Every so often, I’m lucky enough to get the opportunity to have an extended visit with my friend R. That involves breakfast, usually lunch and on rare days, like today, dinner. Today, as we sometimes do, we had breakfast at an all-day breakfast café near my home. I had a plate of neatly stacked French toast with scrambled eggs and R had the big breakfast with all the meats that tend to turn my stomach into a roaring ocean: bacon, ham, and sausage. As we ate our leisurely meal, we chatted about all sorts of things and mapped out the rest of our day.

Today we planned a very late lunch/early dinner at a favourite restaurant where R will definitely upgrade his meat choice and I might actually act like the omnivore I am. After being told I need to eat more meat a few years ago – apparently, my primarily vegetarian diet doesn’t provide my body with enough iron and protein – I now indulge in feasting on select meats (except pork, which I can’t digest) to keep my body steeped in hemoglobin. But I digress…

The plans for the rest of the day involved more food, conversation, and laughter. However, after our very late lunch/early dinner we knew we needed much lighter fare to take us through the evening. This called for a quick trip to the grocery store to grab some fruit and snacks. As we walked through the produce department deciding which fruit would be best I came across something I couldn’t make sense of. Were they mini mini eggplants/aubergines?

Nope…

They were grapes: sweet sapphire grapes to be exact. I’d never seen anything like them before. According to my mother – to whom I sent a photo of this strange fruit – and the interwebs, they are an old variety of grape. They are black, seedless, elongated, and tubular with dimpled ends. These grapes can grow as large as 5 cm to 7 cm (2 in to 2.75 in); and are usually harvested in mid to late August. Because we’d never seen them before we didn’t buy any. Truth be told, they freaked me out a bit. However, I’ll head back to the grocery store over the weekend so I can try them now that I know they are not mutant, radiated, GMO something or others.

In the meantime, I’m wondering how many other customers had a similar reaction to mine, or if others were more adventurous about trying this unidentifiable food object upon first sight…