Favorite Food

          So, there is something you should know about me if you are going to read my blog: I have an obsession with delicious food. In the past I have promised that this is not a food blog and I still swear by that. In fact, I'm not really sure what kind of blog this is anymore, it's something of a grab bag. I ought to change the description of the blog, since it doesn't really hold true anymore. Anyways, my obsession with delicious food encompasses dishes from nearly every culture. If I were to ask you what my favorite food is, you might answer with baklava, butter mochi, Vietnamese vermicelli noodles, or bibimbop. This are all fairly good guesses, because I do indeed love these foods. But my true favorite food, the one thing that I could eat every day and of which I would never grow tired, is not a fancy foreign dish or even something that you have to prepare at all. No, the food that I love the most is best in the pure, unadulterated form in which God gave it to us, and that food is the strawberry.

          I love strawberries so darn much. In fact, I recently bought three baskets at Publix because they were on sale, three for $5. I didn't need three boxes of strawberries, but when you live in the world of apples and bananas that is the FSU meal plan, the lure of having fresh strawberries for an entire week is too strong to resist. Besides, it was five dollars. Of course,this cannot compare to the huge flats of strawberries that I remember buying in my hometown of Merced. These delicious strawberries were as big as my tiny, seven year old fist, and they were sold by the Hmong families that tended enormous fields of strawberries and watermelons, selling their produce out of plywood fruit stands set up near the roads. These stands easily sold strawberries that boasted ten times the flavor of their anemic grocery store cousins at a quarter of their price.

         It was these strawberries, so abundant and delicious, overflowing their green plastic baskets, nestled side by side in the huge cardboard flat, that sparked my original love for the fruit. Strawberries symbolized summer and childhood and the simple joy that relied solely on the pleasure of the moment that your teeth cut through the firm flesh of the strawberry so that juice floods your mouth.

         Publix cannot rival these strawberries, particularly because they are romanticized by the generous veil of memory. However, as I am no longer in Merced, I have to make do with strawberries from Publix, and as far as grocery store fruit goes, these strawberries are pretty damn good. I am fastidious in choosing my fruit, so I picked three near perfect baskets, all full of ripe but not overripe, fruit, no spots of mold, no tiny green strawberries hiding amid their larger, redder brothers. In order to put things into perspective for you, I bought these baskets on Sunday, two days ago. With the help of one Chris Mougey (friend, boyfriend and all-around great guy), I now only have one and a half baskets of strawberries in my fridge.


         What I really need here at college is a good, easily accessible farmer's market. With a farmer's market, I can get my strawberry fix for cheap as well as find a variety of different locally grown, healthful foods. Sigh. All of the plans...