Chuck Wendig's Blog

It is the day of the giving of thanks, a holiday that is ostensibly problematic in its origin but kind of nice and pure in its current form — it’s a celebration only minimally about buying things and ultimately about sitting down with friends and family to a stupidly caloric starch-bomb meal, often concluding with some manner of pie.

(I suggested on Bluesky that the ultimate form of Thanksgiving might in fact be Piesgiving, where you begin the day with breakfast pie, and eat savory pies throughout the day until crossing the finish line with a variety of sweet and season-slash-region-appropriate dessert pies. The goal is then also to figure out how to turn, say, a coffee drink into something reflective of pie — or a cocktail, as well. IT CAN BE DONE. And yes, there’s already 3/14, Pi Day, but the goal here would be to make it more autumnal, more apropos to the standard Thanksgiving meal.)

Anyway, it’s a nice day, and you might be sitting down at some point and enjoying apples today, as I hope you are. You are, after all, a member of the Apple Snack Gang whether you want to be or not, sorry, I don’t make the rules, just by reading these very words you are legally across all galactic satrapies a member of the cult I mean gang. Welcome aboard!

I’ve got apples in my homemade cranberry sauce, and I also made a side of applesauce — this time using Ludacrisp apples, and honestly, it tastes a little weird. Not bad! But weird. I also get a pie from Factory Girl, and I’ll just let you get a look at that beauty:

They have in fact challenged me to try to figure out what five apples they use in this glorious pie — really, it’s the best apple pie ever — and boy howdy am I down for that challenge. I’ll get it wrong! But I’ll try.

(My go-to apple pie apple is Goldrush, but I have yet to be able to get any this season, as my orchard seems late to put them out. Aaaugh.)

Anyway, one of the apples I think most commonly used in Thanksgiving foodstivities is, in fact, the apple I am here to review today.

Without further ado:

My review of a Manoff Orchard Granny Smith, late-Nov:

The Granny Smith apple! An apple that I only just learned is apparently an Aussie apple. Not British, not American. May even have some ties to Tasmanian crabapples? And it’s named after a literal Granny Smith — Maria Ann Smith, an orchard-keeper.

Whatever the case, it’s often thought of as a great baking apple, a good sauce apple, and a terrible eating apple.

In fact, my last review some years ago was this:

“It’s good for baking but don’t put it in your mouth.”

And that was it.

Thing is, that was a grocery store version procured in January. It was tart as hell, hard as a rock, and made my mouth sad.

I decided this year, well, why not give it another go?

They were popping up at my local orchard, plus I was using some to cook with for Turkey Day (a day in which I do not make turkey, by the way, and today I’ll be making little quails) — so I saved one for eating out of hand.

The result?

This was a lovely apple! Quelle surprise, which is French for: “I AM SHOOKETH, FOR THIS APPLE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A MISERABLE ORB OF TONGUE-SHRIVELING SOURNESS, BASICALLY JUST A LIME, BUT ACTUALLY, IT WAS MUCH BETTER THAN THAT, THEREFORE I AM, AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED, SHOOKETH.”

Crisp rather than crunchy. Juicy but not like, “go see a doctor” juicy. Had a lemonade flavor, but less a super-sweet lemonade and more the artisanal kind which is mostly lemon and minimally sugar. It was tart, but not unsweet. The skin was not a problem to eat and was, erm, easy to perforate and did not linger longer in the mouth.

All told?

Very pleasing. Quite refreshing!

Only oddities were —

a) the skin offered about 10% banana runts

b) a puzzling savory note manifested and lingered long after eating the apple — not unpleasant, but odd

Neither of those are deal-breakers.

As such, for eating-out-of-hand, this is an easy 6.6 out of 10. (Higher if you’re using it for baking or throwing at the shrieking poop-fingered goblins you’ve parked at the kiddy table today.)

You can watch me eat it — and regard its witch’s nipple — here.

(I also quick remind: order my books by Nov 30th here from Doylestown to get them shipped to you with unique personalizations and stickers. Support a cool indie bookstore. Help me buy more apples in the process. Okay, minimal capitalistic intrusion complete.)

I’m thankful for this apple.

I’m thankful for you.

Okay bye.

Granny Smith: Best for baking but a good version from a nice orchard will give a pleasantly refreshing lemonadey apple-eating experience

Reviews in 2025: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet, Opal, Cosmic Crisp, Black Oxford, Ananas Reinette, Sugarbee

As a cantankerous alt-rock grunge-loving teenager, I was not particularly a Rage Against the Machine guy — I mean, I liked the music but it didn’t connect with me, and my theory now as to why that was? I was just a selfish teenage dickhead whose angst was not political, not global, and I was honestly a little walled off from the world’s problems and definitely up the ass of my own problems. The private, self-absorbed, inward-looking angst of NIN was more my thing than the outward-facing rage of, well, RATM.

