This is not normally the kind of thing I blog about, but Wes has made a special request and I feel beholden to honor it.  Help us settle a discussion we had tonight before Wes left for school, won’t you?

So, you’re Wes.  You’re studying at home and take a break to make some lunch.  There are no handy dandy leftovers hanging out in the fridge, so you survey your options.  They are as follows:

• Mac n’ Cheese
• Trader Joe’s chicken potstickers (2 mins. in the microwave and SO GOOD)
• Peanut butter and jelly English muffin sandwich
• Apples and cottage cheese
• Eggs

All decent choices, right?  Bear in mind, too, that any and all of these combinations can be eaten in conjunction with a banana or a pickle or each other, so it’s not like he was starving.  It’s no cheeseburger with fries and a lemonade or anything, but it’s also a fairly respectable array of choices.

What did he choose?  Eggs.  Just eggs.  He scrambled four eggs and made them for lunch.  And then ate them.

Now, in my opinion four eggs is just a bit much for one meal.  That’s quite a lot of cholesterol for one, and for another…Four eggs.  That’s a lot of eggs.

He’s of the opinion that four scrambled eggs is a perfectly acceptable repast.

Now, can you help us settle this?

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I’m trying to be healthy.  Well, trying harder than I have before, which is actually saying something seeing as how arguably half of our weekly groceries consist of fruits and veggies.  Still, though, I’m putting forth a little extra effort.

For example, I’m trying to get some walks in at work in an effort to stave off that logy feeling that accumulates from staring at a computer monitor the grand majority of the day.  My favorite place to go walking is down the street where I can smell the food from the different restaurants nearby and browse the wares of the local PCC.  I never buy anything, but I do love to browse and stroll.

Today, I found myself craving an apple with a fierceness I normally reserve for baked goods and créme brûlée.  Not wanting to miss out on this craving for something so healthy, and mentally kicking myself for forgetting my perfectly good apple at home, I grabbed my wallet and phone and set off for a quick walk down to PCC to procure one shiny red(ish) apple.

If you’ve never been inside a PCC, it’s a natural foods store.  Everything in the store is in earth tones (think an overturned vat of urban camoflage paint) and also extraordinarily expensive.  I picked out an organic (of course! Because it wouldn’t be a very good natural foods store if the produce weren’t organic!) Fuji apple, paid an exorbitant sum for it, and walked back to the office.  Cradling that apple in my hands, I felt good.  The world was a healthy place.  I was walking with a healthy snack and the wind was blowing and my mouth was watering to think of the sweet juiciness in store for me once I returned to the office.

Little did I know that the organic apple would turn out to be in dire need of pesticides.  I cut it open at work and found the inside to be brown, and bruised, and what may have been a home for an industrious worm.  Ack!

What a fitting end to my healthy little adventure.  I hopped in my car, drove to the store, and exchanged the apple with no fuss.  The new apple was delicious but I couldn’t help but be struck by the irony of walking to a natural food store to buy a pest-ridden organic apple only to have to get in my car and drive back to exchange it.  It just seems like something went horribly wrong there, doesn’t it?

I just got back from a walk today and the weather is perfect for lazing around.  The breezes are gentle and mild, the sun is out but not scorching, and the temperature is in that perfect mid-70’s range where you can sit outside in shorts and flip-flops and feel fine, but not so hot that if you’re working indoors you feel like shooting yourself in the face just to get some fresh air flowing.

It’s times like these you learn how delicious salsa fresco can be.  I’m serious, if you’ve never had good salsa fresco you are missing out on what may be the best thing to happen to you all year.  It’s refreshing, healthy, and 100% guaranteed to make you eat too many tortilla chips.  My Dad was gracious enough to instruct me in the fine art of salsa fresco preparation when I visited earlier this month.  Now, I’m going to be gracious and share with you!

Ingredients

• 1 onion, chopped to bits
• 2 avocados, pitted and peeled and chopped to 1/4″ chunks
• 4 tomatoes, seeded and chopped to bits
• salt, pepper, cumin to taste
• 1/4 cup fresh chopped cilantro
• 2 toasted jalapeno peppers, seeded and chopped to teeny tiny bits (use tongs and roast them over the gas burner)
• the juice of 2 limes

Just mix all this stuff in a big bowl and make sure you don’t skimp on the lime juice!  It’ll keep the avocado from getting nasty and brown.  When you seal the bowl, smush the plastic wrap down so it’s flush with the salsa, this will keep your avocados fresh too.

I loved this recipe so much that I actually ate it for breakfast one of the days I was there.  With the right tortilla chips?  This dish will make your whole entire week.  I don’t even want to think about what this could do if you parked it right next to a well-mixed margarita.  You’d probably just get to witness the heavens opening up and a choir of angels praising your meal or something.

Now that summer is officially here (we started out this summer with a huge thunderstorm, because our weather is nothing if not always appropriate here in Washington) I hope this recipe gives you everything you need to justify eating tortilla chips for dinner.  Just emphasize the presence of fruits and veggies to any naysayers.  Once they have a taste they’ll shut up and start eating too.

It was a Saturday.  I was standing in the baking aisle of Safeway, stooping down to the lowest shelf to peruse the generic-brand flour.  The blue and white bags of bleached all-purpose flour stared benignly back at me, all swooping shapes and innocuous paper wrapping.

The store was busy, and the aisle was full of small whining children, husbands on cell phones screaming, “I’m in the baking aisle, what brand do you want? … There’s like ten different brownie mixes here, which one do you want? … I’m not being grumpy, I just want to – forget it, I’m getting the Ghirardelli one,” and women barreling past me with shopping carts laden with food and shopping lists.

I selected the most promising bag of flour, the one bereft of obvious holes or obvious signs of spillage, and reached out to claim it.  As I pulled the bag toward me, I noticed something disturbing: the bag had a hole punched through the back.  And flour was spilling out of it like a tiny floaty blizzard.  Sheer inertia and disbelief propelled the bag toward me, until the bag was in front of me and my eyes could confirm close up the presence of a hole in the bag.

By the time I’d confirmed the hole, my pants and shirt were white.  I was a powdered doughnut with grumpy filling.  I shoved the bag back into its place and reached for another bag.  Swiveling it around revealed a hole in that one as well.  My ensuing investigation confirmed my flabbergasted suspicions: every single bag of bleached all-purpose flour at Safeway had a great gaping hole in it.

Never one to be content with spending my hard-earned dollars on a violated bag of food, I turned to alternatives.  The name-brand flours were all more expensive than I was willing to pay, so my eyes drifted to the right.  Where I spied the unbleached all-purpose flour.

Feeling more than a little dangerous from my flouring earlier, I bit the bullet and brought a bag of unbleached flour home with me.  Unsure of the difference in color, let alone taste, I considered this true culinary frontierism.

It was with trepidation that I pulled out my brand new bag of flour to make chocolate chip cookies.  I pried open the bag, peered within, and saw…flour.  I held it up to the light, I tasted it, try as I might I could not for the life of me discern a difference between it and the bleached flour.

The cookies turned out marvelously.  They look good, taste great, and, with the exception of being exceptionally poufy, appear to be regular cookies.

At the conclusion of this incredibly mundane tale of flour purchasing, I have to ask: What is the deal with bleached flour?  If it looks nearly identical, and tastes identical, why are we bleaching our flour?  Are we flour racists?  Does the bleaching process alter the flour in some way?  These questions beg to be answered.  If for no other reason than science, consider every person who’s ever stood in a grocery store wearing floury pants wondering, Dare I bring home unbleached flour?