rest of my purchases to find that they have skipped the delicious stage and gone from concrete straight to moldy mush. Once a year I do get that one magical tasty pear that keeps me going. It’s what dreams are made of.
International orders! It’s probably a good idea to get your orders in by Friday of this week if you want them to make it across the water in time for Christmas. All orders received by 5pm central time this Friday will ship out Friday night. Give the gift of Biff!
I am amazed you could put my exact sentiments into words! Sometime I should calculate how much money I waste each year with the “unfruitful” ripe pear hunt. …They should invent an accessory light that turns green when it hits peak peary deliciousness…
He must have teeth of iron if he managed to make that pear blow up, even if it was too ripe. >_>
i got a pear tree in the back yard…. problem solved.
Yea, I recognise this!
Tinsy trick to get any fruit to ripen quicker. Put them in a paper bag with a banana. Then you don’t have to wait very long to get delicious pears!
Haha, Eddie Izzard describes this phenomenon beautifully – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh5a0ucs8kQ, 5:20 and 6:20 minutes in (strong language at parts)
Completely identified with the ripe pear problem.
-MD
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!! brilliant!
An other trick to get nice ripe fruit is to buy ripe fruit. It seems crazy I know, but you can actually buy them that way.
I’m with you and Biff on the pear thing, Chris. There just isn’t an “edible” phase, is there?
Buy RIPE pears..? Not around here. Hard as a rock is the only option. And what happened to the flavor? Pears taste like cardboard, anymore.
Chris, I feel your pain.
Pears are delicious. They’re just hard to eat.
I actually like my fruit hard. Especially peaches. I like the hard texture better than the more mushy texture of ripe fruit. And there’s no messy juice running down my chin.
If you like crunchy, crisp texture AND flavor, then Asian apple-pears are the way to go. I love those! Sadly, it’s hard to get those around here, either – the ones I see are generally small, expensive, and low-quality. Not at all like the ones I used to get on Maui.
I haven’t had pears in a long time, though I guess I don’t really try to anyway. I hate apples, they make my lips itchy. Except apple pie, I like apple pie!
I like grapes the best.
My favorite is the peach
dribbling down my chin.
I could eat those all day.
damn poor biff and I dont buy fruits in supermarkets cause theres like tons of people who sell them for a lot cheaper one of the good thing of living in an island XD
Helen and Dan are right:
If you put overripe fruit in with unripened fruit, it forces the unripe fruit to ripen faster. When fruit ripens it releases ethylene gas, which causes an increase in vegetable metabolism. Bananas and Apples ripen really fast and give off the most gas.
It’s actually where the phrase “One bad apple ruins the whole bunch” originated from.
Yay for my kollidge degree!
Solution: Eat apples instead. They’re even good, unlike pears. 🙂
Biff: the one place where one’s love of fruit and explosions can simultaneously be pleased.
OH MY GOD!!!! Chris, if you have exploding fruit, PLEASE GIVE IT TO ME!!!! I wish this could so happen because there are people at my school who desrve something to be splashed on their face, wether it be fruit juice or fruit cocktail.
Eww…
Oh i remember trying to do this, failed everytime and just gave up in the end.
One of my tutors at college ain’t very good at guessing the time on pears either which resulted in the entire classes work getting covered in gooey pear mush Ewwww..
Wow, I never knew pears were such a problem. I love pears.
You know, I’m sitting here smiling at Biff and I remember when you said that you had just reached 300 and asked how long it would take to make the next 100. Now, here I sit, only three shy of 400 and it seems like only yesterday. BTW, poor Biff, and you. Hope you get better at finding peaches.
Mmm. exploding fruit. I have to admit, I was a bit worried before reading the caption on this one…
Darn coconuts.
The pear is a lie.
Under Ripe.
Almost Ripe.
Ripe.
Perfectly Ripe.
Over Ripe.
Alcohol.
TOO RIPE.
When I was a kid, I had a friend who had a bunch of Bosc pear trees in their yard. Once they’d ripened, her mom would send us out with pickin’ baskets and we would fill them up and often eat them till we were sick of them. XD OTOH, when they were too ripe for even the birds to eat, we’d pick vasty handfuls of them and fling them at passing cars, birds, squirrels…:D
We were EVIL children.
i love pears i usualy eat them straight out the refrigerator cold and hard
i don’t know i just love the hardness of a apple and the taste of a pear
Cut up an apple, wrap a piece in paper towel and put in sack with pears.
May apples are harder, they’re deadly poison when green, marvelous when ripe and a lethal purgative when too ripe.
The fruit that I have problems with is Passionfruit. You buy them when they’re spherical and pristine looking, but if you open them up, you’re facing a sour treat that will cause your tastebuds to react so violently, your face implodes a little bit.
Instead, they’re left on the windowsill and they slowly wrinkle and shrink until their contents are a delightful black/yellow treat. Alternately, they get forgotten about, but you don’t realize it, and you open one up to a less than tasty black treat.
For those that aren’t familiar with Passionfruit, it’s a tropical fruit which the edible part of is effectively little black seeds with a thin orange/yellow layer of delicious coating each one.
I refuse to eat normal pears. I love those Asian pears, however; they eat like apples but taste like pears.