Lilac Colored Glasses

(Haiku Friday people, if you don’t want to read this first part, just scroll down, the haiku is after it)

You may remember a post about helping CB’s friends move from Gent to Zulte. Well, those are the friends that invited us out to barbecue last night. The original plan had been to meet up with them at the Gentse Feesten but when CB called his friend Willy*, we were invited to their house to cook out in the yard instead. I had no problem with this and neither did CB so he confirmed it with Willy and then, through a cluttered haze of rapid fire Dutch I was able to hear something along the lines of “we got a whole lot of kiwis in our biopakket this week so we’ll bring a fruitsalad.”

Fuck.

That pretty much meant I would be making a fruit salad for us to bring the next day.

“Why,” you may be wondering, “is making a fruit salad such a big deal?”

Simple. Because fruit salad has apparently become my “specialty.”
You know how every woman in your family over a certain age always has some sort of special dish that they’re expected to make at holidays and get togethers and functions? If not then maybe that’s just my family, which is where the Jewish mother thing comes in.

See, in my family, all of the woman over 30 seem to have a specialty. My late grandmother Marian made cranberry mould (spelling?) for Thanksgivings and apricot chicken for Friday night dinners with the family. My late great aunt Joan always made the Charosses for Passover. My Gram makes gefilte fish by hand and bakes amazing everything (but her big thing is mandel bread which is sort of like Jewish biscotti). My aunt Fran always makes jello salads and briskets and my aunt Karen, when she’s in town makes some good kasha and bows. Oh and my mom makes amazing mashed potatoes, potato salad, and dill dip with dark rye bread.

Everyone has something and no one ever steps on anyone else’s toes with who makes what (unless someone is sick, passes away, or it is cleared with the “specialist” in advance). Everyone seems proud of their chosen dishes and is always tweaking and embellishing their own recipes to make it taste better or feed a certain number of people.

But not me. What do I suddenly get tapped for every time we attend a friends’ place for dinner?

Fruit salad.

The funny thing is I’d never even made a fruit salad until I moved to Belgium. Then one day I made a container of it in an attempt to get us to eat all the fruit from the biopakket. Consequently, we were invited to Willy and Lilly’s* house for the first time on the night I made that fateful salad, so we brought it with us to dinner. It wasn’t even that good, if you ask me, but sure enough, the night we stayed for dinner after helping with the move, CB and Willy went out shopping and came back with a big bag of fruit and vegetables. I offered to help CB chop vegetables for a tossed salad but he somehow dissapeared and I ended up making the salad with some help from another woman who was helping with the move. CB reappeared and said something about Willy mentioning that Lilly like fruit salad and suddenly I had the bag of fruit in front of me and there I was, making fruit salad. Again, I didn’t think it was anything spectacular.

It’s just cut up chunks of fruit with some sort of citrus juice to prevent it all from turning brown.

But somehow (thanks to my loving boyfriend) it seems that the trend will continue and that my first official specialty has become fruit salad. So you know what? yesterday, I decided to own my specialty and I really put an effort into the salad: granny smith apples, nectarines, blueberries, bananas, kiwi, mandarins and pecans tossed in fresh squeezed orange juice and a couple teaspoons of honey.

I rocked that frickin’ fruit salad!

Which I guess pretty much sealed my fate as resident fruit salad specialist.

….sigh…

*-names have been changed

Framed by weathered wood
The grey sky is blue again
I can feel the sun.