Fast-forward to now. My kid, who you may know as “B-Dub,” has been playing guitar now for… *checks watch* oh my god since he was five years old. And he’s now three inches taller than me, just to give you that sense.

He discovered Rage, and further, Tom Morello.

And Morello became something of an inspiration to him — the kid loves his attitude toward playing, toward guitar gear, obviously his political stances, and even more obviously, the dude’s actual ability, which is appropriately legendary. The guy, with minimal gear, can make a guitar sound impossible, like he’s forcing it to do literal magic. So, as such, I’ve become a proper RATM fan in the present. And recently we had the opportunity to see Tom Morello with a full band accompaniment, and further, we got the chance to give the kid special access in the form of a VIP “guitar package,” which was like, this thing before the show you could go to where you got to check out Morello’s long-serving guitars, his pedal board, and talk to his guitar techs about all of it. Got this for the kid for an early Christmas present as a surprise.

Thing was, they sent out an email that falsely stated we’d be meeting Tom himself alongside the man’s guitars — but then they sent a follow-up email the next morning to say, “Oops, nope, that’s not true, sorry, sorry, our bad.” Which, hey, that sucks but I knew it going in and suspected the first email was wrong; the initial package description was clear about not meeting the guy. I was under no illusion and expected the clarification that inevitably, if disappointingly, came.

So, we go to the show.

We go to the VIP experience.

And they tell us, “Tom feels bad and wants to make it right,” so suddenly the man hisownself shows up, does some Q&A alongside his guitar techs, and then takes photos with everyone.

It was, needless to say, pretty fucking rad.

But during the Q&A, he said something that struck me in the heart like a pure beam of light. I’m gonna be honest — it was so good, I don’t even remember the question. I think it was a throwaway question and he might’ve even meant this statement as not a throwaway, exactly, but given more as a casual response, and not a statement with the creative weight that I felt it carried.

This is what he said:

“Don’t leave behind who you are in what you do.”

And man, that’s just fucking good advice.

I recognize it’s not particularly profound advice, really, but I do think it speaks to the danger that all creative people face, and that’s whether you make words or physical art or music. Hell, maybe it speaks to the danger everybody faces, regardless of your life path or career choice or whatever — the more of yourself you slap up on that altar of success, the more of You that you have to cut away… the less it all means. The less reason you have to do it.

The less it all matters.

With writing, I am wont to remind folks that who you are really matters to that process. And it matters in a thousand different ways. Two of the most important are: first, you write how you write and that’s important to figure out through endless iteration and reiteration of process, and second, very little if anything we write can truly be original, but the one original thing we get to bring to the table is ourselves. Because we are each of us a truly unique confluence of creative and critical molecules. No one is like you. No one! No one has the particular, peculiar combination of experiences and fears and delights and fetishes and anxieties and neurodivergences that comprise the YOU that shows up to the page, so it’s foolish to try to push that part away. That part is the only part that matters.

And so I really loved what he said — don’t leave yourself behind. Because it’s easy, so easy, to do that. It’s tempting to believe we’re the thing that’s holding ourselves back, or that we’re the thing standing in our way — and that’s not to say we can’t be our own worst enemies. We can! We can absolutely get in our own heads and fuck ourselves up. But sometimes, the thing we get in our own heads about is self-doubt. Imposter syndrome. This feeling that nobody wants us at the party, that we weren’t invited, and if we’re going to show up we better show up with a mask on, or pretending to be someone else. So we need to write in this genre or with that trope or using some particular trick or convention. Even AI represents a way away from yourself — it’s not you. It’s a sticky stolen mash-up of everyone else. Use AI, you’re leaving yourself behind (amongst several other critical sins). Hell, with AI, it’s worse than that — you’ve discarded yourself, given over your agency and your creativity to Techbro Billionaires and their Great and Powerful Oz machine.

You’re not an imposter.

You belong here.

The invitation to the party is you. You’re it. Your creative and emotional DNA is the key that unlocks the door to get inside.

Shit, it’s the only real way past the ropes.

So, I dunno. It hit me and for me was a useful reminder and, as such, I thought I’d pass it along.

Don’t leave behind who you are in what you do.

Fuck yeah.

Also, hey, Tom Morello seems like a real one. Put on a helluva show, and he also had an opener that he invited, a San Diego hyper-political rap-punk group called the Neighborhood Kids, who fucking slammed that stage with intense energy. (Check ’em out here.)

All right, gotta remind you all — if you want signed, uniquely-holidayily personalized, and bestickered books from me, then click here to do that. Deadline is November 30th for a guaranteed get by the holidays.

