Summer Pineapples

This post has been over a week in coming, but it took me that long to get the photos uploaded from my camera. Without photos, this post couldn't have been complete because I'm terrible at describing objects. Especially true when it's something most people have never heard of before.

Amanda loves fruit of pretty much all shapes and sizes, some more than others. But lately we've been all about pineapple in particular. As much as I love it though, after the first few, you're kinda tired of the same old thing. So one night when we were grilling out, I decided to try something I did back when I traveled with Chef Pierre for Farm Bureau. I threw some pineapple out on the grill along with the meat.

Grilling gives me time to sit back and drink a beer, reflecting on life, so I like it and it allows me to contribute to dinner sometimes too. Of course, a lot has changed since I last grilled pineapple on the grill and I realized this as I was out there grilling. I'm now freer of all the cares and worries of life that I had dragged around with me at the time. And a careless attitude is essential to grilling anything new or random. Amanda also puts a lot of confidence into my grilling and I yet have to give anyone food poisoning (myself included), so I suppose her faith is validated ever so slightly. The past few years have been a whirlwind of happenings, but I think it's been mostly for the good.

So to the real bulk of this post, the pineapple turned out amazing. And Amanda liked it so much that we started grilling pineapple even more. We got to the point that I was finally good at cutting up fresh pineapple and sick of doing it all at the same time. We've eaten pineapple so often that Betsy even started liking it. And that's when Amanda showed up with a surprise which made my day - a pineapple corer.

This thing (shown in pictures) is pretty much my new favorite kitchen utensil. It was a perfect fit for cutting out the core once the top was removed. And that's not even the good part. It drilled out the pineapple too, resulting in a spiral cut of the edible portion of the pineapple. There was virtually no difference in waste between this method and our traditional method, and it left us with a cute little pineapple bowl afterwards. For those of my old college friends, I'm pretty sure you can quickly conjure up what a pineapple bowl might be good for...

Anyhow, this tool made my day for just about $10, and it made serving one of our best grilled items just that much easier and attractive. Try it out, and the beer in those pictures is pretty good too.