Apple Schnitz

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Dried Apple Rings

The Amish in Pennsylvania calls them Apple Schnitz, for those of you who may never have heard of them as such these are dried apple rings. If you happen to have an Excalibur Dehydrator laying around, an Oxo Mandolin slicer, and a local you-pick apple farm – then you are in luck. True, you do not need these particular brand items, but Caroline and I have found them to be both efficient and inexpensive, hence my endorsement. After the cored apples are sliced on the mandolin set to a quarter-inch, the slices are dipped into a bowl of 20-25% lemon juice to water, and then placed on dehydrator trays and dehydrated for about 12 hours at 135 degrees F (our dehydrator has four trays).  This morning we woke up to the freshest dried apple rings we could ever hope to eat. The great thing about having a local you-pick farm is choosing the type of apple you want to dry along with the environment they have been grown in such as, organically and just how fresh they are as in, picked by you. We are dehydrating Winesaps and Jonathans and skipping the optional cinnamon on the first batches.

Henna

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Caroline's first henna tattoo

Just say no! Armed and delusional with a mehndi cone, henna for the uninitiated, my slap-happy wife thinks I’ll go for a henna bellybutton treatment – NO WAY. She drew out the design on her own hand and said, look, it will be soooo nice, just like this – ACK! Nice, Caroline, a hairy flower-bird on my belly button with the world’s deepest inverted stigma. Why not draw a dragon and we can light the bellybutton fuzz on fire, film it, and post a video of some really stupid fat guy with a henna tattoo shooting fire from his navel on YouTube?

Recursive

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Self portrait via surveillance video shown on a monitor through a business window

This was me shooting a photo of a video of myself from a surveillance camera feeding a monitor pointed towards the entrance of a closed store. I wonder if in the morning the proprietor will watch the tape on a monitor of the video his camera shot of the guy taking the photo of his monitor that was relaying the images from said camera and then will he wonder if I might not be looking at the photo I captured of his monitor facing his entrance where his video surveillance image was being shown for all who walked by. And what if someday he were to see on the internet that image from his camera that was captured by my camera that everyone else now gets to see, too?

My Alien

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Department of Homeland Security notice that appointment date for biometrics interview is scheduled

My sweet Alien wife has finally been notified by MIB, also known as Department of Homeland Security that her I-90 application to replace her expired Alien Registration card has been processed and they are ready to accept her "Biometric" data. Caroline has been on pins and needles as these days everyone knows you don’t mess around with immigration issues in America and seeing that her old Alien I.D. ran out back in September, she has waited breathlessly for this letter letting her know that the glacial process will in fact – go forward. On November 18 in a small back alley room, what else can this be as November 18 is in fact a Saturday and NO ONE from the government works on Saturday, so what we assume must be some clandestine corner of Phoenix, Arizona, secret Homeland scientists will move to extract the precious "Biometric" data from my Alien. God only knows, will she be cloned, will they steal her stem cells, is she being profiled in some vast database of genetically specific Alien types? Just what goes on behind those closed doors will be exposed right here in just two short weeks.

Lilikoi – Passion Fruit

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Insides of the Passion Fruit also known as Lilikoi - on Hawaii

If you ever go to Hawaii you will likely have more than one opportunity to try what is known in Hawaii as lilikoi, or, for us mainlanders – passion fruit. The same day we bought the dragon fruit we saw these old wrinkled up leathery fruits – ah, so that’s what passion fruit looks like. While on the islands we had lilikoi shave ice at Jo-Jo’s on Kauai, Mahi in guava-lilikoi butter sauce on Molokai at the Kualapu’u Cookhouse and something else with passion fruit but my memory fails me. Passion Fruit is super yummy, a lot more tart than we imagined, but the flavor is phenomenal. I have been looking for a passion fruit jam recipe that uses fresh fruit and not fruit juice concentrate but this must be one of the most closely kept secrets in the culinary world.

Inside the Dragon

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Inside the Dragon Fruit

Visiting the Wild Oats Marketplace nearby we come upon this odd-looking thing. A quick search of labels tells us this baseball-sized red orb is dragon fruit, also known as the pitaya or pitahaya, as well as the strawberry pear, and, for you Latinphiles, the Hylocereus undatus. The dragon fruit is a tropical fruit originating from the Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica area, however, is now cultivated around the world where tropical climates permit. So, if you live somewhere where 20 to 50 inches of rain (54cm to 136cm) a year, with temperatures up to 104 degrees (40c) are the norm, you might want to try growing this yourself, because, at $8 apiece, this is probably the most expensive fruit I have ever seen. And, no, it doesn’t taste like chicken, nor would it taste better with chicken.