palatable – Life In A Word

We’re getting a new dessert destination in town called “The Peach Cobbler Factory”. It’s a franchise I’ve never heard of despite locations in twenty-six states. As you’d expect, The Peach Cobbler Factory offers fruit pie in a cup (à la mode or sans ice cream) but also lots of other desserts. Choose from cheesecakes, cookies, or brownies, and all sorts of spins on peaches. Now if only I actually liked peaches.

Without “cobbler” in the name this business would never have caught my eye. The truth is, I love peach cobbler. It’s one of those foods I find inexplicably tasty even when its main ingredient doesn’t appeal to me. The same can be said for Fig Newtons. I’ve never been a fig fan yet I’ve eaten scores of the cookies. Not that they taste like fresh figs. But cobbler tastes like fresh fruit.

A peach cobbler cinnamon roll? Maybe, maybe not.

I grew up in a household that was all pie and no cake (read my take on pies in Any Way You Slice It). My mother used to make delicious hot fruit pies from scratch. Cherry, lemon meringue, apple, and peach, and there might’ve been a blueberry in there somewhere as well. The cherry was always my favorite but the peach was a close second. My mother knew how to make a homemade crust, with the wonderful latticework on top to finish off the look. She also knew what ingredients went into the pie to give it just the right consistency.

So go figure; I love hot peach pie even if I don’t love peaches. Maybe I had too many as a kid (not by choice), sliced into a bowl and served with cream. Maybe the sugar and crust of the pie somehow makes the peaches more palatable. Whatever the reason, I know I’ll be visiting the The Peach Cobbler Factory and giving their products a try.

Peaches are a big deal around here, evidenced by the groves (no, not “orchards”) of trees just about everywhere you look. South Carolina harvests over 90,000 tons of the fuzz balls every year, over twice as many as our neighbor to the west. That’s right; Georgia may consider itself “The Peach State” (as their signs boast when we cross the Savannah River) and their pretty girls might be “Georgia Peaches”, but South Carolinians know which state really delivers the fruit. On that note, here’s more peach trivia:

The peaches you buy at the market are likely a local product, but no country produces them in numbers like China does. If you added up the peach production from every country in the world you wouldn’t be close to half the number coming out of China.
A nectarine is technically a peach. So is an apricot. The fruits are only separated by one recessive gene (causing the “shaved” look of a nectarine). You can even find peaches and nectarines growing on the same tree.
Peaches come in 300 varieties. The “yellow” is the one you’re familiar with but the white is more common. Peaches can also look like donuts (flatter, with a hole in the middle). They’re categorized as “freestone” or “clingstone” according to how the pit separates (or doesn’t) from the fruit itself.
Peach fuzz is a form of defense. It protects the fruit from the rot brought on by surface water. It also discourages bugs from taking a bite. Maybe I should skip my morning shave whenever I work in the backyard?

I’ll be sure to report back after I give The Peach Cobbler Factory a try. I’m hoping their signature dessert is as peachy keen as Mom used to make. Of course, it’ll be cobbler – not pie – which adds to today’s trivia. With a cobbler I don’t get a crust under the fruit… only on top. That’s okay. As long as it’s hot and a la mode I’ll be transported back to the pie days of my youth. With desserts like those, who needs cake?

Some content sourced from the Lane Southern Orchards website, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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LEGO Neuschwanstein Castle – Update #5 (read about the start of this project in Fit for a (Fairy Tale) King

As predicted, we’ll continue to build this castle in modules. Bag 9 came together in a cool eighteen minutes, but Bag 10 was another test of patience with more of those tiny, tiny pieces. The end result of both bags is the structure and tower you see above, carefully snapped into the surrounding model after I completed it. It’s known as a “bower”, a private apartment for the ladies of the house. Fancy digs, no?

I would’ve loved to see the bower in all its glory. The fact is, with only 14 of Neuschwanstein’s 200 rooms completed the bower is likely just the elegant exterior walls you see here and nothing else. And those walls are full of windows, aren’t they? I’ve added dozens of windows to the castle (with several dozen more to go). And – painful lesson – those windows need to be oriented correctly. I got one wrong on the lowest level of the bower, which meant several steps of deconstruction/reconstruction. Not so fun.

Here’s a close-up of Neuschwanstein’s “lower courtyard”. It’s where King Ludwig would’ve welcomed his guests when they arrived. It’s also where you – should you choose to visit – will begin your tour of this magnificent structure. When all’s said and done, the castle itself will utterly tower over this courtyard, a statement about not only the castle but also Ludwig himself.