All right, fuck it, another quick story. So, during the performance, both with Morello and the Neighborhood Kids, there was political talk, with a bonus chant demanded of FUCK ICE. And let’s be honest — most of the crowd was what the Neighborhood Kids called “old rockers.” White dude graybeards with metal shirts and shit. Not all of them! There were some youths! I saw some trans folks! I sat next to a cool Latino dude who was a big guitar nerd. But mostly: yeah, old white guys. I guess, at this point, myself included in that group. And it was fine! They were awesome old white dudes, still trying to headbang and throwing up horns and fists and trying very hard to jump up and down on creaky old knees. They were committed, and they were politically invested.

Anyway, during the chant of FUCK ICE, two things happened:

First, when that chant was over, a guy behind me — not an old guy, but a young guy, I’d say late 20s, early 30s, standing there with his girlfriend — waited for a moment and yelled FUCK SOCIALISM.

I turned to glare at him.

A lot of people turned to glare at him.

His girlfriend, perhaps seeing this, hit him on the arm.

He received — thankful for him — no acknowledgement of what he yelled from the stage.

Then, directly in front of me was this meatball-looking dude, this absolute casino-fiend of a man (did I mention the show took place in a casino theater? eennh it did) with hair slicked back and dreams of having starred on The Sopranos — soon as the chant was over, he and his starving-bird-girlfriend got up and walked out of the show in a huff. As if FUCK ICE was a bridge too far for them.

I guess they were hoping Tom Morello was raging against the machine of… socialism? He was mad at progressive thought? Raging against immigrants? Like, what the fuck? What machine did you think was the problem? Did these people ever actually listen to RATM? And then I realized — no, they didn’t, not really. Guys like that, they just heard the guitar and the fuck you I won’t do what you tell me and in their minds etched that saying onto their feelings about Big Government or Big Woke or some other stupid shit, and they ignored literally all the rest of it, and then they come to a Tom Morello show thinking he’s on their team while mostly being fans of like, Limp Bizkit or whatever.

Dipshits, dipshits, everywhere.

Anyway! Sorry, had to add that story in.

BYE.

I’m kind of spoiling my review a little here in the post title sooooo I guess let’s just get into it, shall we?

My review of this fucking SugarBee “apple,” bought at I dunno some grocery store, maybe Sprouts, I forget, early-November:

This apple was a real piece of shit.

I’m sorry! I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

Okay, look.

I don’t know if this is literally, legitimately the worst apple I’ve eaten all year. Okay? I don’t know that. This shit isn’t science. I give it a fancy number score as if to make you believe this is math somehow, but it’s not math, it’s just me taking a dart made of my emotions and throwing it at a map of the internet. Giving it a number makes it feel like an official, objective accounting but in reality, but mostly that number is just a gut check feeling and reflects whether I’m happy or sad or meh or, in this case, angry inside my mouth.

Now, I know some of you genuinely like this apple.

That’s okay! You should be allowed to like things, even if you liking those things makes me think somehow your tongue is broken, or that perhaps your brain has been chewed upon and through by some kind of weevil. It’s fine! You’re fine! We’re fine. More SugarBee apples for you, friend! Less for me because I don’t want to eat poison!

Because that’s what it kind of tasted like.

It tasted like this:

You took a rose.

You sprayed that rose with wasp spray.

You muddled that rose in a mixing glass with a couple cubes of brown sugar.

You poured cider over it, strained it, and made me drink it.

And then the aftertaste was like if you dipped a cantaloupe* in MSG — I was suddenly assaulted by this weird savory umami goblin that lingered and lingered, clinging to my tastebuds and I have no idea why.

It was juicy! It was sweet! Not tart at all, not even in the slightest! What a nice crunch! Wow is that the piquant effervescence of RoundUp mixed with grandmother’s perfume? Oh my!

Seriously, I don’t know what happened here, but it fought my tongue like an angry swordfish on the line. One assumes this horrible fuckface of an apple is not emblematic of all SugarBee apples — I’ve had one of these before and recall not particularly liking it, thinking it was a dullard’s apple for children and only children, but I don’t recall the “pesticide and weird melon” taste. I’m almost tempted to buy another one from a different store just to see, but I may not hate myself that bad. I even peeled this one to see, and it did not fix the problem, not at all. It insisted, then persisted.

Anyway. This was bad and weird and the taste stayed on my tongue like the smell of a dead rat in the walls. It was fucking horrible fuck this fucking apple.

I’m going 1.1 out of 10, which is honestly gracious, but I am trying to give it some small credit for the juicy crunch it gave.

Here’s me eating it.

