Not Another Political Post!

Lately, everywhere you turn you hear about the election. Obama this, McCain that, Palin this, Biden that. Everybody's up in arms supporting their candidate and tip-toeing around the real issue that affects our everyday lives: Which fruit is the best?

I have been flip-flopping over my favorite fruit for as long as I can remember. At the beginning it was strawberries. For a while it was watermelon. I even went to the pomegranete for a while, we'd get them annually from my grandparents' tree in California. But which one is the BEST? I decided that the fruit needs to be tasty and versatile, able to be good in salads or by itself. Also a factor: How consistent is the quality of this fruit? Too often I buy a peach that turns out to be void of juice and taste. Or I'll peel a tangerine and find it littered with seeds. I want a fruit that doesn't leave me surprised, at least not too often.

Let's keep in mind that I love fruit. I eat a LOT of fruit, it is my favorite snack. Everything on the list is something that I enjoy eating, and the difference between number 17 and number 1 is not much.

17. Lemon/Lime: While these 2 both add delicious citrus flavor to drinks, fish, and mexican food, they are not very good by themselves. So that's why they're last.

16. Pear: Pears can be delicious, but I feel like they're perfectly ripe for like 2 minutes. I always end up eating one that's hard as a rock or melts in my hands, and I end up holding it over the sink while I eat it like a donut on a string. And how can you tell when you're at the core? The core of the pear is too vague.

15. Grapefruit: This was a breakfast staple at the Hansen household growing up, and I loved them. However, when I moved out, I realized that there was no Mom around to cut up my grapefruit for easy consumption! Now it's just too much work, plus I don't have a special knife. I saw one guy peel one like an orange and eat it that way, so I gave it a try. But grapefruits don't peel as easily as oranges, and it was just a big mess.

14. Cherry: Cherrys are delish, but you can't really put them in a lot of foods, unless you do all the work of pitting them and sich. We had to go over to our neighbors the Goodwins and pick all of their pie cherries every year, as they didn't use them. Or worse, we had to go pick at the Church welfare farm. Nothing worse than picking pie cherries. You can't eat them, and you pick for like 2 hours and you don't even have a full bucket. And your hands are all sticky.

13. Apricot: We had an apricot tree that rarely produced. Usually we'd have a late freeze and all the buds would die. That was too bad, because apricots are so good straight off the tree. I even like them a little green, that way they're nice and tart. We'd usually make apricot jam with all of the extra apricots if we had a good year. Magically, these same delicious apers turned into a jam that makes ordinary toast disgusting. Whenever Mom would open up a jar of Apricot jam, we'd count the days until the jar would be finished. Which was never.

12. Grape: Grapes are very consistent, and are easy to pick out. But I get tired of them rather quickly. And they're boring. Let's move on.

11. Peach: Peaches are like pears in the sense that it's hard to get a perfect one. But when you do, My Lands!, it's succulent and juicy and all your wildest dreams contained in one sphere of fuzzy skin. But it's impossible to eat without juice running down your arms and into your armpit. Canned peaches are pretty good, too, probably the best canned fruit.

10. Plum: The other midsummer fruit, plums are more consistent than peaches, although I prefer a great peach to a great plum. I like the red ones with the red meat inside.

9. Banana: Bananas are decent to eat by themselves, but easy to get tired of. Why are they ranked this high? I'm glad you asked. Well, I'll tell you: because they are good in everything. You can put them in your shake, your cereal, your oatmeal, your birkermusli, your hamburger, your spaghetti--you get the picture.

8. Pineapple: This actually might be a better canned fruit than peaches. Fresh pineapple is a dessert by itself, and canned pineapple isn't that much worse than fresh.

7. Watermelon: What summer gathering is complete without watermelon? Well, I'll tell you: NO summer gathering. I can't decide if I like chilled watermelon more than room temperature melon.

6. Orange: Orange you glad I didn't say banana? My winter comfort fruit. Mom would buy a huge box of oranges from the store and keep them in the newspaper cupboard (a chilled area connected to the garage), and I would eat at least 2 a day. Most of the time I would grab an orange or 2 on my way up to bed. One winter, I kept on tossing the peels down the crack of the bed, between the wall and my bed. When we finally cleaned it up, there was about 3 rainforests' worth of orange peels under my bed. Honest to goodness!

