Life is butter, life is butter
Melancholy flower, melancholy flower
Life is but a melon, life is but a melon
Cauliflower, cauliflower.(source unknown)1
1Well, the source where I first saw this was on a whiteboard on a dorm room door when I was a freshman in college. It tickled my fancy then, and it stuck with me since. I seem to recall googling the origins at some point, but wasn’t excited about what I found.
Tonight we had dinner with my in-laws, and we had a lot of vegetable options: green beans or peas and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes or butternut squash. As you can imagine, it was difficult to keep track of them for serving, not to mention difficult to determine their syntactic bracketing, due to the combination of the coordinating conjunctions and and or. In the end, one person had green beans and potatoes only, one had green beans, potatoes, butternut squash and peas, one had peas and rutabagas and carrots and potatoes, and three of us had peas and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes and butternut squash. (Though one of those three did not actually eat any of the butternut squash, though it was on his plate. And one of us got a fair amount of butternut squash on her face. One of us attempted to feed a carrot to his pants. One of us enjoyed saying the word rutabaga.) It is important to mention that the peas and carrots were not bracketed together, as the carrots were roasted with the rutabagas and some of the potatoes. Some of the potatoes were therefore bracketed with the carrots and rutabagas, and some of the potatoes were mashed. While everybody ate potatoes, the potatoes were either mashed, or roasted with sage and bracketed with the carrots and rutabagas. Nobody who ate mashed potatoes and green beans ate rutabagas and carrots. (The green beans only came bracketed with ham, which is not a vegetable.) It is entirely possible that every person had peas. At least 2 peas ended up on the carpet, though the carpet was not given a fork.
I would attempt to diagram this, but then I might not be finished with this post before midnight. Instead, I will show you my plate.
A few years ago, I was working on an intonation project with several people. As part of the research, we were annotating soundfiles for specific phenomena. One of the things we were annotating was the location of a the maximum f0, the point in a given region of speech where the pitch is highest. For the specific project we were doing, we were labelling this point with the symbol ^, also known as a caret. It came up along the way that in some examples, we also wanted to mark another point that was linked to the caret to indicate when the peak f0 formed more of a plateau in shape. It was decided that we should use p to indicate a plateau. In reviewing our decisions about our labelling scheme, one of the women on the project was stressing that while not every peak would have a plateau marker, every plateau should be marked also for the peak. My coworkers looked at me questioningly when I started to snicker at this review of our protocol.
“No Ps without carets,” I said, by way of explanation.
Here are some multi-colored carrots I got at a farmer’s market in July of 2009. I took the picture then, too. I don’t think the carrots would still look this attractive if we still had them.
Here’s one last serving of vegetables for you:
Eat every carrot and pea on your plate.
Try saying that one out loud to a small child (or to an adult with the mind of a 12-year-old).
Imagine that I say to you, “Tonight for dinner we’ll be having peas and carrots or green beans.”
What do you think our menu options are? Can we be having both peas and green beans? Are just green beans an option? If we have peas, do we have to have carrots?
What I’m trying to get at is that the phrase peas and carrots or green beans is ambiguous. How you interpret it depends on what syntactic structure, or bracketing, you assign to it.
In this case, there are two different ways you can bracket it. You can have:
So, with the one bracketing you can either have both peas and carrots or you can have both peas and green beans. With the other you can have both peas and carrots or you can have just green beans. I’m afraid that if you want only carrots, you are out of luck. You are only allowed to have them with peas, or not at all. And if you don’t like peas, you’ll have to hope that you’re getting the bracketing on the right, because at least then you stand a chance of getting just green beans. Artichokes are completely out of the question, which is a shame, because I really like artichokes.
Why am I telling you this? Because I like vegetables. Also because this actually relates to my research. The project I’m working on right now is looking at how people produce and perceive ambiguous coordinate structures like these, especially with respect to intonation. Because when you speak, you generally (but not always) give cues to the structure you intend. You may not even realize when you’re saying it that your menu options are ambiguous, but chances are that if you are offering peas and carrots or green beans, you will use aspects of your speech–specifically the timing of what you say and the patterns of the pitch of your voice as you say it–to indicate which structure you mean. Your prosody acts to group the words you say into meaningful chunks so we know what our vegetable options are.
So, what will it be? Do your options look like this?
Or this?
Images by John. Vegetables prepared by me.
(This confusing bit of a post is brought to you by a tired brain, and was in part prompted by a two-month-old request from Nora that I write more about linguistics. I just hope she likes peas.) (At some point, I’ll try to tell you a bit more about what I’m actually looking at, when it doesn’t involve vegetables.)
