Say that Again?

Here's a picture of our fruit bowl, just after getting back from the grocery store and putting things away. (We have strawberries in the fridge, as well as some frozen blackberries and raspberries.)

In our fruit bowl are three bananas, (one ripe and 2 a little less than ripe) one avocado, three mirabelle plums, 2 red "delicious" apples (which I think aren't very, and Thomas likes quite a lot. I'm more into the granny smith or Macintosh varieties.) and three Grāpples.

Well, what the heck is a grāpple, you might ask.

Good question. Apparently it's an apple that's been soaked on grape flavoring. Not even real grape juice, just artificial grape flavoring.

(As a note, it's pronounced Grape - el, not grapple as in to "wrestle or grasp".)

I'd seen them in the store a few times, but we've always passed them up. They're sold in little plastic cartons of four grapples apiece. For $5.99. That's right... that's $1.50 per grapple. Most of the rest of the apples at our grocery store range from ~$.62 each to $1.01 each... and they're cheaper if you buy them in a bag, or on sale. ( Generally speaking, at least one brand of apple is on sale every week. )

This time, Thomas noticed them. He picked up the little sealed package and turned it over several times, trying to figure out what it was... Finally, he sighed and said "Well, interesting idea, but they're pretty spendy." I countered with, "If you want to try it, we can... one of the bits of advice I'm constantly being given for sticking on plan is to try new things. You never know when you'll find something you like." (I used this particular advice on the mirabelle plums, which are, by the way, fantastic! If a bit wet and sticky.)

I had one this morning, as part of my morning snack. A grāpple is about 90 calories, with 3 grams of fiber, so standard for an apple. They do smell very much like grapes. Concord grapes, as a further matter of fact, which are my favorite kind of grape. The skin is yellow and red, giving the grāpple a not-quite-ripe look, and as it was enclosed in the little plastic package, hard to get a good look at in-store. There were numerous little nicks and blackmarks over the skin (I tried to take a picture of these, but my camera is not so good with the close-up shots.) and I might not have selected these in the store if I could have seen the marks, but they didn't penetrate the skin, so the fruit underneath wasn't bruised or bad. (Or bruised in the middle, which seems to be a horribly weird side effect to force-growing fruits, and I don't like it one bit. I don't want my apple to look perfect on the outside and sort of brown and fibrous in the middle.)

The grape smell was a lot stronger than the grape taste. (In fact, the smell is so strong that it's clinging to my hands over an hour later. I'm not sure I care for that too much.) Mostly, it tasted like an apple. Same crunch, same apple-taste.

I wasn't all that impressed, and at $1.50 each, I probably will not be buying them again, unless they prove a bigger hit with Darcy and Thomas.

Thomas's boss's boss, Shreyas, kept him over two and a half hours late on Wednesday for a meeting to address the issue of people quitting left, right and center from EFC. ("Wait, wait, let me get this straight... Shreyas kept everyone two and a half hours PAST quitting time to discuss WHY people were quitting?? Did anyone point out the obvious to him? Or like your two and a half percent raise that still doesn't bring you up to the MINIMUM of the pay range they were originally offering for the position?") which has screwed our week up royally. Wednesday is our normal grocery shopping day, but by the time Thomas got home, it was past dinner time, and if we'd gone to the store first, we wouldn't have eaten until at least 8:30... and then Thursday is one of our walking nights...

Thinking we might not get our walk in last night, I decided to do some free weights yesterday... I did 20 each of 7 different free weight exercises and 10 crunches and 10 pushups. It took me about 15 minutes to do them, and while it was only a 3 pound weight (in each hand), I was shaking by the end of some of the reps. Gotta work on that, I expect. Of course, Thomas came home early (not much early, like maybe 20 minutes) and we went for our walk promptly. Being in a bit of a hurry, since we needed to do the grocery shopping, I walked at his pace instead of him walking at mine, which meant we did the whole 2.2 miles in a little less than 27 minutes. Which is a good deal faster than I like to walk. (That's a 12 and a half minute mile... sheesh, no wonder I was out of breath and a little footsore last night. Literally, when I went to bed, the heel of each foot was painful to the touch.) He did the whole walk pulling Darcy behind him in her wagon (she was walking with us for a while, but ended up with such bad blisters on the back of her heels that I'm letting her ride for a while until they heal up.) so I suppose I shouldn't complain.

But then we got home and turned around and went right back out to do the grocery shopping, so I didn't get much rest, either.

On the other hand, Thomas brought me these yesterday... aren't they nice?