Running build time: 5:07.

Total leftover pieces: 37.

Accompanying movie soundtrack: Rudy (1993). I can’t believe this movie came out over thirty years ago. Then again, I can’t believe I graduated from Notre Dame over forty years ago. Extreme bias aside, Rudy is a story of perseverance unlike any other. Just when you think Rudy Ruettiger can’t 1) Get accepted into Notre Dame, 2) Make the football team, 3) Actually play in a football game… Rudy delivers the goods time and again. You need hear only a few seconds of the flute-soloed theme to know most of the soundtrack. I can tie every bit of the music back to specific scenes in the move but that’s just me, a Notre Dame fanatic. I’ll be watching my Fighting Irish – in person – this weekend as they take on Wisconsin at Green Bay’s Lambeau Field. Meanwhile, you’ll be listening to the Rudy soundtrack. Here.

I like a lot of foods people seem to hate. My favorite Thanksgiving pie is mincemeat, not pumpkin. My favorite licorice color is black (red is just a licorice imposter). You can heap any kind of shellfish you want on my plate except oysters. You’ll find blue cheese in my salad and Brussel sprouts cozying up to my steak. But what about “America’s Most Hated Food”? Was I born in the wrong country? Sorry fellow citizens, I must respectfully disagree with the winner of a recent survey on hated foods. Black or green, stuffed or plain, sliced or diced, there’s nothing quite like the taste of an olive.

Zippia is a job-search engine I’d never heard of, until I came across their just-released survey called The Food Each State Hates the Most. Zippia’s road to its results is rather unscientific. First, come up with a list of forty-odd foods where people tend to say, “gross”. Then, use Google Search Trends to determine which of these foods people look up the least. Finally, group the search results by state. After that meandering highway, here’s what you get:

I think Zippia produces these surveys as a clever way to attract customers. Didn’t work for me – they just insulted my taste buds! Thirteen of fifty states claim the olive as their most hated food? Two of those states are California and Georgia, where the lion’s share of America’s olives is grown. I’m already suspicious.

I’ll grant Zippia’s survey this. Most people I know don’t care for olives. They don’t like the look or the smell, and even though they’ll admit to olive oil in their salads and heart-healthy recipes, they’ll still deny any affection for the fruit. Yes, I said fruit, not vegetable. Doesn’t that make those little sodium balls a bit more palatable?

The rest of the survey, I can buy. Anchovies shouldn’t swim anywhere near a pizza (good call, America’s Heartland). Washington and Oregon residents probably sat next to me in elementary school, overdosing on bologna sandwiches. Eggplant, ick. And beets… beets… I’m almost sixty years into this world and have yet to acquire the taste. Check back with me in the next life.

If the Zippia survey is to be believed, I live in a state where turkey bacon is our most hated food. Really? We just bought several pounds of the stuff last weekend at Costco. It’s not so bad. On the other hand, olive oil and vinegar stores are trendy around here. Most markets have an olive bar adjacent to the cheeses. Meats and breads have been enhanced with bits of olives for years. And for the really fancy, serve a tapenade with your crackers; a French spread made of finely chopped olives, capers, and anchovies. Okay, so tapenade’s probably not for everyone. But I like it.

I developed a taste for olives as a kid because my mother kept tossing them into her casseroles. Before I knew it I was eating olives as a snack (and what kid hasn’t done the “wave” with one on each finger?) One regrettable afternoon I downed a whole can of the large black ones before discovering my mother intended them for one of her recipes. Believe I went to bed with no dinner that night. At least my belly was full of olives.

[Side note: The only member of my family who likes olives is my daughter. Maybe I should’ve named her Olivia? I did have a childhood crush on Olivia Newton-John.]

As if you need more proof of my love of olives, you’ll always find several cans in my pantry. The sliced ones go into my pizzas, salads, and tacos. The diced ones go into my omelets. The whole ones sneak onto vegetable trays next to the carrots and celery (when my wife isn’t looking) or I just down ’em by the can. And their green siblings with the red pimentos jammed down the middle? They go perfectly with chips ‘n’ dip in front of the TV.

Step aside, America. Spain produces more olives than any other country. Italy and Greece aren’t far behind. It would be appealing enough to live on the sands of the Mediterranean, growing old on their uber-healthy diet. But also having trees of “America’s Most Hated Food” everywhere you look? That clinches the deal. I just might take my O-Love overseas one of these days.

Some content sourced from the Zippia.com article, “The Food Each State Hates The Most”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Tag: palatable

Peachy Keen

O-Love