Tag Archives: apple

Always be prepared

I’m off to a full-day workshop tomorrow, and I have no idea what the food situation will be.  Will there be coffee?  Will there be munchies?  Will I have time to grab lunch?  Will I starve to death in a room full of strangers?

But don’t you worry!  My bag is stuffed full of granola bars, apples and lollipops.  You know, just the basics.

An apple-y weekend

On Friday night, I attended a clothing swap that was to be accompanied by wine & apple tasting. Now, I had no doubt that there would be wine tasting, but lo and behold, there was an apple tasting! We did blind tastings of six types of apples (red delicious, gala, jonagold, fuji, ambrosia, and spartan), and I managed to identify only two of them (gala and red delicous). Sad. I’ll have to work on my apple palate.

I managed to catch a little bit of this weekend’s apple festival. Alas, all the tastings were sold out by the time I got there so I couldn’t practice! There was a display of different types of apples – at least 200 types, I’d say – that was really interesting, and a cider demonstration. The best part was the market, where for $6 you could buy 5Lb bags of apples to take home for the winter. There must have been close to 40 types of apples, many of which I’d never even heard of.

Given that I had bought close to 10Lb of apples while in the interior last weekend, I passed on buying more. I did buy a giant bag of apple chips (oh, so tasty and crispy and delicious) and they have disappeared faster than I could have predicted.

Pi(e) day

Tomorrow is March 14, or 03/14, or 3.14, or pi. I haven’t decided what pie I will celebrate with, but it’s a toss-up between traditional apple pie, banana cream pie, or banana peanut butter pie. I’m sort of leaning towards banana peanut butter pie but I don’t know if i have enough time for all the components. We’ll see what happens.

Comfort food for rainy days

This weekend was the winter farmer’s market and I picked up some gorgeous buttery baby potatoes, baby sunchokes, walnuts, and fuji apples. As soon as I got home, I sliced up the sunchokes and pan-fried them with garlic and rosemary. There’s a distinctive sweetness to sunchokes that gets me every time. I’m going to boil the potatoes, smoosh them with the palm of my hand into little medallions, and then roast them in the oven with olive oil and rosemary. The fuji apples are ridiculously crisp and sweet, and I have yet to smash open the walnuts – but I can’t wait!

A friend gave me some organic carrots and vanilla (talk about extravagance), so I did what any normal person would do and made a four-layer carrot cake with cream cheese-vanilla icing. The icing tasted so vanilla-y and creamy – remarkably like vanilla ice cream – that I ate more than a quality-control portion while waiting for the cake to cool.

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When soggy bagels are all I can think about

Yesterday I ran 10 km in the National Capital Race Weekend. Two years ago I traned for about three months, and finished in 58 minutes. This time around I put in a week of half-assed training and came in at 1 hour, 3 minutes. Not bad.

The thing with 10 km is that I get really bored at the 8 km mark, and I have to think of reasons to keep running. Invariably, it’s the post-run bagel that gets me going. They’re soft and bready, ever-so-slightly-soggy from sitting in a plastic bag, and they’re cold. But after 10 km, they taste like the most delicious thing in the world.

Alas! By the time I got to the food tent, all the bagels were gone! Yargh!

I had to settle for several bananas, apple slices and one orange slice (I think I got the last one, so there). I also had some free yogurt and lots of red radioactive gatorade.

Maybe it’s those five minutes that make the difference between getting a post-run bagel and not getting a post-run bagel. I guess I’ll run faster next time.