Top Ten Fruits

Some days you’ve got deep, insightful posts, and some days you just have random stuff that occur to you at the last minute. I have nothing profound to say, so I’m going to give you instead:

My Top 10 Fruits

Honorable mention #1: Cherries. Love them, but I don’t eat them often enough to have them crack the top ten. Also: the pits.

Honorable mention #2: Grapes. I eat a fair bit of them, but they’re round, and roll all over the place too easily. They’re hard to eat quickly, because some of them inevitably have started to rot on the stem, and they sit there waiting for you to be lulled into eating them by accident. Boo!

Honorable mention #3: Apples. Just too hard. I’m sorry. I like them baked, but I actively dislike them raw. I’ll only resort to apples if I’m really getting desperate. But yay for apple cobbler.

10: Cantaloupe. Generally good fruit. I almost never pass it up on a buffet. But let’s be honest: it’s not going to win any awards. It’s just generally good. Better than honeydew, but that’s all it’s really got going for it. Can’t bake with it. Hard to peel it.

9: Oranges. I’m a big fan. Honestly. But for the love of all that’s sweet, I can’t stand peeling the dang things. Any fruit that can physically harm your fingernails has to get docked a few places. It’s a rule. But they are a key ingredient in my favorite kind of roll (orange rolls), so they’ve got that going for them.

8: Tangerines. Not as good as oranges, if I’m being honest, but so much easier to peel. It just goes to show that if the end result is easier to get to, then it wins out over a superior product that’s obnoxious to access.

7: Watermelon. Nothing like a good watermelon, right? Except they’re such a pain to actually buy and bring home and cut up. It’s not like you can just grab one on the way to work. You need a honking big knife and a cutting board to really get at them. And good luck telling if it’s going to taste good or not. I have to dock points for that.

6: Pineapple. Good stuff, the pineapple. Why did I dock the orange for being hard to access, but the pineapple gets a pass? Because the pineapple isn’t trying to be anything it’s not. It’s doesn’t pretend to want you to eat it. Its entire outside is basically a big “GO AWAY” sign. And yet once you’re able to get in there, mmmmm mmmmm good.

5: Peaches. Very tasty, but they’ve got such a narrow window of actually being good. If they’re not ripe enough, then they’re hockey pucks that taste like cardboard. If they’re too ripe, then they drip juice all into my beard. Come on, peaches!

4: Strawberries. Great fruit. Lovely in salads. But such a wide range of tastes. Finding a really perfect strawberry can be difficult, and once you finally do, you’ve eaten it in like two bites. Plus, they go rotten in the fridge too easily. On the other hand, you can cover them in chocolate really easily, since they have that built in handle. Genius.

3: Mango. My golly. Talk about a premium fruit. Honestly, this one might have made a go at one of the two top spots, except for one thing. How in the world do you eat the thing? It’s got this peel that won’t, and this pit that tries to hold onto the fruit for dear life. If my wife wasn’t around, I don’t think I’d ever eat a mango, because I’m convinced she’s one of the few people in the world who knows the secret.

2: Bananas. Probably not the flashiest fruit out there, but also the one I eat the most of. I have one for a snack every day, and I have one in my smoothie each evening. Which maybe means they should be my number one, but I just can’t. Still, they’re super easy to peel, they’re sweet and delicious, and they go great with baking. They’re just a bit . . . generic. Sorry, bananas.

1: Blueberries. In a landslide. I’ve loved these since forever, and I would gladly eat them by the bucketful. No wonder I moved to Maine. They’re great in smoothies, by themselves, on pancakes, in pancakes, in muffins. You name it. They are the best fruit ever.