SugarBee: Like a rose dipped in wasp spray and sugar

Reviews in 2025: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet, Opal, Cosmic Crisp, Black Oxford, Ananas Reinette

* by the way, fuck melons, melons are also pieces of shit and should get fucked, throw all the melons out, put them in some sort of space trebuchet and launch those shitdicks to the fucking moon, the moon can be for melons, melons for the cave-dwelling moon people, I’m sorry if you like melons** but in this case you’re wrong and have been duped by perhaps nostalgia or aliens or those weevils I was talking about earlier

** watermelons are sort of okay

HEYYYY so every year, I tend to get Very Cool People who decide to buy my books as holiday gifts for friends, loved ones, cherished foes, or, y’know, themselves. And I like to offer the opportunity to get signed, personalized books shipped to you if you want ’em, and here’s how that happens —

You click here and order from Doylestown Bookshop.

Ah, but you don’t just get signed, personalized books, ohh no.

You also get:

COOL STICKERS (wendig-themed, as supplies last)

and

A UNIQUE HOLIDAY-THEMED PERSONALIZATION in which I describe a horror holiday gift (e.g. “a wet cardboard box full of blood” or “an AI avatar of your dead grandmother you can use to play Fortnite and also she’s going to murder you in the middle of the night”).

All the details are at the link above.

Note that orders have to be in by 11/30 for guaranteed holiday shipping — orders ordered after that may still get the stickers and personalizations but may not arrive in time for the horrordays I mean the holidays.

That’s it. Easy-peasy, hearts-a-squeezy.

(Psst: these are the books in the promotion.)

Anyway! Don’t forget to summon the Dread Lord Santa Satan Chuck to deliver books and kooky shit to all the very wonderful readers out yonder in the fiery hell-world that is 2025. Please to enjoy scary books and weird joy.

I think one of the other things I really like about apples is that once in a while you eat one that makes you really feel alive. What I mean is, there’s something about the moment where you bite into it where you’re given a hard shove out of this reality and into the reality of the apple. For a precious moment, you lose sight of everything. All there is, is the apple. Its taste. Its texture. The joy it gives. It’s like a slap to the face, except in a good way? (Usually. Some apples are called “spitters” for a reason, after all.) Certainly apples aren’t the only thing that does this — there are experiences in life that accomplish this in ways bigger and smaller. First kiss, a car accident, someone tells you that they love you for the first time, a moment at a concert where the band plays your favorite song or a song you never really appreciated before that moment — I think there are a lot of really fascinating moments that perforate the expected expanse of our daily lives, and it’s really great when they happen, and honestly, to my mind, they happen less and less as you get older. Perhaps there’s just a loss of novelty — little is new, everything is some degree of comfort. Even your anxieties can start to feel like an old enemy rather than a brand new monster. But sometimes you still get it. And for me, sometimes the way I get it is by eating a really new, interesting apple.

Which leads me to —

My review of an Ananas Reinette from Scott Farm (VT), early-Nov:

The Ananas Reinette — translated from the French, the Pineapple Pippin, and “pippin” is basically just “apple,” so it’s a pineapple apple, and if you placed that apple between two pens, it’d be pen pineapple apple pen, so enjoy that earworm. You’re goddamn welcome.

(Weirdly, it’s got a French name, but it’s a Dutch apple — a roughly 500-year-old apple, originating in the Netherlands. In Dutch, then, it should be ananas appel. I am unsure why it has a French name, then? I blame one of you.)

Anyway.

I really like a tart apple.

Not just tart — but really tart, and really sweet.

I like it because of exactly what I outlined at the fore of this post — sweetness on its own is not likely to do much work jarring me from my gestalt, but if you add in a whip-crack acid-lick of tartness in there? Oh, my world, she is shook.

And this apple has exactly that.

The first flavor out of the gate is a pretty intense pineapple-lemon-pear slap to the mouth. And it’s great. The kind of pain that is pleasure. You get that lip-smacker sour-patch thing, and it’s also got that tongue-scrubbing tastebud buzz, like what you’d get from eating pineapple. It’s wild. It’s crazy. It’s a blast of flavor and it will give you that short, sharp spiritual shock that will rattle your soul out of drudgery and ennui.

It’s crisp. Pretty juicy. Medium-to-finely grained. And it’s a pretty apple. That bold green-yellow with the little green freckles (aka lenticels) on it? Love it.

And so now you’re going wonder, if I liked this apple so much, why am I giving it a relatively low 7.9?

Well, first, I’d note somewhat haughtily that a 7.9 out of 10 is still a very good score, I’ll have you know, and you’ll respond with, “Well if it were a grade in school, it’d be a C+,” and I’ll respond with, “Grades are bad and silly and measure nothing of value and don’t even really make sense on that 1-100 scale,” and you’d tell me I was stalling, and okay yeah maybe.

The reason I’m not quite ready to commit my heart to a higher score here is just because at the end of it, there was a grassy aftertaste and then an afteraftertaste which was a little metallic. I’m willing to believe it’s just a fluke — also willing to believe that this apple just needs more time in storage, which is totally a thing with this one. You let it go a little longer in cold storage, and it’ll ideally lose that green-grass vibe. But for now, this specimen of this apple, I gotta go 7.9 / 10.

