Food!

I’ve never really loved cooking.  Part of it is that I hated having to take so much time prepping the food, mixing, and then waiting for it all to be ready.  It doesn’t help that I usually don’t think about food until I’m already hungry.  Being hungry and then working on a meal that’s at least a half hour away from being edible is torture.  It’s so much easier to wrap a chimichanga in a paper towel and throw it in the microwave and have it ready.

The problem with that (besides all the fats and grease destroying my arteries and anything else in me that they possibly can) is that it doesn’t taste nearly as good as working from your own fresh materials.  I don’t have a vendetta against frozen foods or canned foods, but you can taste the difference when a meal is fresh and when it isn’t.

Before I lost my employee discount, I got Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: The Basics, which is what it sounds like, the basics of cooking everything under the sun, even how to cook an egg.  I’ve only tried one recipe so far: French toast.

Now, I already know how to cook French toast.  For all my complaining about cooking, I can fix anything that involves breakfast.  I don’t know if it’s the most important meal of the day but it sure is my favorite.  I mostly wanted to see if I could make French toast better.

Turns out, their recipe calls for a larger milk to egg ratio than I usually put in, which means that I could get seven slices of toast out of only two eggs—it usually takes me three or four eggs to get that amount.  And there are some intriguing ideas to add to it.  This weekend, I’ll be trying how it tastes to add chopped almonds on there.

I am not in fear of starving or eating crap for a while yet.

And while I’m on the subject of food, I had spring break last week, and while everybody else I know took this opportunity to go to parties, visit family, do a road trip, or get caught up on all that other work they’ve neglected, I ate apples.

You read it correctly.  Apples.  They are the most perfect food in the world.  Not only are they tasty, healthy and can fill you up when taken at the end of a meal, but they also have a rich presence in history and mythology, something few other foods can claim to.  Although there’s plenty to criticize about my eating habits, I typically do have at least one apple every day.

And the variety of apples is incredible.  It doesn’t take much.  Go to any grocery store and you are swamped with the wide variety of colors, sizes, and shapes of these beauties.  But it certainly does not end in the grocery store.  I recently discovered that there are over 7,500 cultivars of apples in the world.

So I decided to start trying out these different varieties.  At my regular grocery store, I snapped up one of each selection they had and throughout the week, tried one at the end of most every meal.  Here are my thoughts on each apple type:

Honeycrisp—it has a very subtle sweet flavor and I do like how it feels to bite into it; trouble is, the sweetness is so mellow and the price is so high (just the one cost me $2.63) that it’s really not worth it for me.

Red Delicious—worst apple of this bunch.  Unlike Honeycrisp, which had little flavor, Red Delicious has none.  Worse, these have never lasted me more than three days.  I tried this one the day after I bought it and it was already starting to turn brown.  That and the skin is so thick that you have to chew it half a dozen times before you can swallow.

Braeburn—tart and wonderful.  One of the smaller apples on this cart but that worked just fine for me.  I like having my apples be a nice addition to the meal, I don’t need them to be the meal itself.

Granny Smith—on the sour side, which I like.  The skin is as tough as Red Delicious, which I don’t enjoy at all.

Gala—about as perfect an apple as I could hope for.  Juicy, sweet, and so big that it makes me want to vomit, but just right for a meal or a snack, whenever the time is.

Golden Delicious—so much better than the Red.

Pink Lady—my favorite thus far.  Plenty of flavor, sweet, the juice is a little thick but the costs outweigh that little thing.

Fuji—it was yummy.

Jonagold—the flavor is as muted as Honeycrisp but nowhere near as pricey.