Aside from beach holidays and road trips with your friends, what does summer reminds you of? Here in the Philippines, summer means a steady rise of temperature and an abundance of fruits that you can only find during the hot and humid weather.
Exploring the wet market gives you that pleasant surprise to find so many fruits in season. It’s one thing I love about summer here. Never mind the heat, that is simply inevitable. A few days ago, hubby took home a small basket of Duhat, that’s black plum in English. Our neighbor planted a small tree a few years ago and it is now bearing fruits. Fresh pick, so sweet and juicy. I haven’t tasted duhat for so many years now so it was kind of a thrill to satisfy my taste buds with it. It does reminds me of the early years. My cousins and I used to pick them in the province when we were kids. Climbing trees and eating the juicy black fruits were part of my colorful childhood life.
Yesterday, I bought a kilo of Sineguelas, those juicy and somewhat sour fruits which are good eaten chilled, with a dash of salt. Sineguelas is a Tagalog term which means Spanish plum. Have you ever seen a sineguelas tree laden with fruits? The weird thing about it is, it has to shed all its leaves before tiny buds appear in small branches of the tree. Until the fruit ripens, the tree remains bereft of its green leaves.
I don’t exactly know where this fruit originated, for more than fifty years, I know it simply as sineguelas. Sineguelas, anyone?
Dreams And Escapes 
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