Wasted Pineapple

This is not the pineapple you think it is.









As usual, I thought I had a good idea. I like rum and I like my friends so I invited my friend Dani up for dinner and some rum drinks. I have a borrowed juicer and I knew a juice recipe that had all the things I think go great with rum: pineapple, lime and mint. Sounds great. Plus I had made some regular + sun-dried tomato pesto. I had mung-bean vermicelli, you know, that clear kind. I also had some plans to do with a pot of lima beans. It's great, even though I'd been on a big downer. The night, and the drinking was designed to pick me up. Pick us both up.

But, quite frankly, and I am admitting it to myself and to any others that care to listen. I do not like mint drinks. I tried to make this mint juice one time and I thought I just over-minted it. I think fresh mint can be kind of bitter if too much is used, and both the last time I tried it, and this time, when I totally cut the recipe past half, I got the bittery mint blues.

Which, I must tell you is a waste of a good pineapple. I enjoy a good juice now and then and the fun of a well-made juicer. But, watching pineapple go through it, all sticky and strange, the pulp all still full of juice, the beautiful fibery goodness of pineapple given up for the juices I could have anyway just by putting the delicious pineapple unjuiced in my mouth, is enough to send me to fruit-blues jail on the spot.

So, I was happy to have juiced and then almost immediately felt like a big juicy failure. Dani drinks because she knows I enjoy it. And the way I was enjoying it was dirtying up my drink with more and more rum to mask the failure my juice. Which, by the way, was meager in amount-ness. Another thing I don't like about juicing a pineapple, it's a big looking fruit, but yields a small amount of juice.

So, don't get me wrong, the food was delicious, the company great, although moods were both running a little bit dark, and this wasn't helped by the rum putting my buddy on the verge of a migraine. Sigh.

Luckily, we were sitting there talking and counting up our friends who are currently dying, when who should stop by but our wonderful neighbors across the hall. Two Chris's, married with a three year old Hazel, who I enjoy sharing my juice with. Hazel said the juice made her lip tingly. I had the same reaction.

The Chris's brought another bottle of rum. Darker and more delicious than the cheap stuff I had. Plus, they brought good cheer, wonderful conversation and our chirping the night away attracted Joel from down the hall. And then there was more merriment! At least I think there was. I remember the next day feeling kind of exhausted and out of sorts (still).

Ah, well. I am eating my pineapples intact from now on. Pineapple #9, I hardly knew ye, and forgot, even, to take your picture.