red apples make me wanna shyt.

My mom gets sick with gas and the trots with red bell peppers... I wonder what does that... other things high in fiber don't?

I predict you are thinking of the joke whose punchline is "Yeah, and I wish it was dark."

Red Delicious Apples float in water, exactly like a bowling ball doesn't.

WITCHES!

Nope, haven't heard that one. :confused:

Meet me over at the humor thread.

Has Flint always been insane? Or, did he just 'turn' one day?

Ah, yes, apples…

Our supermarkets have this habit of displaying nice, fresh, crunchy, juicy apples during the first week of a promotion, but then these are suddenly replaced by ones that are fresh… out of storage! They still look good, but the act of eating is a gruesome exercise – all pap and no flavour - absolutely no modicum of eating enjoyment is delivered at all, for that matter.

Red Delicious, howoever, seem to achieve gruesome status whether fresh off the tree or fresh off the storage rack.

But all is not lost! Our local Waitrose (supermarket division of the John Lewis Partnership – ‘never knowingly cheap’ or something similar is their motto) has started selling a US derived variety known as ‘Empire’ – absolutely no disappointment so far and I’ve been buying them for over two months now. And they’re predominantly red in colour as well!

;)

the day I was born, baby
 

I like an honest man, Flint. Good for you. :D

I've never liked red apples, but then I've always favoured content over looks anyway.

I love Braeburn - can't get a better apple as far as I'm concerned.

RK - I suffered a very bad reaction to red jalapenos (written up here - it's a bit grim) and yet they're supposed to be milder than the green ones. I wonder if something in the colour does affect some people?

I'll look out for Honeycrisp, but I find the name a little off-putting as I'm not one for sweet apples.

I miss going to food fairs, which I did every year when I was in marketing. I discovered Jalapeno Tabasco and Braeburn apples at the BBC Food & Drink Show. Companies launching or promoting food would give out free samples which I'm sure was a more cost effective way of gaining new customers than TV advertising.... That and I'm a greedy pig who's a sucker for free samples of course!

Curb Their Enthusiasm Font Size:
By Alex Avery :




On HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," the female lead character portrays a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. It is appropriate that this show is a comedy, because NRDC has long been a bad national joke. How are we to take seriously the claims of an organization that for the last decade has used baseless fear and science fiction to get the public's attention? Its tactics are reminiscent of the little boy who cried wolf, except the apocryphal shepherd boy got only three chances. NRDC, despite dozens of attempts to needlessly scare the American public, has yet to receive the deaf ear it deserves.

In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency is bending itself into a pretzel to accommodate this gang of activist lawyers. This week, under a consent decree with NRDC, the agency held a special four-day Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) to review the supposed impacts of atrazine on the sexual development of frogs. Atrazine is an important agricultural herbicide, widely used for decades.

While one day of the 4-day SAP was set aside for public comment, the NRDC was inexplicably given a separate day of its own to bloviate. Moreover, the NRDC's pet scientist used up nearly six hours of the public's comment day. (His research is, unsurprisingly, the only research implicating atrazine in frog abnormalities.)

Ten years ago, NRDC perpetrated one of the biggest scams ever on the American public, claiming that a product called alar, used in growing apples, was the "most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply." NRDC ranted that alar was a "cancer-causing agent used on food that the EPA knows is going to cause cancer for thousands of children." But it wasn't true, and NRDC knew it. Alar, it turns out, was far less a cancer risk than tap water or peanut butter.

Why did they do it? According to boasts from NRDC's public relations firm, it was all an elaborate (and highly successful) fundraising scheme. When their lies were exposed -- sadly too late to save mass parental anguish over supposedly poisonous apple juice or to save apple farmers the millions of dollars in market losses -- the NRDC equivocated. "We never said there was an immediate danger," they said as they laid blame on journalists who "muddled" their report and the public who "overreacted."

Like alar, the agricultural herbicide atrazine is a high-level target of the NRDC. These activists claim atrazine is a known carcinogen -- when they know it is not.

In 1994, the EPA initiated a special review of atrazine, among other herbicides. Since that time Syngenta, the primary manufacturer of atrazine, has provided the EPA with more than 200 studies that demonstrate that atrazine is safe for humans and the environment. In June 2000, the EPA's atrazine SAP met and concluded that atrazine does not pose a cancer risk to humans.

But the constant intervention of NRDC into the regulatory process has carried on the review of atrazine for nearly a decade. Last year, one college researcher claimed that atrazine at low doses (but not at high doses) was affecting the sexual development of frogs. He became an instant media darling. Yet three separate groups of university research scientists have been unable to replicate his results. Replication is the foundation of sound science. Nevertheless, based on that one scientist's unreplicated research, the NRDC demanded and got the EPA to convene yet another SAP to examine the impact of atrazine on amphibians. That was this weeks' meeting.

In advance of the meeting, the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs posted its opinion that "The current weight-of-evidence does not show that atrazine produces consistent, reproducible effects across the range of exposure concentrations and amphibian species tested." On Thursday, after the SAP, the EPA says "atrazine exposure did appear to be having some impact on gonadal effects" of frogs. Nothing has changed about the evidence from a week ago. It is still inconsistent, unreplicated, and illogical.

The SAP will apparently recommend to the EPA yet more research into possible impacts of atrazine on frogs.

