The Hunger Struck - Confessions of a Food Fanatic.

I was really looking forward to making a Galette Des Rois this year. But as things go, I was so over fed with sweets and other rich holiday foods that when it actually came around to making one I no longer had it in me.  For those of you not familiar with the Galette des Rois, it’s a French three kings day cake made during the first week of January. It’s extremely simple to make: puff pastry, almond cream and a little creativity from the tip of your knife. There is a small plastic trinket or as the French call it “feve” that is often placed in the center of this cake for the kids and whoever receives it is king for a day.

The Galette Des Rois was a wonderful and extremely unanticipated adolescent food experiences for me. It came at a time when food couldn’t have been further from my mind. I was 15 and had just arrived in Paris, where I would be going to school for the following semester. I was extremely overwhelmed and in retrospect perhaps a bit too young to be so far away from home by myself for the first time. I was staying with this extremely off center family in a suburb of Paris. To just scratch the surface, the father lived in the garage and I’m pretty sure the mother was still breast feeding her 10 year old son. It was unlike any family dynamic I had ever encountered and I would be lying if I denied being totally dishearten by it.

I don’t know what’s going on this year with those small mandarin oranges I love so much. They continue to disappointed me. I’m not talking about your garden-variety mandarin either. You know those mini ones that are the size of large grapes? I look forward to those every year and for some reason it’s looking like this is going to be a really bad season for them not to mention every other mandarin orange variety I have purchased since November in Vancouver.  It seems that no matter what variety I’ve come home with each week they are all sour and lacking in some way. I’m quite disappointed and have almost given up hope.

After a month of failed attempts, I recently decided to go in an entirely different direction with my orange consumption: navel oranges. While I don’t dislike these oranges, I was always a bit indifferent to them. They seemed too involved as a snack for work, considering I’m not the type to go and slice them up in the kitchen, not to mention that peeling a navel orange is tedious at best. But this weekend I found myself in my grocery store with a choice: give the navel orange another chance or become an apple eater. I went with the orange.

Does anyone else find eating an apple, by just biting into it, to be somewhat vulgar? I do eat and enjoy apples, I just don’t really like myself when I do. But that’s a story for another day…