Dutch pears, Spanish plums and Saturday desserts

I am working on my Saturday desserts which are not decided yet in process in my mind. The selected ingredients have reached the kitchen table and looked so beautiful over the wood surface that I decided to give them more attention.

The main ingredients are Conference pears from The Netherlands and black plums from Spain some of the imported fruits easy to find in any Norwegian market/supermarket. Norway imports the absolute majority of the fruits and vegetables found in the markets. Both climate and geography create natural barriers to agriculture in this country. The climate shortens the agriculture season which last four or five months while the dramatically beautiful geography leaves on 3% of land in conditions to be cultivated.



Even the traditional fruits, produced locally, are not enough to serve the entire population what makes them even more expensive. Norwegian apples, plums, blueberries, raspberries and strawberries are adored by its people but the season are shorter and the production insufficient. Those who aim at a basket of locally strawberries or cranberries, in their high season, must accept to pay double price if compared with the same fruits imported from The Netherlands and Belgium, traditional Norwegian suppliers.

The problem of the fruit prices in Norway is pretty serious even in face of governmental efforts to stop prices from rising. Besides, the perversity of international trade, European protectionism and the ambitiousness of supermarket chains make things very complicated for the Norwegian, even if this country pays very high wages to its people.



I am a daughter of the hot tropics used to a large variety of organic locally produced fruits and vegetables. Raise among a multitude of garden and back yard trees where we climbed everyday for guava, bananas, mangoes, avocados, pitangas, jabuticabas, amoras, caquis and figs. Where fruits au naturel and fruit compotes are the everyday desert.

It reminded me of a community in the Orkut where a group of Brazilian claimed that "Fruits are not desserts" criticizing the Brazilian of serving a slice of papaya or a slice of pineapple as dessert. Serving plain fruits as desserts is the ultimate Brazilian tradition in a not at alltraditional country.




These pears are in their best days, sweet and soft and so are the plums, which exhibit in their flesh the most amazing color palette.

I simply adore fruits.