The most delicious apple

I had the most delicious apple today. It was beautiful and sweet. The moment I bit into the pale red and creamy-yellow skin, I knew I found that once-in-a-lifetime perfection. It was like love at first taste. It was a solid crunch, like the sound of your feet walking through the snow on a quiet winter night.

Apples, like a lot of fruit, can be hit and miss. Some look deceiving good, only to offer up disappointment. Soft ones are especially disappointing.

I was once partial to Granny Smiths, those tart and refreshingly green coloured apples, which you usually see stacked neatly in a silver bowl, and gracing the glossy pages of an interior design magazine.

More recently, I have sought out the Gala. The delightful apple that I had today was a Royal Gala, which was grown in New Zealand. Such a long way to travel, I thought. I have never been to New Zealand (It’s the one place that my wife has been that I haven’t). I pictured my apple being nurtured by the richness of the Waimea Plains, on New Zealand’s South Island. Or maybe warmed by the summer breeze sweeping off the North Island’s Hawke’s Bay.

The taste of the apple took me back to my childhood, when I would visit my grandparent’s home, in Duncan. They had a couple of apple trees in their front and back yards. The warm summers of the Cowichan Valley filled the trees with delicious apples. I would go out with my Grandma and stand on my tippy toes to reach the highest apple that my tiny eight-year-old arms could grab.

I learned that the Gala apple was developed in New Zealand in the 1920s by orchardist, J.H. Kidd, and is a cross between a Golden Delicious and Kidd's Orange Red.

Like finding that perfect love. I'll probably never taste anything better, I thought to myself, as I crunched my way through this mouth-watering apple.