If You Eat Enough Fruit, Can You Make Spring Happen?

In case you have been hibernating, I want to make sure that you know what this winter has been like.  It's been cold.  Like stay-inside-if-you-want-to-live cold.  Chicago has gone through multiple polar vortexes.  Snow sat on our lawns and piled up in our alleys for months.  Even the schools were closed for a few days!  That last one is definitely more impressive the more familiar you are with the Chicago Public Schools.

But finally, the snow is starting to melt.  Emphasis on starting.  We still have insane amounts of snow piled up in our alley.  So does this mean it's finally spring?

Probably not.  This is Chicago, and it is March.  I'd be foolish to be so hopeful.  But even though it's currently 27 degrees outside, I can eat hopefully.  And adventurously.

I recently bought my runner boyfriend The Runner's World Cookbook.  So last night he decided to make a runner-minded burger.  (Check out his blog for the results!)  I opted for the Almond Butter and Pear Sandwich.  Because I want it to be spring already, gosh darn it!

The ingredient list looked super tasty: almond butter, cinnamon, honey, vanilla, pear.  Even goat cheese is pretty tasty.  But there it was.  The lone gross factor.  Chopped dried apricots.

Look at them.  Pretending to be candy.  Pretending to be a tasty fruit.

Apricots are gross.  They're not quite oranges, not quite nectarines, not quite something I want to eat.  But I'm an adult.  An adult who is trying really hard to eat foods she wouldn't normally eat.  There had to be a reason dried apricots were included in this otherwise tasty sandwich.  So I put them in my sandwich.

The finished product minus the second slice of bread.  Look at all those little bits of gross.

How did those little bits of gross taste?  Pretty inoffensive.  The other ingredients were more pronounced than the apricots.  They provided a chewy texture, which I liked combined with the smooth texture of the almond butter and goat cheese.  I really liked this sandwich, apricots and all.  I'm glad I made the choice to include them.

It was too many dried apricots, though.  I'll cut the amount in half next time.  And I'm still not going to eat them on their own.  I'll stick with pretty much any other fruit.  I just don't see why you would choose an apricot over another type of fruit.

Also, I don't know why I didn't just spread the goat cheese on the other slice of bread.  That would have saved me a lot of trouble trying to make everything evenly spread.

Hopefully my willing consumption of apricots will prove that we are more than ready for spring.  Hey, tomorrow it's supposed to be 35!