SORRY, PINEAPPLE APPLE, I LOVE YOU.

Watch me eat it here.

Ananas Reinette: Flavor taser

Reviews in 2025: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet, Opal, Cosmic Crisp, Black Oxford

To talk about this apple, we first talk about other apples.

Let’s talk about the Black Diamond apple, because I get sent this every once in a while — a meme goes around, like this one —

Or this right here —

And everyone goes ooh and ahhh and they’re like WOW BLACK APPLES HOLY CRAP, THESE ARE CLEARLY THE DEVIL’S APPLES, I WANT SOME, but I think there’s a few things to note here.

First, shit you see on the Internet is and has often been bullshit, and that was true before AI got its uncanny fangs into our online realities, and at this point you should be increasingly skeptical of most things you read — honestly, I might not even be real. I’m doubting my own existence!

Second, usually things that sound too good or too extreme to be true often are too good or too extreme to be true, because few things are that good or that extreme. Most things are in the bell of the curve, not the edges.

Third, things that seem designed to be spread — to be memeified, or to go viral — are also often, say it with me, bullshit. If it’s a short punchy piece of cool information in a neat little square, it wants to be shared — or more to the point, it means someone wants you to share it. They want you to fertilize the world with horseshit.

(It’s why right now you can go on Facebook and see shitloads of people — of all ages, amongst people you certainly know and trust — spreading unsourced unlinked things with obviously-AI images, because these things make them feel good, or feel mad, or feel wonder, or feel something anything at all. Never mind the fact that it’s very easy to check the reality of the claims they’re reposting — even with enshittified Google. Never mind that when you tell them it’s AI, they’re like, “that’s okay, because I like it anyway.”)

So, then, the Black Diamond apples.

That meme above isn’t the only one I get — sometimes it’s other photos, sometimes it notes that these are like, sacred apples grown in Tibet and they were found in the Buddha’s own peaceful armpits or what-not and they are so healthy they’re basically magic they cure bad skin bad hair bad breath bad cancer — aaaaand you know, this just isn’t reality, as far as I can tell.

It seems like:

a) the Black Diamond is a real apple

b) it’s just a normal, maybe not even that great, apple, very reddish-purple, still cool, not black, designed more to be delightful in a gift box than in the mouth, and potentially Photoshopped to look darker and more impressive

(I’ve seen them compared to Red Delicious apples, soooooo. Yeah.)

(If you want some inside baseball chatter about it — this thread, here.)

The funny thing is, we actually have apples right here that tend to grow pretty dark. This is just a regular-ass Red Delicious I bought some years ago at a grocery store — it’s not black, but it’s definitely the color of, um, a blood-spattered ruby slipper, wouldn’t you say?

The photo at the fore of this post is the subject of this review, the Black Oxford — and I took a shot from another angle, and you can see from that angle the purpleyness (not a word) is heightened —

Or there’s the Arkansas Black, as well. I’m sure there are others, to boot. Heck, the Blue Pearmain — which I regrettably did not get any of this season! — literally has a blue hue to it due to the dusty blueish bloom upon its skin. (I’ve no idea what that “bloom” is — if anybody knows, drop a comment.)

Anyway — case in point, the Internet is often full of shit, but also, there’s often actual true things that are just as cool as the bullshit you find online.

All that being said? Let’s review this fuckin’ apple.

My review of a Scott Farm (VT) Black Oxford apple, early-Nov:

This apple is a lightless void. Its skin is the Homeric winedark sea, and its flesh is as dense as a collapsed star. It’s a heavy apple. You could knock a toddler’s head off with this thing. I mean, don’t! Don’t do that! But you could.

The skin is somewhat forbidding, but not terribly so. The flesh really is dense, which lends itself to a diligent chew — you’re gonna have to CHAW down on this thing, so if your CHOMPERS ARE WEAK, this apple is going to tell you to get fucked. No sad soft teeth for this apple. You gotta have a rock-tumbler mouth to eat this apple proper-like.

The taste is —

Honestly, it’s pretty wild.

It’s more sweet than tart, but there’s a tart tang in there. I think the sweetness, though, gets pretty interesting — my first thought was, “This tastes like black cherry soda,” and then my second thought was, “That’s wrong, this tastes like Dr. Pepper.” And it does. The herbaceous-spice vanilla prune cherry captured-ghost corn syrup weirdness of DOC PEP is in the flesh of this apple.

There is a darkness in the heart of this apple, but the darkness is not Satanic or Luciferan — it is not there to buy your soul at a crossroads at midnight, nay. The darkness is the darkness of the night sky, the darkness of reduced cherry juice, the darkness of a ruby Port.

Maybe only one or two demons in there.

It’s nice. It’s pretty. It’s tasty. Go get one.

I feel like we can call this a solid 8.2 outta 10.

I eat it here. Wendigo mukbang, baby.

