Stuff I Liked This Week, Gravenstein Edition

There’s a dwarf apple tree out in front of my house, a Gravenstein, selected expressly for the heirloom apples it bears. The tree has decided that this is the year it will produce and has, every day for about a month now, dropped three or four aesthetically flawed yet delicious apples into my hands. They are the perfect texture, crunchy and tart, and if they’re weird shapes or a bit bruised or have holes in them, that can all be cut away. I put very thin slices into a grilled cheese sandwich recently and that made me feel like some kind of culinary genius, but I’m mostly focused on finding waffle options that include apple.

I made an excellent apple pie waffle this week by sandwiching thin slices of apple between two layers of standard pie crust — the pie crust was probably the most perfect I’ve ever made, but the ratio was off, the waffle needed more apple. That’s fine, live and learn, or rather, waffle and learn. And I whipped up a batch of yeast raised apple fritter batter, rolled balls of it in brown sugar and cinnamon, and waffled that — I’ll be doing that again for sure. Next on the agenda, a sharp cheddar and apple waffle, maybe in a biscuit dough? I live with a waffle skeptic, he keeps telling me I can’t waffle these things, and I keep proving him wrong and yes, this is why I’m fat, shut up or you won’t get any waffles.

I found the Republican National Convention terrifying and alienating, it made it hard to find things I liked this week and easy to retreat into eating delicious waffles. But the world is not 100% dumpster fire. I continue to have good work. My editors said really nice things about my travel essay projects. I played a solid set with my band on a huge stage with a pro sound crew who couldn’t have been nicer — or more enthusiastic about our weird brand of ukulele rock.

Here’s hoping you proved someone wrong about what can be done this week, and you shared the delicious results with them anyway.

You know the drill, some of the links here are Amazon links, you buy, I get a little something something. Beats cluttering up the site with junk ads. Thanks for clicking through.

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I just finished reading Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, good lord is that the weirdest, bleakest, most fucked up thing I’ve read since what? Geek Love? (Palahniuk is, after all, the guy that wrote Fight Club.)It’s about a former model whose face is destroyed in a shooting and her transsexual – um — guide, and drugs, and hell, I don’t actually know what it was about but I couldn’t stop reading. Palahniuk does voice in such a way that I needed to know what the hell was going to happen. And man, that was fucked up. Should you read this book? I don’t know, what’s your tolerance for excessively dark profane humor?

La Rustica is on Beach Drive in West Seattle and I forget it’s there too often. It’s charming — a word I don’t throw around — and the food –Italian — is so good. It’s a little splurge-y for a person who usually goes for cheap Vietnamese, but it’s not overpriced. I’m tempted to throw out all kinds of overused cliches to describe it –“hidden gem” comes to mind — but then I’d have to stop writing. I’m telling you about it so next time you’re in Seattle you say, “What about that place down by the water?” We’ll go. It’s lovely, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get a sunset like this one.

Oh, hey, I do still write elsewhere from time to time.

• Here’s the latest on life with Harley the Dog — Chain of Command in which a certain dog sounds of on who’s the boss.
• For G Adventures, Here’s a collection of memories that talk about why I like to walk in strange new places: On Walking.

It rained, hard, for about six hours on starting very early on Friday morning. I woke up around three in the morning to get a glass of water and everything smelled amazing. Whenever I feel joyful about the rain — and I was, very much so — I think that I have left my California roots behind.