My Little Fruit Bats

I love fruit in all its forms.  I would eat it 24/7 were it cheap enough and nutritionally balanced.  So great is my love of Mother Nature's sweet little treats that I could probably be the first vegan ever to be morbidly obese.  Yup.  I could definitely overdose on fruit*.

My fruit-eating obsession has been well and truly passed on to both of my children.  Occasionally they seem reluctant to try a new one but as soon as the sweet, pulpy goodness touches their tongues you can almost see their pupils dilate and suddenly it's "More, more, more!"

Charles is a slave to strawberries but he's not as obsessed as us and there are some fruits he  won't eat.  So he calls us his little fruit bats, indulges us by buying our fix and shakes his head in disbelief at the sheer volume we can put away.

Tonight I made lamb salad for Charles and I for dinner.  For the kids – because they hate salad, I made fish fingers with fruit salad.  At this time of year fruit is cheap and plentiful and you can buy mounds of the stuff you don’t normally get.  So their bowls were loaded with kakayaberries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and grapes.  They were thrilled with the fare on offer and ploughed their way through dinner in fairly short order.  Naturally having cleaned their bowls they felt that they were rightfully entitled to dessert. 

Luckily for me I’d managed to score a kilo of cherries from a roadside cherry van and forgotten to include them in their fruit salad so I proceeded to sit with the bowl and my trusty cherry pipper – pipping them one by one for the little fruit bats.  After the first three all sense of restraint and propriety were abandoned.  Rather than take the cherry from me they were simply opening their mouths to receive their share and squawking whenever their sibling was fed instead of themselves. 

The cherries themselves were huge and barely fit into the pipper.  For whatever reason James decided that the only way for the cherry to enter his mouth was whole and he would scream with outrage whenever I tried to halve it for him so it would fit.  As a result, cherry juice would stream unchecked down his front whenever he closed his gob.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first ever vampire fruit bat;

 *  And I did once.  One Summer I was given a tray of mangoes and challenged to eat them all before they went bad.  24 mangoes in six days is not an endurance event my body was trained to cope with.  I turned an interesting shade of yellow, felt ill for about a month** and couldn't eat the wretched things for the next two summers.  So while I could eat fruit 24/7 I know it would have to be different kinds of fruit.

** And we won't go into any of the other side effects.