We met face to face, but never eye to eye

[venta]

Some time ago, I reached the age where I realised I didn't know my age. If asked (which, let's face it, doesn't happen all that often) I'm forced to remember what year it is, subtract my birth year, and work out whether I've had a birthday or not recently in order to answer

Comments

[ceb]

I am with you in both the apple club and the working age out from first principles club...

[lnr]

Heh, for years and years I was too *lazy* to eat an apple whole, and hence rarely ate them at all. So as an older child I'd only eat apples if someone else had sliced them for me, and even as an adult I'd only bother if I sliced them myself. It's only in the last 3 years I've somehow got the hang of it and now I eat an apple nearly every day, as an actual apple :)

I do still like them sliced too though, it's just my knife at work is rubbish.

[venta]

I was fed apples from the tree in the garden, of unknown antecedents. I don't think they were usually maggoty, though; I think they were more inclined to bruising and grotty-looking bits, which are at least easy to spot. I got my RDA of maggots from the brambles, instead :)

[valkyriekaren]

Our garden apples were never that nice - they were cooking apples really and were usually small, hard and sour, in the few years they fruited significantly. The blossom smelled nice in summer, though it hard to compete with the rather more pungent elderflower.

[feanelwa]

Me too!

[metame]

My favourite way to eat an apple is with it in one hand and a knife in the other, and to just chop bits off one at a time and eat them - like whittling it down to a core. Particularly good (for some reason) when the apple consumption is being combined with eating some bits of cheese too.

[venta]

Yup :)

The problem with that is that it requires two hands and lots of attention (to the apple, knife, thumbs, cheese etc) so less optimal when you're sitting at a desk and pretending to working at the same time.

Also I always seem to end up with a core that looks like a bad early-90s computer simulation of an apple core; too few polygons and unexpected angles. I always get the feeling that there's lots more apple to be had if only I could work out which direction the next cut should be in.

[bateleur]

I wish you hadn't said that. Now I'm thinking about convex-apple-cutting algorithms and theorems about edible apple maximization instead of the several things I'm supposed to be doing.

(I tentatively conclude that there's a unique convex hull that minimally encloses any given core, regardless of geometry, but that it is not necessarily reachable in a finite number of cuts.)

[ailbhe]

I have discovered that I love apple-corer-and-slicers. I cut it, nibble the core first to get that out of the way, then eat the slices with gusto and also pleasure. It was such a frivolous piece of kitchen kit that I felt really guilty buying it but I'm delighted now.

[venta]

Yes! I have contemplated buying one, and concluded (thus far) that its usefulness is outweighed by the amount of drawer-space it takes up. They are great, though.

You can also get equally funky devices for rendering whole fresh pineapples tractable, but I think I'd use one of those even more infrequently :)

(Edited multiple times for (a) saying the exact opposite of what I mean and (b) crimes against apostrophes.)