Fruit Filling

It’s easy enough to stick a piece of fruit in a lunch bag or briefcase.  But it’s also easy enough to ignore it, or to decide it’s too hard to eat at work. After all, if you take a bite out of an apple or pear or peach, you’re committed to eating the whole thing at once or making a juicy mess of your desk. Berries aren’t really meant for eating-out-of-hand. Slicing a banana before it’s been peeled is fun, but hard to eat without a fork or spoon. Clementines are easy to peel, but oranges are even messier than August peaches.

I quartered and cored an apple one day and put it in a plastic bag, thinking it might make things easier: not exactly one-bite snacks, but close. Even sprinkled with lemon juice, it browned. I needed a way to keep the segments together.

Peanut butter.

It’s one of her favorite foods. It has a little extra protein, and the ingredient list on the brand we usually buy is blissfully short: peanuts and salt.

The peanut butter wasn’t quite adhesive enough to hold the quarters in place, but a rubber band around it was. Tuck the whole thing in a plastic bag, squeeze out as much air as possible, and you’re off. It was, from dinnertime reports, among the best afternoon snacks in the history of food.

We’re reasonably healthy eaters, holding strictly to a policy of “All things in moderation, including moderation.” But it is a bit of a challenge to get fruit and vegetables into our diet–even including “stealth vegetables” like the zucchini in a quick bread. Besides, if you include chocolate chips in the zucchini bread it’s pretty hard to make the claim of healthfulness. But an apple a day–even one that takes a multi-step process to prepare–is a good thing.

Bring home the plastic bag and rubber band to wash and reuse another day, of course.

Sure, it’s a little fussy.
But even before coffee, I can usually get one of these assembled in a minute-thirty.