Fruit

Jean E. Small, who co-owned and ran a Lexington Street pharmacy and was later honored for thousands of volunteer hours at Sinai Hospital and Meals on Wheels, died of Monday of complications from old age at Levindale Hebrew Convalescent Home. The Village of Cross Keys resident was 96. Born Esther Jeanette "Jean" Taylor in Baltimore, she attended city public schools and began working alongside her father at his Gay Street furniture business. She joined the Miriam Lodge and United Order of True Sisters, a Jewish charity organization, and delivered food baskets on the High Holy Days to the needy.

I vowed that I would never put pieces of fruit in my wine. But as May approached, I found myself dropping fresh strawberries in glasses of white wine and joyfully downing the mixture. There were two explanations for this behavior. Without woodruff Best Herb-Free: Meyer-Fonne Gentil d'Alsace, 2005. $12.80. Gorgeous golden wine that is sweet without being cloying. Crisp finish that pairs well with fruit and cheese. Ameztoi Getariako Txakolina, 2006. $14.99. A crisp wine from Spain's Basque Country.

Imagine brewing a cup of coffee from beans you grew yourself. Or making a pitcher of lemonade from your own lemons. Believe it or not, it's possible - not easy, but possible. Though most indoor plants are enjoyed for their foliage and some for their flowers, some fruit trees can be grown in containers and, if conditions are right, may eventually produce fruit. All fruiting plants will need lots of sunlight. "You want it in the brightest window possible," says Byron Martin, third-generation owner and president of Logee's, a Connecticut mail-order company that specializes in unusual tropical plants.

Recipe for a perfect picnic: Start with a glorious day -- blue sky, maybe a few puffy clouds, not too hot, not too cold, preferably with a gentle breeze. Add charming companionship, friends or family. Season with some of your favorite foods. Relax and enjoy.Of course, it's not that easy to whip up an ideal outdoor dining experience. It takes organization and labor beforehand. To help you execute a perfect picnic, we talked to food and organization experts, and checked out local sources for equipment.

Smooth way to fix fruitNo sleight of hand is required with this card deck. Any hand works. "The Smoothies Deck" (Chronicle, 1999) by Mary Corpening Barber, Sara Corpening Whiteford and Lori Lyn Narlock features 50 recipes for blended fruit concoctions. Cool Hand Lime (above) doubles as a creamy dessert or palate cleanser for a fancy dinner: 3/4 cup low-fat milk; 1/2 cup fresh lime segments, frozen; 3 tablespoons fresh lime juice; 3 cups nonfat vanilla frozen yogurt. Place ingredients in a blender.

IT IS RAINING figs in my back yard. It happens every August. The two fig trees planted in a strip of sorry soil next to our backyard parking pad start producing purple figs at a furious pace.Because some of the branches hang over our parked cars, part of my morning ritual becomes removing fallen figs from car windshields, hoods and rooftops. This summer, with the drought and state prohibition on washing cars at home, speedy removal of the figs has become especially important.Lifting a freshly fallen fig from a hood is a simple matter.

When shopping for lemons and limes, look for fruit with the smoothest skin and the smallest points on each end. They have more juice and better flavor.Lemons and limes will keep longer in the refrigerator if you place them in a clean jar, cover them with cold water and seal the jar well. After using half of the fruit, store the other half in the freezer in a plastic bag. This reduces the loss of moisture and retards bacterial growth. Properly refrigerated limes and lemons will last one to two months.

Q. While watering my azaleas this summer I've noticed small, white, fuzzy things sitting at the spot where the twigs are joined. Recently, I've seen a strange black coating on some leaves. What's going on? Is this cause for alarm?A. Those fuzzy things are the egg sacs of azalea bark scale. Tiny nymphs left the egg sacs in June and then began feeding on your azalea leaves. The black coating is sooty mold, a harmless fungus that grows on the plant sap excreted by the scale.If you see a large number of egg sacs and if there is leaf yellowing, spray your azaleas with a dormant oil this fall to kill overwintering nymphs.

Red-ripe and bursting with juice, strawberries are the sweet taste of childhood. Their scent conjures lazy days, warm evenings and suppers finished with homemade strawberry shortcake, warm from the oven and topped with sliced berries and clouds of whipped cream. They are spring's first fruit, one of the joys of living.Strawberries are relatively easy to grow in your own little patch or in a strawberry jar on the patio. A strawberry jar won't produce great quantities, but it will be enough for a few blissfully decadent daiquiris.

Q. I'm trying white potatoes and sweet potatoes for the first time in my small vegetable garden. How do I know when to harvest these underground crops?A. You can begin digging small, tender new potatoes when the plants are blooming. Gently dig up a single plant with a garden fork and check tuber size for desired eating quality. For larger potatoes that you want to eat fresh or store, wait and harvest when the plants begin to die.Keep soil hilled up around the plants to increase the number of tubers formed and to prevent sunlight from turning your spuds green.

