Eight pounds of pawpaws

After a brief trip for a memorial service, I have gotten back home and am catching up on many things. I finally finished tweaking the dog portrait pencil drawing and have started the inking. I made some minor alterations to the left dog, but that right one has given me fits. I ended up changing the left eye and fooled around with his muzzle to where I didn’t see Tramp so much. It’s not ready to show quite yet, but I should be into the watercolors by Sunday.

A pile of pawpaws

Among other things happening in the last few days, I decided that we needed to have a pawpaw expedition.  The weather here is starting to change.  It is supposed to rain tomorrow and the temperatures are dropping, so it seemed a good idea to have a major hunt for the pawpaws.  We found quite a few as you can see, not including about four pounds that went home with a friend. However I think we should have gone out a week or two ago.  Some that we had noticed on earlier walks were no longer there or were way too ripe, but we still ended up with a good haul.  I think next year, I’ll have to pick more in mid September.  The kitchen smells heavily of ripe fruit and I will need to get most of it into the freezer soon.

Do you even know what a pawpaw is?

A single paw paw hanging down

I sure didn’t until earlier this summer. When I was out picking blackberries with a friend, she noticed that there were a lot of small pawpaw trees in the field we were in.  There was no fruit on the smaller trees she pointed out, but I knew I had seen them before.  As we walked our path around the property, I saw literally hundreds of pawpaw trees.  We started looking for fruit and sure enough we finally saw some.  It is not like domesticated fruit trees where there are dozens hanging down.  Most trees had none and when we did see some, it was usually only one or a very few.

The mother lode

Still, with so many trees we have found dozens. I got myself dizzy walking the path and looking up at the same time. LOL    The tree trunks are slender and very bendable.  I could grab the trunk and literally pull it over to reach the high hanging fruit. I managed to pick one that was ripe a couple of weeks ago and the consensus was that it tasted somewhat like a ripe banana.  I picked a few more today.  The smallest  one is ripe but  I am not quite sure about the other two.  Still, I picked them just to experiment on how soft they need to be before they can be eaten.  I am going to go on line and look for some recipes later.  I am not fond of ripe bananas, but John liked the way they tasted.  I’m thinking that I might make a banana bread recipe and use the pawpaws instead.  The consistency was about the same.

I picked these today

The size variation is pretty big as you can see.  And in the picture above with the four, the largest one has to be close to 5″ long.  The pawpaw is the largest native American fruit according to Wikipedia but I hadn’t ever noticed them before.

I have been working outside some and straightening up in the studio lately, so not much creative work has been accomplished except for a few gift tags and cards to list in my etsy shop.  I have been talking to several people about commission work so maybe the holiday season purchasing has begun.  With any luck we can work out the details and I can start something very soon.  Or maybe I’ll just paint the these.  There probably aren’t too may paintings of pawpaws out there, do you think?