Mom's trunk persimmons

My mom has always been a feeder. Yes, many children of feeding moms think their moms are extreme cases, but ask anyone who's passed through our home while growing up and they'll tell you that my mom's a particularly extreme case. It used to grate on me so much when she would make our whole family late because she was cutting mangos and melons for the half-hour ride to church. And until these recent years when I've had to plan my meals ahead and cook for myself, I didn't correctly understand why my mom always asked us what we wanted to eat for lunch while we were still working on our breakfasts. I just thought she was just a food-obsessive, or what we would now call, a "foodie."

Well, now that she has two beautiful grandsons to feed, I'm no longer the object of her feeding mania, at least not in her kitchen. In fact, the tables have turned and now I'm the food-obsessed maniac who approaches her every week with bags of something new to eat. That doesn't mean she's completely retired from the kitchen. She's opened a traveling food cart of shorts out of her Volvo wagon trunk. Whenever I see her she automatically opens up the trunk door, rummages through a dozen or so grocery bags and fruit boxes, and pulls out enough food to feed 6 people for a week. Since it's just me with not much room for storage, I usually have to do a little editing out of stuff. But she doesn't make it easy an easy process and I inevitably end up tossing much of it in the trash.

Last week I shamefully found myself with a whole basket full of overripe persimmons. I tried to cut them up and finish them off, but they would just collapsed into a pile of mush. Then I realized these had a nice hard shell that could serve as their own cups, and that's when the fun began. I lopped off the stem with a paring knife, nestled the fruit in a little bowl and dug in with a little spoon like a pint of ice cream. They were so much fun to eat I managed to finish off the entire basket - about ten of them. So if you ever find yourself with too many ripe persimmons that your mom tried to force feed on you, you now have a good technique for finishing them off.