homesick?

In a week and a day I go to America for six weeks with my son. This summer is painfully hot, already breaking the mercury and sending us gasping from one side of the street to the other. It's the time to creep from shadow to shadow, shade to shade, sleep the day away and come alive at night.

When your kid is a morning person, this just isn't going to happen.

We all piled into the Jeep for a final adventure before the summer crushes down on us. We drove to Kalba, then to Fujairah, where we stopped at the lovely Hilton for lunch. The Pitame boy ran into the ocean fully clothed. We ate hot lunches and drank cool fruit juices and talked about tsunami aftershocks as we watched a pitiful, rogue wave make off with someone's abandonned shoes and socks. We took the new road (116) over to Kalba and the old road (88) back from Fujairah, oogling the fruit stalls as we went. Two positively beligerent vendors tried to charge us 40 dirhams for a couple of mangoes, so we laughed and made our way back to the Jeep. NO wait wait. Take. Take. Eat. And they were cutting fruits and shoving morsels into our hands, practically into our mouths. Eat. Eat.

 

Which is how I discovered Chikus, or Khakis, these little, indeterminate brown ovoids with a surprising taste of pear and fig and date all rolled around on the tongue. For 25 dirhams we left with our mangos and chikus, and had a nice ten minute respite from driving while we waited for the Jeep to cool down. And learned a timely lesson in patience, for if you try to eat a chiku before it's ripe, all the spit in your mouth will be sucked out, and you'll be left with a bitter, sere taste that's difficult to expel. Wait til they are soft, and gently yeilding.

Part of the rythmn of life is in the foods that we eat. I'm an avid watcher of the produce aisles, coming gleefully home with sacks of blood oranges, or pomegranates, or strawberries in their proper time. I look at what is on offer here in the UAE and though I'm sometimes tempted, I don't buy the peaches from Australia. They are always out of season here, and the flavourless rocks everyone's trying to sell me just don't compare to the sweet, juice down your cheeks peaches I used to buy in America.

So I am homesick for the ritual of food as I knew it when I grew up: watermelon chilled in a stream and eaten on newspapers during July's family reunion, pomegranates around the kitchen table, chatting with my mother,at the end of the year. Red plums so juicy you couldn't eat them in polite company, around the beginning of July, and peaches whose scent transported you to heaven from a kilometre away. Blood oranges to stave away the worst of February's bleak, longest of nights, and strawberries off the vine in early June. And mangos. When I was a kid, as soon as mangoes showed up at the supermarket, my mother and I would glut ourselves, joyfully sticky and laughing all the while. But then they started showing up all the time; rather than spoil them, we waited til their season was again upon us before digging in.

Good things are worth waiting for. Especially here, where almost all produce is imported, it's crucial to wait and choose with the seasons. Shop locally, or pick those fruits and vegetables that are imported from as nearby as possible.

Because really, everyone should have a home made peach cobbler. And cherry pie. And apple fritters. And... chikus. Dragon fruit. Longans and lychees. Mangosteens.