The full moon rises over Baltimore today at 6:38 p.m. (five minutes earlier at the beaches). This being the last full moon before the autumnal equinox, it's often called the Fruit Moon, which shines, one presumes, on the ripening fruit. The Harvest Moon is defined as the full moon closest to the equinox, which falls this year on Sept. 22. So this year's Harvest Moon is still a month away, on Oct. 4.

I think I'm pretty safe in saying that sangria is the hottest cool drink of summer 2009. You can't exactly call this fruity wine punch trendy - it's been around too long - but it goes perfectly with the foods that are trendy right now. That means every Latino restaurant and tapas bar in the area is offering its variation on the red wine and fruit juice theme. (Not to mention non-Latino cafes and wine bars.) No other mixed drink that I can think of can be made so many different ways. These days you can use red, white or sparkling wine.

Gift-giving that bears fruit Christmas is truly a child's holiday. It is a day filled with wonder and joy, of love and reunion. Why should citrus play any role at all? At least that's a question that occurred to me most every Dec. 25 through the 1960s as I slid down the stairs (yes, slid on the back of my footed pajamas as it was less likely to wake sleeping parents in the pre-dawn hours) to discover that Santa had slipped tangerines and oranges into my stocking - again. What's the deal with all the fruit, fat man?

Late-season tomatoes are a difficult sell. They are not gorgeous. Spotty, misshapen, with fissures on their skin, they would be described, if they were children, as having faces that only their mothers could love. Yet in this, the shank of their season, they draw attention from me and the fruit flies. The fruit flies circle the tomatoes that sit on a kitchen counter, looking for soft spots. Only days before, the tomatoes had been on the vine, catching a last bit of sunshine before biting cold and fading daylight shut down production.

By all rights last fall, Doug Woerner, my downtown farmers' market late-season quince source, should have been feeling the love. The October 2007 issue of Martha Stewart Living had an article on quince, with several simple recipes. But not even the blessing of that well-known purveyor of "good things" helped move many pints or pecks of the fruit off Woerner Orchards' market table. I was, and still am, one of Woerner's only quince customers. I can't wait for his quince, with its knobby shape, glo-green color when not ready and almost fluorescent-yellow tone when ripe.

2006 Folonari Riesling From: Pavia, Italy Price: $ 9 serve with: seafood, spicy Asian cuisine Riesling is associated with Germany, Austria, France's Alsace region, Australia, Washington state - but seldom with Italy. This crisp, just-off-dry version of this noble white-wine grape is simply a wonderful value, however. It offers generous flavors of citrus fruit, apples, peaches and tropical fruit, but somehow never crosses the line into being overblown. It offers good acidity, a welcome touch of minerals to offset the fruitier flavors, and a zingy finish.

The full August moon was once known as the Fruit Moon, denoting its appearance while fruit is ripening on the trees. Last night's full moon was partially eclipsed during the afternoon, our time. At its peak, the Earth's shadow darkened about four-fifths of the moon's face as people from western China to western Europe watched. We in the New World were on the wrong side of the planet for this one. The next total lunar eclipse visible here will occur (numerologists take note) on 12/21/2010.

When Charlie Gailunas harvests zucchini from his lush Catonsville garden, he might overlook a specimen camouflaged beneath a canopy of leaves. "Sometimes you miss one," he says. By the time he finally discovers the hidden squash, it may have grown to baseball-bat proportions, far beyond the zucchini's capacity for tenderness and a pleasing, mild taste. Gailunas, a retired hospital administrator who has cultivated his 700-square-foot garden for 30 years, doesn't toss the zucchini, nor does he pawn it off. He makes Gagutz, a Sicilian soup introduced to him by a neighbor's mother who lived in Little Italy.

Which fruit ripen after they are picked - and why? For the lowdown on ripening, I called the postharvest information center at the University of California, Davis (postharvest.ucdavis.edu) and the California Tree Fruit Agreement (eatcaliforniafruit.com). Ripening, I learned, is a complex process involving three changes in fruit: Starch is converted to sugar; acidity levels decrease, and the cell walls of the fruit begin to break down, making the fruit soften. Not every fruit experiences all these changes, but all of them experience at least one. Climacteric fruit ripen after they are picked; nonclimacteric fruit do not. Nonclimacteric fruit include pineapples, cherries, grapes, citrus fruit, berries and watermelon.

From: Russian River Valley, Calif. Price: $40 Serve with: Roast poultry, tuna steakIt is not lightly that one recommends a $40 California pinot noir, but this Burgundylike beauty from Robert Stemmler is, if anything, underpriced for its exceptional quality. It offers bright black-cherry fruit - seasoned with subtle earthy notes - that just won't let go. Its full body is buffered by a silky texture that glides across the palate, and it exhibits flavors and aromas of wild berries and cranberry.