Coming to grips with grapes
Extra credit if you can name the cultural reference that informs the title of my post today.
Hint: You have to be extra weird to get it. But in a good way, like the pirate.
And the way it ties in today, is on the subject of grapes and at least one other thing.
Have you tried lately to buy a good grape?
You should know that for many years I have been more or less obsessed (overused word; forgive me but in this case it is accurate) with red grapes.
Green grapes are okay but I'm going for the resveratrol in the red kind.
For a long time, as soon as I bought my grapes, I froze them.
Then, when thawed for a certain length of time (about ten minutes), they were like round semi-mushy popsicles. Most delicious and fun to eat.
Best for summertime, but I look for grapes year round.
Here is the problem: It has become difficult to find good-tasting grapes.
And then there is the price, which is at times so outrageous that I won't buy the grapes no matter what they taste like.
But lets talk about taste. And texture! As those concepts apply to the red table grape.
Two things are paramount: a snap when you bite, and a tart-sweet flavor. Juicy of course, but not too juicy.
Naturally then, when I come upon the grapes in the produce department, I first look them over. I'm checking out their overall appearance, to include their size. And then if I think there is hope, I taste one or two.
If you put a grape in your mouth and bite down and there is a slight resistance, that's a good sign.
But then the taste which follows must be an ideal balance between sweet and tart.
It's a heady mix and more often than not, the grapes I encounter these days do not pass muster.
I've tried putting red grapes on my list when TG graciously goes to the store for me, and keeping my fingers crossed when he comes back and I find that he bought some.
Easy Candied Pecans cooling on the Silpat
It's not that he is ignorant of grape characteristics; it's just that he does not eat them, so it doesn't mean as much to him what they taste like.
He makes every attempt to bring me what I'm looking for in a grape, and often succeeds.
But a few months ago I had to tell him that what he'd brought home was not up to snuff in the least.
They were large round globe grapes.
I'm sorry and if you like this variety of grape, God bless you, but for me? Just no.
These grapes are, one, too big. Too round. And, two, they have seeds.
SEEDS! I mean, who wants a grape with seeds? Not the pirate.
You have to bite one -- they're huge, nearly ping-pong-ball sized, so you pretty much have to bite them in half anyway -- and those seeds (like, four of them) are in the middle.
Then you have a decision to make: either crunch on those, which is unpleasant, or tease them out with a fingernail and put them in your napkin.
Ugh.
It destroys the grape eating experience, I am here to tell you. But then there isn't much to eating that kind of grape to begin with.
There is no snap and there is no tartness. What's inside is mushy sweetish water, the flavor of which barely if at all resembles that of a red table grape.
I don't know what they're thinking by putting those on offer in the produce department because I cannot imagine who likes them.
So anyway last week, after New Year's celebrations had died down and become a thing of the recent past, I went to the store with a list.
By the way, normally on New Year's -- either Eve or Day -- we don't do anything special.
But this year, since I'd been sick at Christmas, I wanted to make some festive foods and have the family over.
We also invited a new friend from church, who accepted our invitation and it was nice getting to know him.
I served (again) Naughty Hammie Sammies. It will have to be a while before we have those again, because they are addictive.
Funeral Potatoes ready to go into the oven
(And I should tell you that instead of the three-fourths pound of shaved ham called for by the recipe, I use a full pound. Go thou and do likewise.)
In addition to the sammies we had Funeral Potatoes (recipe tweaked to include one cup of sautéed onion and a packet of Ranch dressing mix), a reprise of our Christmas Eve bacon-wrapped Lit'l Smokies with a BBQ dipping sauce, baked beans, deviled eggs, pirate cheese ball with cracker assortment, tortilla strips with salsa, Easy Candied Pecans, and Brownie Pie served with Reddi-wip, the price of which has gone through the proverbial roof.
(I mean, seven dollars for a can of whipped cream? Give me a break. We bought the store brand.)
Back to the grape story, which took place a couple of days after our congenial New Year's soirée.
Standing in front of the refrigerated grape area, said grapes already loaded into cellophane bags, not even having planned to buy any but noticing that they looked like the kind of grape I like, I tasted one.
It was perfect. That grape was just the right size -- not too small, not too large, about the size of a marble, Goldilocks in grape form -- and it had the snap. And it had the tart-sweet flavor.
We were there. We had arrived in beautiful downtown gorgeous got-to-have-some Grapeville.
Thrilled, I picked up a bag stuffed to the gills with grapes.
At the till I loaded not just my grapes but all of my purchases onto the conveyor belt. I know most of the cashiers at this particular store -- well I mean, at any given time there are only perhaps two cashiers ringing up groceries -- but I noticed that a young girl unfamiliar to me was working that day.
