Comparing apples to apples

Apples are delicious, nutritious, and versatile. They taste great in a pie, cake and kugel form, but they are at their best in whole. When it comes to fruit, there are three categories. The fist is the kind you need to deconstruct with a tool, mangoes, and melons are great but you need get a knife and do some prep work before they can be enjoyed. The second kind doesn't need a tool, but still must be worked on before they can be eaten, like oranges or pomegranates all you need to do is peel them with your hands to get at the sweet goodness inside. The last kind just needs to be rinsed off before you start eating, these are generally the most sensual fruits, figs, or peaches, plums, apricots, pears and persimmon are all fine examples of this type, but best of all is the apple. Apples come into season when you need them most, from late fall through the winter fresh locally grown apples can are available. I think apples are great, there are hundreds of varieties but my favorite is the Fuji Apple. I don't know what it is about the Fuji above all apples, from the Whimsically named Pink Lady, the classic Rome or Red Delicious, the the mealy yet flavorful Golden Delicious, the bakers friends of the Granny Smith and the Braeburn to the insane deliciousness of the Cortland and HoneyCrisp. Apples come in all shades and colors light pink yellow green blue purple red and every hue in between, but a Fuji in its full brilliance will go from yellowish green on the shady side to rather plain dull brownish red. This plain appearance carried through into the flesh where it is a nice golden color, nice but not noteworthy. This is false modest on behalf of this regal apple, because though it may look plain and though is neither very large or very small it is a delight to the rest of your senses.
To eat a Fuji is to indulge in fruity hedonism. It's flesh is satisfyingly crisp once you take your first bite you are all your stress is gone, crunching through a crispy apple can relieve stress. Chewing your way through a Fuji is cathartic like a two minute Club Med vacation. The aromas unleashed with that first bite waft into your senses with the perfume scent of spring. Eating one a Fuji apple in season at the end of winter ,from late January through early March awaken the olfactory center in your brain, a one whiff and you know that the long winter of deadened senses will soon be over. We will all be free of our seasonal prisons, and our seasonal depressions, the days will be longer and the world will be better. Now we com to the taste. Flavorful and sweet with hints of honeysuckle, and a souçons of tartness on top. It is sweet without overpowering you with sweetness, is tart but eating elicits nary a' pucker.
Perhaps it really is just the name. Fuji. It brings to mind mist shrouded snow covered peaks of the orient. Evoking images of Japan, zen gardens and spiritually elaborate tea services. It even invokes those macaque monkeys that take baths in the snow (those monkeys crack me up, but they are exotic, and always look blissfully relaxed)
Eating something exotic without it really being exotic is a treat, a calm in the storm of truly unique experiences. It lets you feel adventure without being adventurous. It is a trip into the heart of darkness, while at the same time just eating an apple.
Whatever it is, I love those apples, and when the season for them is over in a week or two, I will be sad for a moment, but then I my attention will wander to some other produce, but the attraction is never the same, year after year like it is to the Fuji apple.


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