Why is the environmental protest industry allowed to manipulate the process this way? The NRDC is not a grassroots organization funded by concerned citizens throwing in their twenty dollars apiece to save the environment. They are a well-funded army of lawyers ($4 million in taxpayer funds from the EPA alone) that uses our legal system as a means to an end. The first lawsuit filed by NRDC against atrazine was in 1986. And when NRDC can't win in court, they take their case to the media, where they are not required to swear to tell the whole truth. The alar smear campaign exposes their underhanded tactics.

Hundreds of studies conducted by responsible scientists confirm that atrazine is safe for humans, safe for the environment and valuable to farmers. On matters of the environment and human safety, isn't the word of sound science considerably more valid than that of lawyers?

Alex Avery is director of research and education at the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues in Churchville, Virginia.



http://www.techcentralstation.com/index.html

Um, OK.

I was just eating a fuji apple the other day, and it was good. But not as good as a gala. So I'd say that gala apples are the best. Followed by fuji or golden delicious. Not sure which. I need to do a taste test sometime.

He is opposed to fresh local food.

all the apples I mentioned are grown in New Zealand, I think. Gala and Fuji anyway. What's frustrating is that a New Zealand apple tastes fresher than a local apple when you are shopping in a grocery store. You have to go directly to the orchard or find a farmers' market if you want a yummy local apple.

I am trying a recipe tonight that calls for red apples, and I successfully convinced myself that I could not just swap in green apples and expect the flavors to work the same way. So per LabRat's advice I was going to go with Honeycrisp apples as the lesser-of-all-red-apple-evils, but my grocery store didn't carry them. So I settled on the Pinata apple, purely on the fact that it was way more expensive than all the other apples there, including the organics. If it's expensive it's probably better, right? Upon coming home and googling I discovered this site which claims

Score! The recipe calls for them to be cooked in the oven along with a bunch of other ingredients; I'll let you know how they turn out.

Yah. Somebody did mention organics earlier, so we got the alar spam. When we eat in-season, right off your neighbors tree is better and you can get more interesting fruit. I have no problem with big apple growers selling a good product, but assuming someone is only buying local to avoid the long gone alar scare is idiotic.

We'll just pop by and judge it ourselves thank you. :)

Granted, I have not had HBO for some time, but the last I saw the lead female character would be Cheryl David, Larry's wife. Who are they talking about?

OMG Honeycrisp are the ƒuckin' awesomest, ever!!!1 ... I just popped my Honeycrisp cherry.

I'm with you.

They taste like a mouthful of win.

better than a stayman winesap?

I can't believe I didn't mention the Honey crisp or the Pink Lady.

I've never had a stayman winesap apple and Bruce lives near an orchard? I am very envious. I bet he's baking a pie right now.

Weird that this thread is back up again right now. We're going apple picking tomorrow.

You'd better call ahead and make sure there are still apples. We went last week and were thwarted. If the man was to be believed, the whole apple crop was shite because of a late frost.

said there were no apples to pick. It sucked cuz the kids were really jazzed to go a pickin.

At least you might be able to find a farm with bales of hay,pumpkins and a scarecrow or two real soon. Oh and lots of apple cider too.

We were in luck. Plenty of apples. Beautiful weather for it. I took the day off. We had a picnic there. Great time. Traffic sucked getting home though. Nothing like DC traffic to suck the restfulness out of you as you are getting home from being away.

wow, that looks idyllic.

Yeah, it's gorgeous there. We've been going there for almost 15 years. It was unknown when we first started going, but now on a nice fall weekend, there will be hundreds of people there. Got to get there on a weekday to really enjoy it in peace. They have planted a bunch of grapes too, so in another couple years, they will have the wine draw too.

It's about an hour outside DC, so it's very doable.

I took the kids to Linvilla today, which was seriously crowded. We were there more for the pumpkins than the apples...

more pics!

Nice farm, they have shitty neighbors though. :rolleyes:

Was Linvilla the Orchard the fought off an eminent domain takeover attempt? (ah, it wasn't fought off, it was negotiated.)

I just wanted to note that this post has an exceptionally high truth:word ratio.

They develop strains that look good in the shop but have the taste and nutrition of, as you say, cardboard; then stick some BS name on them to make people buy them.

I hate that shit.

Gimme a pink lady. (I was thinking of apples, but now that I reconsider...)

We bought some honey while we were at the apple place last weekend. This place has bee hives to pollinate the trees, and a local beekeeper comes and collects the honey. It's packaged for the orchard and they sell it with their own label in their little store.

OMFG! All my life, I thought honey was just honey, and it was nothing special. But man, is this stuff awesome. That stuff you buy in the grocery store is nothing compared to this fresh raw local honey. We keep finding excuses to use it, and already the jar is about a third gone in a week and a half.

Nobody told me.

I've discovered that about local honey, too!

You are what you eat. Honey and milk (of all kinds), takes on the taste of what the maker is eating. The stuff you usually buy at the supermarket is blended and processed to even out the taste.

and mainly clover honey. i expect apple tree honey would be better.

Ours tastes rather piney ...

LINK

Because of our discovery, we actually stopped by a farmers market yesterday where I've seen honey for sale, and bought some wildflower honey. It will be interesting to see how it compares to both the apple orchard honey and the plastic bear squeeze bottle from the grocery store.

If you can, try some of the Eucalyptus based honies. Blue gum is especially tasty. :yum:

I lthink of them as 'mealy'. Granny Smith or Fujis are the way to go.