Salad, shrimp, apple, croutons, pecans

* Jumbo shrimp cut down to size, which runs counter to the whole point of buying big ones but it does save on peeling them I suppose. Cooked in hot water, not boiling, just until turning throughout, then quickly removed and apologized to.

* Pecans heated in the microwave.

* Granny Smith apple that's been around quite awhile now

* Homemade mayonnaise with honey. This time with a whisk because there was only one egg yolk and I wanted to feel the magic. Rice vinegar, Dijon mustard.

* Homemade croutons, from homemade 100% whole-wheat sourdough bread. They're extraordinarily delicious.

* Sea salt.

Oatmeal, apple, blueberries, pecans

New American Breakfast, sixth in a series, where new is quite old indeed, where American is Scottish, and where breakfast occurs late in the afternoon because sometimes other things come up. The point is oats are a nice slowly digested grain and do not rapidly convert to sugars which are then converted to body fat.

* steel-cut oatmeal from the bulk bins at Whole Foods. Cut because they cook a little faster but not rolled because those are flattened, cut and steamed to become more like instant and something is lot in the processing. Of course whole groats are best of all but they take too long to suit me because I want oatmeal NOW! It's a bit bewildering faced with all those choices and all those bins so you should know what you want in advance so that you don't look like a dummkompf when you get there. Kidding. The people there are exceedingly helpful.

* 3/4 cup steel-cut oatmeal
* 1.25 cup water
* 1/2 large Granny Smith apple cut into wedges.
* handful of pecans

* 1/2 handful raisins
* handful of blueberries
* I got big hands
* butter
* sprinkle brown sugar

* cinnamon
* dash salt
* heavy cream

⚡⚡ ZAP ⚡⚡ Five minutes in microwave. Careful, it tends to foam up and spill over. Ask me how I know.

Apple and cheese with balsamic snack

I know this little kid that likes candy so tart it'll crinkle your face in. It's weird. The one time I ever saw him have a really good time laughing like a kid is when he gave me some of his candy just to watch the change of my visage to extreme discomfort. These apples remind me of that. \

Granny Smith apple, blue cheese

Afternoon snack that takes about ...

* 30 seconds to prepare.

* 5 minutes to photograph, determining settings, setting up lighting, changing lenses and such, playing with the camera and equipment.

* 1 minute to wolf down like an unmannered animal.

* 2 seconds to make sure nobody is watching.

* 10 seconds to lick plate.

* 10 minutes transferring photos to laptop, creating files, opening programs, converting to DNG, importing to Photoshop for further conversion to TIFF, resizing, adjusting, fixing, saving and converting again to JPG for internet, closing programs.

* 5 minutes uploading photographs to Flickr, opening programs and browser windows and websites and blog and writing how impossibly delicious and intriguing the combination of sweet/tart/crisp apple with creamy/biting/umami/stinky/salty cheese, copying/pasting html code, addresses and such, checking, closing programs, windows, browser.