Black Oxford: Cheerful Goth kid who loves Dr. Pepper

Reviews in 2025: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet, Opal, Cosmic Crisp

You may have heard the news — and if not, you may have felt it in your bones, a paroxysm of worry squirming in your marrow like worms — that Kraft put out an apple pie mac and cheese. And of course, for those who somehow don’t know, I’m the Chief Captain Scout Leader, aka, The Apple Man, of the Apple Snack Gang, whereupon I eat apples and apple-related things and then post about them here and on Instagram. So it was of course grotesque kismet that I would end up eating this fucking thing in front of you, digitally, so to speak.

Food Crime Mukbang, baby.

I have done this in a two part video, if you wanna watch —

Part One

Part Two

— but if you’re one of those weirdos who, you know, still reads things, I note first that a) bless you and b) you can just read what I’m about to write.

My review of this shit is this:

It smelled fairly strongly of apple pie spice, but not apple pie. I am of the mind that many apple-flavored things are apple-flavored in the same way that pumpkin spice is a thing — the apple-flavor contains no apple, the pumpkin spice contains no pumpkin. They’re just flavored with their respective spice blends, and those blends are honestly pretty similar. The smell coming off this Kraft mac was cinnamon and nutmeg-forward, with zero apple anything.

Oh, and it smelled a little barfy.

Not hella-barfy!

But a little barfy, like how some products cooked in coconut oil smell or taste that way after they sit too long. (Rancidity, man. Rancidity.)

I ate it.

And it was–

Okay, listen, I expected it was going to go one of two ways. The first was that it was going to be an absolute atrocity inside my mouth, a food crime punishable by exile in a cosmic prison beyond the veil of space and the walls of time — a spoonful of nightmare. Or, alternatively, that it was going to be really fucking dull.

I would’ve preferred the Mouth Atrocity.

Unfortunately, I got Fucking Dull.

It was boring!

The potpourri smell mostly disappears into the food. It gives only a faint hint of autumnal spice in the mac and chee, which is, y’know, fine. It’s nothing to hurk up, it’s nothing to cheer about. It’s just food. In your mouth.

(It must be noted that one of the things Kraft gets right, always, about their mac and chee — those soft little noodle-tubes are deeply, deeply comforting. Texturally they’re a wonder — barely any texture at all, just a soft, acquiescent bundle of not-quite-goo in your mouth, less pasta and more those wiggly tube things you’d win at an arcade, the ones that look like water-filled double-anuses and you let them slip and slide in your hand? You know what I mean? You know what I mean. Anyway, point is: you barely even need to chew Kraft mac and cheese. It’s present! You can tell it’s there. But it begs little of you. It asks almost nothing, demands no work, and loves you for who you are.)

So, this was completely unexceptional and uninteresting in every way.

But I really wanted to try to get closer to… well, what it said on the box. APPLE PIE. Like, where’s the crime part of this food crime? I wanted to at least get closer to the intent of the thing.

As such, I got out my applesauce.

I make a pretty solid applesauce — it’s easy, and delicious, and here’s how you do it: chop up as many apples as you want. Keep the skins on maybe half of them? Only red ones. You want that red, rosy color. Pour some apple cider (non-alc) over them, ideally something from a local orchard or farm. Like, a half-cup, maybe a cup if you’re cooking a bunch of apples.

Simmer, cover for 20 minutes until apples are mushy.

Blend them up — you can just mash, but in that case, peel all the skins to start.

Then return the apple goo, now blended, to the pot, and now add:

Cinnamon, nutmeg. Cinnamon to taste, nutmeg just a heavy pinch.

Cook on low for another… at least 20 minutes, maybe 30, maybe more. Stir semi-often. I cover the pot back up for the first part of this but then leave uncovered for most of the time.

It reduces down to this delicious goo. It’s shy of apple butter — but has a velvety texture, and you’ve added no additional sugar.

Anyway.

I took a heaping spoonful of my applesauce —

And plopped it into the mac and cheese.

Mixy-mixy.

Then I ate it.

And — no food crime here, my friends. ONLY FOOD MIRACLE. Holy fuck it was tasty. You know how sometimes when you were a kid (or an adult still shut up) and you squirt ketchup into pasta or mac and cheese and you’re like “This is gross but also amazing?” This is that. It’s maybe gross, I dunno, but it was super tasty. It added this sweet-tart appley snap to the mac and cheese and upped the comfort level, upped the nostalgia level, and gave it an actual apple pie vibe.

So, do that.

And in fact, turns out this is a thing — älplermagronen is a Swiss-German dish where mac and cheese (tubule mac and cheese too) is paired with, often, bacon, onion, and potato and then on the side you get applesauce or apple compote to mix in for taste. Warm and comforting and yum.

Anyway.