5. Strawberry: Strawberries are always a good choice, and are good with most things. But there's something about strawberries that keep me from putting it at number one. Maybe I get sick of them pretty quickly, maybe because I don't like strawberry flavored candy, and maybe because everybody else likes them so much.

4. Apple: The classic American fruit. I have my favorite varieties: Jonathan, Golden, Pink Lady, Grandma Smith. You can turn them into delicious pies, eat them by themselves, or chuck them at your neighbors. I remember the epic apple battle we had with the neighbors. There were apple remains all over the garage, the brick walls, and the driveway. We were cleaning that up for days. If you were there, leave a comment. I want to say Allan and Kurt were there.

3. Tangerine/Clementine: I can eat tangerines by the truckload if they are seedless and easy to peel. It's easy to tell which ones are easy to peel, just like with oranges. If the skin is loose at the stem, it should come off in one peel. If you can't do it in one peel, you should consider giving up life altogether. The one problem with tangerines is that you don't know if you're going to get a billion seeds and no one likes to spend all their time getting seeds out.

2. Pomegranete: Speaking of getting seeds out, Pomegranetes are all about the seeds. Unlike tangerines, getting the seeds out is half the fun! I consider myself OGPE: Original Gangsta Pomegrate Eater. I was eating pomegranetes before you even learned how to say pomegranete! I was eating pomegranetes before Whole Foods told you to buy them and put them into your cloth bag that you overpaid for just so you could kid yourself and think that saving a few plastic bags will stop global warming! Sorry, did I just bring politics back in? I could eat pomegranetes for every meal if they were more affordable. Just give me a knife and a dropcloth, and I'll sit at the counter for hours digging each nugget of juicy goodness out.

1. Raspberry: (David Putty voice) Yeah, that's right. Pick yourself off the floor. Are you really that stunned that I chose raspberry as number 1? Raspberries are delicious! They're always consistently tasty and juicy, they can be eaten like popcorn to no end, and only a small amount will go a long way. Have you ever eaten a bite of fruit salad and not tasted the tiny piece of raspberry? No, you haven't! And the best part is that you're picking the seeds out of your teeth for hours, reminding yourself how delicious that salad/smoothy/raspberry ambrosia was. Also, raspberries are a year-round fruit. Now I've gone too far, you say? Go to your local Macey's or Piggly Wiggly or Kruger's or Publix or Safeway or Stop N' Shop (have I covered all the regions of the US yet?) and get yourself some frozen raspberries. Let them thaw, and they're almost as good as the day you picked them. Now you're sitting there craving raspberries. Calm down, get your wits about you, diaper your child and get yourself over to the store for some delicious produce.

But not yet. The post isn't over. Did you notice that I may have left off your favorite fruit? Well, I did it intentionally, because your favorite fruit, let's be honest, royally sucks. Here are a few fruits I find to be overrated:

Mango: Mangoes leave an unpleasant aftertaste in my mouth, so I don't really like them. Every time I refuse a mango, the person offering will insist that I just haven't had a good one yet. Well, how many do I need to try before I can declare that mangoes are just not that good? It's the same way I feel about sushi. How many different kinds of sushi do I need to gag on before I can declare that it's totally disgusting?

Kiwi: First, you have to peel them. With a KNIFE. Second, they look like a giant booger. Third, they're not that good, and you can't eat the thing in the middle. Way too much work for not that much reward.

Cantalope: For the most part, cantalope is pretty bland and tasteless. The ripe ones can be pretty good, but I think I was fed too much cantalope in my younger days to really care for them again. Until further notice, I have broken up with Cantalope. We're still friends (I'll eat them when they're available, like everyday at work), but I'm not ready to commit to it by actually buying one at the grocery store.

I know that last list will have a few misled individuals up in arms. To you I say: make your own durned list. And then I will be up in arms because you said that raspberries are overrated. And then we will realize that arguing about fruits is almost as useless as arguing about politics: nobody's going to change their minds.