Honolulu Lite
Persimmons don’t add
a thing to guacamole
This guacamole tastes funny," my wife said. "What'd you put in it?"
The usual, I said. Well, I added some onion salt. Gives it that, you know, mass-produced flavor.
"No," she said. "That's not it. What else?"
Uh, avocado, onion, salsa, garlic, tomato.
"That's it!" she said. "We didn't have any tomatoes."
Sure we did, I said. Right there on the counter. In the bowl. A bunch of them.
"Those aren't tomatoes," she said. "Those are persimmons."
I figured she was just pulling my leg, trying to get back at me for the time she accidentally made guacamole with frozen pea soup she found in the freezer. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard. She didn't think it was funny. Luckily, our guests couldn't tell the difference.
Richard Simmons? I asked.
"Not Richard Simmons," she said. "PERsimmons. Didn't you think it was unusual that someone would give us a box of tomatoes as a gift?"
Hey, it was from your family. What do I know? Besides, they looked like pretty good tomatoes. Although, now that you mention it, there weren't any seeds to speak of.
"They were persimmons, you peat moss," she said. "They are a traditional Christmas holiday treat, like walnuts."
I picked up one of the persimmons and tossed it up and down. It looked like a tomato. The size was right. It had that orangish hue that tomatoes have nowadays. It was hard enough to be a tomato. I mean, I think I could have played handball with it without breaking the skin.
What the hell is a persimmon, anyway? I asked.
"I don't know exactly," she said. "It's some kind of fruit and it's real expensive, like red bell peppers."
What do you do with them? I asked.
"You thank whoever gives them to you, that's what you do," she said. "Then you don't make guacamole out of them. You put them in a bowl on the dining-room table and a couple of weeks after Christmas, you throw them out."
Man, I said. I've never heard of a fruit like that. That's pretty wild. And it explains a lot.
"What do you mean?" she said.
That BLT I had for lunch yesterday. It tasted really weird. I thought it was that leftover bacon I found in the back of the meat drawer. I didn't know I was actually having a BLP.
"We didn't have any leftover bacon," she said.
What was it? I asked.
"Believe me," she said. "You don't want to know."
Alo-Ha! Friday compiles odd bits of news from Hawaii
and the world to get your weekend off to an entertaining start.
Charles Memminger also writes Honolulu Lite Mondays,
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