To sum up:

I ate the food crime and it wasn’t much of a food crime but then I made it into a food crime that simply corrected the injustice of boring food, the end.

An apology to folks who wanted to see me in Halifax this coming weekend — sadly, given the current governmental shitshow here in America, air travel is getting a bit dicey right now what with the fact we have no government. We have air traffic controllers and TSA folks without pay. Delays and cancellations are way up. Safety issues, potentially up as well. Security checkpoints — like some at Philly airport — are closing down, which only gums up the works more. And Sean Duffy is threatening to shut down parts of American airspace (??) and as such, my family has decided it is not the best idea for me to be traveling out of the country at this exact moment in time, and I can’t afford any additional days to the trip given stuff going on here at home. Soooo, that left me with the uncomfortable decision to miss a convention that I adored the last time I want, and also missing getting to see readers and friends. It sucks, and I’m sad, but it felt like the right decision, and one made also to limit worries and concern with my family right now. It’s stupid! I hate this stupid fucking government and I’d like things to go back to normal now, please. At least yesterday’s election provided a much-needed boost of hope and normalcy to the system — here’s hoping it cascades and things can start the slow crawl toward better days.

This is the apple in your hand.

Some would say it is so red that it looks black, but that’s not quite
right. It’s the color of wine and offal, of liver soaked in Pinot Noir.
Bruise-dark and blood-bright.

The skin shows little russeting, if any. But it is home to a peppering
of lenticels—the little white dots you sometimes see on appleskin. These
lenticels feel somehow deeper than the skin itself. As if you are staring
into a thing that is nothing as much as it is something: an object of depth,
of breadth, like a hole in the universe. In this way the lenticels are like
the stars of a moonless evening.

The skin is smooth and cold, always cold. It is a round apple, not
oblong, not tall, but also not squat. The Platonic ideal of an apple shape,
perhaps: roughly symmetrical, broad in the shoulders, narrow toward
the calyx. The apple is heavy, too. Dense-feeling. Heavy enough to crack
a window. Or break a nose.

Even before you bite it, a scent rises to meet you. It’s the smell of
roses—not unusual, because apples are related to the rose. Same family,
in fact: Rosaceae.

What is unusual is the moment, a moment so fast you will disregard
it, when the smell makes you feel something in the space between your
heart and your stomach: a feeling of giddiness and loss in equal measure.
In that feeling is the dying of summer, the rise of fall, the coming of winter, and threaded throughout, a season of funerals and flowers left on a grave. But again, that moment is so fast, you cannot hold on to it. It is
gone, like a dream upon waking.

Of course, what matters most is the eating.

In the first bite, the skin pops under your teeth—the same pop you’d
feel biting into a tightly skinned sausage. The flesh has a hard texture,
and if you were to cut a slice you’d find it would not bend, but rather, it would break like a chip of slate snapping in half. That snap is a satisfying
sensation: a tiny tectonic reverberation felt all the way to the elbow.
In the chew, the apple is crisp, resistant to its destruction, with a
crunch so pleasurable it lights up some long-hidden atavistic artifact in
your brain, a part that eons ago took great joy from crushing small bones
between your teeth. The flesh is juicy; it floods the mouth, refusing to be
dammed by teeth or lips, inevitably dripping from your chin. But for all
its juiciness, too, the tannins are high—and the apple feels like it’s wicking the moisture out of your mouth, as if it’s taking something from you
even as you take from it.

The taste itself is a near-perfect balance of tartness and sweetness—
that sour, tongue-scrubbing feel of a pineapple, but one that has first
been run through a trench of warm honey. The skin, on the other hand,
is quite bitter, but there’s something to that, too. The way it competes
with the tart and the sweet. The way the most popular perfumes are
ones that contain unpleasant, foul odors secreted away: aromatics of rot,
bile, rancid fat, bestial musk, an ancient, compelling foulness from the
faraway time when crunching those little bones made us so very happy.

And so very powerful.

The bitterness of the skin is a necessary acrimony: a reminder that
nothing good can last, that things die, that the light we make leaves us all
eventually. That the light leaves the world. A hole in the universe. So we
must shine as brightly as we can, while we can.

It speaks to you, this bitterness, this foulness.

It speaks to some part of you that likes it.

Because part of you does like it.

Doesn’t it?

Okay, this isn’t really an apple review, ha ha I tricked you because it’s Halloween, you sickos. Rather, a note that Black River Orchard is two bucks for your digital book reader of choice. Which is to say, you can find it at Bookshop.org, Kobo, Amazon, B&N, Apple, and so forth.

And The Book of Accidents is still five bucks.

I expect this is a today only thing, so hop to it. If you dare.

