august flies by...

goodness, another week just flies by...it's hard to believe that I'll be back in school again; it's that dilemma where you're really excited about everything but the immense amounts of work looming ahead. I have to admit that I haven't cooked anything particularly interesting this week, due mostly to the weather (excessively humid). I did make some apple crisp on wednesday, when mika cooked dinner for us at lmf.

that's a mini-food story on its own, though. trips to harvest are always an adventure. it's probably good that it feels like it's farther away than the 2 blocks it really is. I went there intending to buy apples and butter for the apple crisp, and emerged with some nice, big organic apples (granny smith, which were an abnormally darkish green, and gala), butter, some erivan yogurt with a granola packet, fresh mozzarella, and some heirloom tomatoes. I must say that I wasn't particularly impressed with the tomatoes, although the mozzarella was quite good. though my father (who does the food shopping at home) always bought the beefsteak tomatoes from market basket, rather than the on-the-vine hothouse tomatoes that are so trendy these days, my mother supplemented our tomato supply in the summer with her tomato plants. my idea of what a tomato tastes like is slightly better than the average hard-pink-tomato eater's idea, I think. anyway, buy your heirloom tomatoes from a farmer's market.

the erivan yogurt purports to be from "cows with names," pasteurized only once. I think I would need to do a side-by-side tasting to determine the difference between ultra-pasteurized dairy products and pasteurized dairy products. I occasionally buy the garelick pasteurized heavy cream in the hopes that it will taste radically different from the ultrapasteurized stuff, but it really doesn't. I suppose my palate is just underdeveloped. back to the erivan yogurt. well, that must have been the sourest yogurt I've ever had. it wasn't as smooth-looking as regular yogurt - it was more a suspension of tiny white solid particles and whey-colored slightly viscous liquid. at any rate, it was SOUR. the granola helped, but only so much. I wonder who eats it; since it's still selling, somebody must be buying it. hopefully, the popularity-gaining yogurt won't be a victim of food trendiness in the near future; that is to say, it won't become an overly manipulated foodstuff. too many bad things happen to good food. greek yogurt has been gaining favor rapidly, as are more european-style yogurts (they're thicker, and have far fewer flavors). I look for the greek yogurt every time I got to harvest, trader joe's, and whole foods, but the articles that say they sell greek yogurt are lying. my favorite yogurt ever was the mango yogurt I had in lisbon, from the supermarket, but that was probably because it was packaged in small round jars (which I took home with me...one I gave to sonia and one I gave to my mother.

it would be interesting to know how one's perception of something affects how you taste it (I'm sure there are studies on this; I am currently too lazy to look for them. I am also supposed to be working). for example, I bought these organic apples instead of conventional ones; large, loose ones instead of small, bagged economy ones. so theoretically the organic apples are better, but do they actually taste better? on the matter of organic v. conventional, I am willing to go for organic due to perceived future health benefits, but I would like to know if these loose apples are better than the smaller ones. they had an edge over smaller apples as tasted from the apple crisp, but whether that's because I expected it, I will never know.

taste combination of the week: vanilla ice cream with freshly crumbled bits of digestive biscuit mixed in. heck, plain digestive biscuits too, while we're at it.