May I just say, without sounding like an advertisement: Trader Joe's has some rockin' raisins, the Jumbo Raisin Medley, which consists of "Seedless Golden Light Raisins, Flame Raisins, and Jumbo Raisins, Sulfur Dioxide." They're so good I don't even care about the word "dioxide."
I am not a raisin person. In fact, I grew up thinking of raisins as a kind of culinary buckshot, that ruins perfectly good food: why is this lump in this lovely muffin? And it probably didn't help that my grade-school cafeteria, which was like something out of "Oliver!" (children filed through a garbage alley/garage that led past the sad dishwashing station into a giant room/prison with high windows that we couldn't see out of), served a dish that had no name but that I presume was meant to be a "raisin pie." Basically a giant casserole filled with brown bloated raisins, surrounded by a nondescript raisin-pie sauce, with a crust on top. You'd have had to chloroform me to get me to eat it. But, as my mother would say, some children had no raisin pie at all.
That said: I really like these raisins and you should try them. I have them on oatmeal, which I eat 231 times a week, with honey and almonds. They come in a bag, not a box; are tart like apricots, tender yet chewy, and discrete (i.e., they don't stick together like those crappy little boxes of raisins that people feed their children as snacks).
Please examine this raisin picture closely: I think it will convince you.
"...some children had no raisin pie at all. "
ReplyDelete"Oh, the poor dears," she sobbed. She dreamily recalled her own MaMa's culinary gifts. She had loved into life the most exquisite tartlets, fairly bursting with gin-swollen, golden raisins that had been marinating in Papa’s recipe for weeks; short, plump little cakes that were baked in the fluted scallop of a seashell. We called them hillbilly madeleines...
Hi, Alice!
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