HAPPY APPLEWEEN, NERDS

Gotta chase that sweet, sweet Honeycrisp dragon — that’s the thing, right? So many of our grocery store apples are, at this point, chasing the success and the flavor of the vaunted and beloved Honeycrisp apple. They want that honeyed sweetness with the big crispness and the epic juice and, at the end of the day, if that comes in an apple that’s easier to grow and easier to transport, so be it. (Doubly so if it’s an apple they can control better in terms of who can sell it, grow it, distribute it.)

Enter: the Cosmic Crisp.

It is, itself, a Honeycrisp x Enterprise collab — it’s hardier than the Honeycrisp, and arguably crunchier and juicier at the same time. It can only, only be grown in Washington state — er, also, Chile, apparently? — and has actually led to instances of apple piracy, with people stealing trees to plant in other states. And if you read that link, you’ll further see what a massive fucktangle you get looking at Big Agriculture — these are not small, scrappy entities. You’ll see private equity in there. You’ll see names like Goldman-Sachs, Bill Gates, Harvard University in there. I think like with so many things inside our capitalist nightmare, at the ground level of these monster-sized corporate entities you have people who genuinely care about both the individual product and the category of products — meaning, people who care very much about their apple, but also, apples in general. But then as you go up the chain, interest in the product is superseded by interest in money. The product is just a chit, a marker, a physical representation of investment and profit, a money tulpa. Doesn’t matter what the widget or dongle is; as long as it conveys cash, it’s interesting to them for that singular characteristic. And that’s a bummer. Money is a bummer. I’m not saying I hate people getting paid for cool things, but when you leap containment and that thing just becomes a wealth amulet, you know you’re in dicey territory. And with apples…

I mean, do we need to re-do the Red Delicious lesson?

Or the encroaching Honeycrispocalypse?

(It’s kind of like publishing. The people I know in publishing are nearly all amazing, thoughtful, fascinating people who care very much about books and writers. The publishing industry, meaning the giant ever-shifting architecture around and above them, is also controlled by people, many of whom don’t probably give one sticky fuck about books or authors — and it’s enough that this mechanized architecture becomes ultimately faceless and profit-driven. And so the industry stops caring about individual books and more about TRENDS and COOL GENRES and POPULAR TROPES and it aims for them even if that’s… the equivalent of overplanting Honeycrisp or breeding Red Delicious until it’s very red, but not very delicious.)

(Sorry, little bitta inside baseball there.)

So — the Cosmic Crisp.

It’s viewed by some as the heir to the Honeycrisp throne. And I’ve liked it quite a lot in the past. How did it hold up this time? Did it win my heart? Did it win my mind? Have I formed a sinister cult around it?? AM I IN THE CORNER, GIBBERING ITS NAME OVER AND OVER AGAIN?

My review of the Cosmic Crisp from Giant grocery store, PA, late-Oct:

Well, shit.

That’s the review.

Well, shit.

To unpack this a bit:

This wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be!

The positive: probably the juiciest apple I’ve yet eaten this season, maybe ever. You can watch the video here and honestly, it gets pornographic how the juice floods out of the apple. And it was lovely juice. It’d be wise to buy a batch of these and just juice them to drink — it would be phenomenal.

That said… you know, the rest wasn’t as good.

The crunch was nice! It’s a good crisp, breaking apple. Honestly better cut into slices you can break them like pieces of slate — biting into it outright is not as pleasing. The flavor, well. Well. It was fine? It’s fairly straight-down-the-middle with the one notable complexity being: redolent with rose. And that is not one of my favorite apple flavors. It tastes like grandma perfume a little. And I don’t want my apple-eating experience to be in any way reminiscent of macking on someone’s Gamgam, you know?

Leave GamGam outta this.

So, it’s floral, but not a floral I like.

This is not the Cosmic Crisp I’m used to. Now, I’m willing to believe this was simply not the best example sample of a Cosmic Crisp apple — after all, the one I had was beat-to-shit. It looked like it had been shanked in apple prison. Someone slashed it with a shiv made from apple seeds or something. It was a rough customer, and so that is indicative that maybe it’s not the best version of this apple at the outset, and that maybe translates to lesser flavor.

Still, what a bummer.

As such, I can’t rank this higher than the Honeycrisp, and if I’m being honest, I can’t even rank it as high as the Honeycrisp. I know! I know. To be honest, if it weren’t for the absolutely lovely flood of cidery juice this thing purged from its cells, it might’ve even ranked lower.

I’ll try to eat another before the season is over and add to the review.

But for now?

Can’t go higher than 6.7 out of 10.

GO ON, GEN ALPHA, HAVE YOUR WAY WITH IT. SAY YOUR LITTLE CATCHPHRASE. DO YOUR LITTLE GESTURE.

In the meantime, the Opal holds the “best grocery store apple” award this season.

Cosmic Crisp: So far, not out of this world, but rather, very much of this world, probably somewhere not that awesome like Scranton, PA or Ohio, even though it was grown in Washington state, or maybe Chile

Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet, Opal