‘Prime 9’ Fruit that pose as veggies

Who knows exactly when, but by the time you are old enough to understand ‘you could HATE V-8’ juice you have learned that tomatoes are classed botanically as fruit rather than vegetables. I guess sometimes, fresh grown tomatoes can be very sweet so in a way I freely accept them as fruit. But some things on my ‘Poser’ list are just too hard to choke down as fruity-foods both LITERALLY and figuratively.

So two of my least favorites include Cucumbers and Eggplant. Yes I can enjoy an occasional ‘Zesty Dill’ or a crisp sweet pickle chip, but please keep all other forms of Cucumbers away from me. They pollute all that they touch with their stinky green skin. Eggplants taste dull and just look too shiny and ‘purpley’ to trust. They remind me of some kind of ‘bruise gone wild’ or my foot after I stub my big toe.

Pumpkin and Squash I tolerate for two entirely different reasons. Once when I was younger my wife grew an enormous 115 pound pumpkin. I carved it out from the bottom and with the help of two highly paid illegal aliens wore it around my head like Darth Vader with a spray-on tan. Let’s just say I was popular with the kid in the day, but not so much with my wife later when those pumpkin innards glued themselves to my hair. I will always have a soft spot in my hair for Pumpkins. Squash is not bad cut up and stir-fried with some kind of meat grease. But its real value to me is to dry them out and fill them with BB’s to make maracas. I love squash maracas – until they break.

Finally the last 4 botanically classed fruit that most of us consume as veggies are the hardest to accept. Yes perennial ‘flavorites’ like corn, beans, peas, and sweet peppers are all actually fruity by nature. I know I know, it shakes your faith to the ‘apple-core’ that you have been deceived by public education and worse - the supermarket. Up to now, other than church, the grocery produce aisle was the last bastion of honesty and organic purity left in America. Who knows what’s real anymore or what to believe? The next thing you will be telling me is that potatoes have ‘eyes’ and lettuce has ‘heads’. Yeah right – what do you think I just fell off a turnip trike?