I love citrus fruits and berries but I don't normally buy apples, pears and the like because you tend to have to make a commitment to eating a whole one. If you open a satsuma you can eat the segments slowly without worry that they'll go brown from oxidisation and berries, of course, are perfect little self-contained wonders. Not so with an apple: leave it for five minutes while you take a phone call and you come back to something that looks like it's already decomposing.

Which is why I was glad to see some small pears in the supermarket when I grabbed some groceries before my evening calls last Thursday. Of course, they were hard when I got them but I was hoping that they'd ripen up over night and that I'd be able to have one for breakfast the next day, or over the weekend, or maybe on Monday. But by Tuesday morning they still felt like they'd been carved from jade.

That was a little disappointing as I had to go away for a couple of days and I expected that I'd return to a bowl of liquid pear goop. But no. This evening I returned home and found the pears are still giving me a nine or 10 on Mohs scale. So maybe I'll get to have pears for breakfast and maybe they'll have their moment of ripeness overnight and they'll be "dead pears" in the morning.

As I've said, the really good ingredients don't need much in the way of cooking, anyway. So while it would be nice to experiment with some of the vegetables I saw there and don't have at home I wasn't too worried. I started off buying 2oz of sliced, dried persimmons. They're not too sweet, chewy and don't have that mouth drying effect you sometimes get from a raw persimmon. But they definitely have the fragrance and perfume you get from the fresh fruit.

Then the chap running the fresh fruit stand gave me a Fuji apple to test. I did and I liked it. Sweet and crispy, it was a great breakfast and most likely more healthy than a muffin or a pastry. I got half a dozen to take back with me so that I have something healthy to start the next few days with.

If it hadn't been so hot I'd have stayed longer. But it's still April and I'm not yet ready for 90°F, so I made a hasty exit and did a very un-English thing and found some shade.