Spring Into Beach Day Fun!

   My friend and I are on a mission to visit all the beaches in Seattle. We call it... The Great Seattle Beach Tour. Or at least that is what I have been calling it. We started last Summer with two successful beach trips: Golden Gardens and Alki. We have continued our beach tour again this Spring with a visit to Madison Beach. The other two beaches were on Puget Sound, but Madison Beach is on Lake Washington. It was a pretty beach to be at in the Spring, full of flower blooms and growing leaves. My friend and I found a sunny spot and read by the water. It is raining right now as I write this, but a couple of weeks ago when I went on the beach trip, it was quite nice! Sunshine, come back!

  I recently listened to a 'This American Life Episode' where it was stated that toast is the new cupcakes. I've heard this before with a different food. A couple of years ago pie was the new cupcakes, but it never fully caught on, at least not in Seattle. There are a couple of pie shops in Seattle, but the enthusiasm for pies has not yet matched that for cupcakes. I do think cupcakes are more delicious than pies but pies are more romantic than cupcakes. The type of people who eat pie are people with secrets eating at a diner late at night. Or wanderlust hobos who purposely abandoned their lives of wealth to embrace the freedom of a rattling train. Or a plucky, 1940's girl detective enjoying a piece of pie after solving a big case. Although toast is good, I don't see it surpassing the popularity of cupcakes or pie. I've never had toast as delicious as a cupcake.Excluding the This American Life toast story, toast does not lend itself as easily to romantic back stories the way pie does. But of course, taste is all a matter of opinion, and I've only had home toasted toast, never artisinal toast. 

   I don't have my finger on the pulse of popular trends, but I do have my finger on the pulse of what I think should be the next popular artisanal food trend: Fruit Salads! What is more delicious than a fruit salad? Every Spring, when I see the fruit slowly appear back in the grocery stores at ever reducing prices, I start looking forward to fruit salads! I have many strong opinions on fruit salads. For example, apples should not be in fruit salads. Most fruit is mushy and soft. But not apples, or at least not good apples. They are crisp and hard. It is jarring to be munching on a bunch of juicy and soft fruit and suddenly bite into a fruit piece that is such a noticeably different consistency. Another more obvious fruit salad rule is that fruit salad should be made only with fresh fruit! I could go on an on about my fruit salad opinions, but I suspect that this is a subject that is more interesting to me than it is to other people. 

   But if fruit salads became a trend, people with actual food expertise could carefully craft the perfect combination of fruits to make various different and delightful fruit salads. I would love to go to a restaurant and see that on the menu were five different fruit salads to choose from. Or, if there was a restaurant with a fruit salad bar. The only difficulty with this plan is that fruit salads are best when the fruit is freshly cut. The owner of the fruit salad bar would have to be very vigilante about only cutting small portions of fruit at a time for the salad bar. Hopefully, by this time next year the artisinal fruit salad trend will have begun and I will be on my blog raving about my favorite fruit salad restaurant. Keep your fingers crossed for me!