Apparently, and I’m not taking this as gospel or anything like that, but apparently, next to bananas, pineapples are the second most popular of the tropical fruits.
What I want to know is why?
Well, okay, I know why - it’s because the damn things are everywhere - but why the heck at they so popular?
Let me get this off my chest straight away - I hate pineapples. I don’t think I’ve ever liked pineapples and the fact that they are now popping up in places they shouldn’t be (like as the house for one of my least favourite cartoon characters Sponge Bob) has just made the situation worse.
You see, maybe it’s just me, but I’m not impressed by the way pineapples are being used for things that, well fruit shouldn’t be.
Like sitting on a piece of gammon for instance. Come on now, who ever decided that a piece of gammon would taste better with a slice of pineapple on it?
And why not a piece of apple, or pear, or banana for that matter?
Or even better, consider that the gammon is most likely being served as a main course, how about with a slice of turnip or carrot or something - if it has to be served with anything at all.
But, nope, I would safely say that in a huge majority of establishments that serve gammon, they will also dollop a piece of pineapple on top. It’s almost as if the darn gammon wouldn’t be dressed without it.
Here’s the thing - gammon is lovely and it is still lovely without pineapple and I should know.
But it’s not just with gammon, because with pizzas now part of the common diet it’s not uncommon to see chunks of pineapple sitting on top of a pizza alongside stuff like cheese and ham.
The Hawaiian for instance cannot be an Hawaiian without a slice of pineapple - but here’s the thing - that’s just a bloody conspiracy.
You see most of the pineapples being cut out of tin cans all over the world these days come from Hawaii - it’s in their interest to try to get people to use them.
But it’s a bit like suggesting to people that you couldn’t have an Irish pizza without a couple of spuds on top.
Come to think of it, that actually doesn’t sound to me like it would taste too bad and at least spuds are something you should be eating with a main meal.
Pineapple on the other hand is a fruit that, I think has tried to slip into main courses because people won’t even eat it as a dessert. And hey if you don’t believe me, read yesterday’s blog, even the birds wouldn’t eat it.
It’s not that there is even a shortage of recipies to make dessert type thingys from pineapple. A quick cookery web site search found forty-three ideas on just one page things like pineapple turnovers and pineapple pie.
But let’s face it folks most people would never choose a pineapple pie over an apple pie or choose a pineapple turnover instead of a banana split.
And yet, I have come across pineapple in main courses more often than in desserts and for a fruit that can’t be a good thing.
That said, they do seem to be darn adaptable so when my better landed back last year with two plants for the house, I was astonished and perhaps a little horrified to see that they were, in fact, pineapple plants complete with mini pineapples growing on them.
Unusually too for plants in our kitchen they even managed to survive more than a year, managing in the process to deliver several painful jabs of their spikes into the one pineapple hater in the house.
And then, to cap things completely the darn things got so heavy that one day they toppled the entire plant pots over - conveniently spilling dirt and muck all over my plate sitting on the worktop below.
The plate of course had my dinner on it, complete with a lovely piece of gammon that was then ruined.
Just like it is every time a bloody piece of pineapple is put in it!
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