Total mundane yes, but it is the season here in Oz and some of my favourite stonefruits are starting to hit the supermarkets.
Over the weekend I picked up a nice bag of cherries, and some really nice lychees. 
Interesting side note - I have now discovered the second thing my dog won’t eat. Lemons and now Lychees. (And yes I peeled it for him first:rolleyes:)
What are stonefruit?
Fruits that have a large(compared to the size of the fruit) seed which is hard and ‘stone’ like if you will. Looking up Wiki apparently the technical term is “Drupes” Who knew?
“a drupe is a fruit in which an outer fleshy part (exocarp, or skin; and mesocarp, or flesh) surrounds a shell (the pit or stone or pyrene) of hardened endocarp with a seed inside.”
It’s fruits like Cherries, Lychees, Apricots, Peaches and Plums amongst others.
My personal fav’s are the cherries and Lychees, and those two particualry having growing seasons in Australia that means good fresh ones start showing up in stores about a month or so before Christmas.
I love this time of year when the apricots appear in the fruit shops.
I felt rather stupid when I realized that stonefruit meant things like peaches and the like. I spent a long time thinking it was some exotic fruit I had never heard of.
My favourite stonesfruits at this time of year are cherries and nectarines. Nom.
You happy folks do know that it snowed in San Francisco the other day, don’t you? <jealous grumbling ensues>
I’ll be happier once the prices start dropping. Cherries are down from $15/kg to $12/kg, but that’s still way too high.
Early season and all that …
What’s a lychee?
I started trying to describe a lychee, but seriously I couldn’t do better than Wikipedia. Lychee. I find them very tasty. Commonly used in South-East Asian cooking (and apparently other parts of Asia).
They can grow in the warmer areas of Australia. My mother grew them when she lived in Northern NSW (near the Queensland border).
We have a peach tree in our front garden.
And another one out the back.
You may all proceed to envy me now
well, in another couple of weeks when they’re ripe anyway…
Oh, lychees! It’s been years since I had one!
They aren’t in the grocery stores around here and the nearest place I know to get them is Chinatown in Chicago. I keep hoping they get more popular as other Asian foods have over the years, but not yet… I hear they do grow some in the US but apparently they ethnic markets absorb them all.
<grrrr! danged lucky other-hemisphere-dwelling peachtree-having Dopers!! grrrr!>
Nothing compares to fresh peach pie… mmmmm… pie…
So, whattaya cook with lychees? Because, although I am a hardcore fruit lover, and I have made quince pie and eaten wild buttonberries and gooseberries and made passionfruit jam, I could never quite get a handle on how I might use lychees.
One of these days, I am going to make jam from loquats, but my God! I’ll be at it all day.
Cook with them?
I just peel 'em and eat 'em.
The fact that y’all in Oz are in your stone fruit season means that we in the U.S. have just passed the halfway mark on our way back to our local stone fruit season. I love them, too, and we’re lucky where I live to have a family-run orchard nearby to supply us with (in order of ripening): cherries, apricots, plums, nectarines, and peaches. Pluots are in there somewhere, too.
Oh, well, during the autumn, winter and spring I console myself with figs, honeycrisp apples, clementines and navel oranges.
Me, I’m looking forward to the carambola/starfuits and pomegranates we get this time of year.