When I say young, I mean maybe eighteen years old. She was tallish and slender, but what stood out and was in fact impossible to ignore, was her hair.
Now mind you I had not stared directly at the young lady; I was busy with my stuff and I don't stare anyway.
But I could not help but notice the constant, near-obsessive relationship the young cashier had with her hair.
The hair was long -- to the middle of her back -- and stick-straight. It was mouse-brown in color, unexceptional in that way but nevertheless clean and soft and well cared for.
It was hair that gets a great deal of attention from the one upon whose head it lives. Hair that has frequent contact with shampoos and conditioners, not to mention styling tools and a hairbrush.
Because of its length and texture, and the fact that it was unrestrained, the hair hung like a soft curtain over the girl's face.
It wasn't just in her face; it was all around her face, in fact obscuring her face unless she touched and moved the hair every six to eight seconds.
Which she did.
In my peripheral vision I could see that she would first run her hand across the top of her head to reposition the hair, a useless gesture because it immediately fell right back into her face.
Deep Dish Brownie Pie is one hundred percent legit
She would then toss her head before sweeping the hair across the back of her neck and over onto one shoulder so that if she held her head at an awkward angle, for a few seconds at least the hair hung across only one side of her face.
There was no scrunchie lodged on her wrist, to use when she'd gotten enough of incessantly fooling with the hair. She did not anchor the hair behind her ears or make any attempt other than constantly moving it around, to keep the hair out of her face.
At about that time I was up. It was my turn and I needed to hand the girl a can of cut green beans and say I have twelve of these (Rizzo eats green beans every day at three o'clock), so that I didn't have to haul the whole cardboard tray of them up onto the belt.
And the cashier kindly and efficiently dealt with that, and when she did, I noticed something.
I realized with what I admit was a jolt, that she was a he.
My cashier was a young man and not a young lady, as I had supposed for the past several minutes.
He was a person of gentle features and as I said, slender. And then there was the abundance of hair, and what seemed to me to be a distinctly feminine preoccupation with it.
As the young man continued to struggle with his luxuriant hair between scanning each item -- a situation which must have been exhausting to deal with throughout a multi-hour shift -- I wondered why someone in management had not told him that he needed to pull his hair back and secure it somehow.
Because if he got careless and leaned down three inches while the conveyor belt was running, bringing an order close enough for him to scan the items, it would have grabbed his hair. The potential liability for the store was clear -- at least to me.
And if that had happened, there would have been a kerfuffle resulting in some hair having to be cut, if not an even worse scenario unfolding.
Not to mention the distraction of a grocery cashier constantly touching and flipping and sweeping and obsessing about the hair on their head, in a setting where food is being handled.
Was this a case of someone in authority not wanting to risk offending an employee seeming to display a certain identity, even though under the circumstances it was a clear dereliction of duty not to do so?
Even though by not saying something, in my opinion the management was at the very least ignoring common-sense protocol, and at the worst, putting the young man at risk, at least marginally, of injury?
I have an uneasy feeling that if the cashier had been a female, the directive would have been issued forthwith: hair should be secured so that it does not fall into the face and have to be constantly touched, especially when worn at a length that makes it a hazard when working near a conveyor belt.
At any rate, we'll never know.
The young man rang up my groceries the rest of the way and said he hoped I'd have a good day, and I thanked him and since I always say I appreciate you (because I do), I said that and walked away.
When I got home, I was so excited to have some really good grapes. I washed and tasted one or two more as I put my groceries away.
Rhett at Aunt Audrey's, fixing to pray over his dinner
Only, later -- the next day, to be exact -- I realized something.
In the bag I had purchased, a quantity of good grapes -- the kind I like, the kind I look for, the kind I love -- had been placed on top of a quantity of those huge round watery seed-laden globe grapes that I hate.
The ones with no taste and no texture but no dearth of utter nonsense.
It was only then that I saw clearly marked on the cellophane bag:
RED GLOBE GRAPES WITH SEEDS
Because a completely different type of grapes were present in impressive numbers when I checked them out visually, and reached inside the bag for a taste, I had not noticed that what lay beneath them was the opposite of what I thought I was getting.
Even though the bag was clearly marked, there reigned confusion.
Guess I'll have to look more closely next time instead of making assumptions based upon information gleaned at first glance. And plan what I buy into, accordingly.
Lesson learned.
And that is all for now except to wish you a Happy New Year.
Oh, and to say that today and always, I appreciate you.
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Happy Tuesday