A couple of summers ago I participated in a CSA: I paid money to a local farm and each week I got a big selection of marvelously fresh and tasty vegetables grown there on the farm. In addition to scoring the satisfying feeling of supporting a small farmer in her efforts to grow sustainably, I got some pretty amazing produce. Many, many greens. But there were some purples, too. I don’t have any photos of the kohlrabi I got, though it was quite strikingly purple. (Also freaky looking.) Nor did manage to get any striking photos of deep purple beets. (Not even the ones that sprouted fur and came to life in my refrigerator.)
However, I did get some photos of some colorful eggplants, such as the one above, which came in a striking array of colors and shapes. In addition to the dark purple (which I’ve been known to call eggplant purple), there were some lighter, brighter purples, too. (Mind you, those round orange things in the photo above are actually a variety of eggplant call Turkish eggplants.) I was quite amused to select some especially odd-shaped eggplants, including one that looked like a coiled purple serpant, and another that looked strikingly like a seahorse.
I hope I’ll get back to doing the CSA deal again. Maybe next year, when more of the family will have teeth with which to chew vegetables. But for this year, I’m still going to make efforts to buy local produce and support small farms. I hope to be hitting up the farm stands and farmers markets frequently in the coming months. I’m also looking forward to family excursions to local farms and orchards to pick fruit. (Mmmm, blueberries…)
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This week’s PhotoHunt theme is “purple.” For more pictures of purpleness, go pay a visit to tnchick.
Biologists the world over are expressing cautious excitement over reports of the discovery of a new species of animal life that was discovered last Friday.
Reports were received of a number of small furry creatures residing in the refrigerator of a Massachusetts family’s home. Animal control officers on the scene then reported the hitherto unidentified animals to the scientific community.
The Chenopodiaceae Beta Fuzzae, or Fuzzae Beet as it has been nicknamed, appears to thrive in the dark, chilly ecosystem of the vegetable drawer, and requires only as much light as is offered by the little lightbulb that goes on when the refrigerator door is opened. It resembles a common beet root in appearance, but with a coat of downy fur, and is believed to be part vegetable and part mammal. It was observed roaming among the piles of arugula and turnip greens, and exhibited signs of rudimentary intelligence. “One of them looked right at me, and I was sure it was going to start speaking,” said Bob Loobsteele of Animal Control, who was first to arrive on the scene.
A family of the Fuzzae Beets have been extracted from the rest of the colony their natural habitat, in order that their behavior may be studied under more controlled conditions.
The implications of this discovery are far-reaching. “With so many other species being threatened by climate change, it is heartening to find that new life is evolving,” says Dr. Frank Murgentroober, head of the Springfield University Department of Paranormal Vegetable Phenomena. “We think it’s only a matter of time before more life forms are found lingering in the depths of neglected vegetable drawers, or even emerging from pizza boxes left under the bed in college dorm rooms.”
Dr. Wilma P. Snodgrass of Large Urban University, however, is a dissenting voice among the excited scientific community. “We think this may well turn out to be a hoax, or the twisted delusions of someone who has far too many vegetables on their hands.”
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This improbable report is brought to you hot off the presses of this week’s Monday Mission, which solicited posts in the style of a news article.
I mentioned briefly that I’m going to be a bridesmaid in a wedding coming up soon. Well, that “soon” has now become “this Sunday.” Which is, technically, very soon. As is the standing tradition, in U.S. weddings at least, I will be wearing a dress chosen by the bride. As it will be an October wedding in New England, the bride has chosen fall colors. My dress is in burnt orange, a very pretty color, though a somewhat unusual one in my wardrobe. And is also often the case for such occasions, I am to have shoes that match my dress. This means that I have needed to get some dyed. I picked up my shoes yesterday afternoon. And I have to admit that I was quite startled to see them. You see, they are orange. I now have shiny orange shoes. I don’t think you can ever be fully prepared to see orange shoes.
Anyhow, this weekend I will be donning the orange, and perhaps as such, feeling a bit like a pumpkin. Hopefully an elegant pumpkin, mind you, but a pumpkin nonetheless. But seeing as it’s October, pumpkins are all the orange rage right now. And in honor of their orange pumpkiness, I bring you a pumpkin-based Themed Things Thursday.
Peter Peter pumpkin eater
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well
¹ I admit that I’m recycling this particular item from my vegetable ThThTh list. But recycling is good, right? Or should I be composting, since it’s vegetables we’re talking about?
I head to the farm for my next load of vegetables tomorrow, and I fear I may be buried in tomatoes. For some reason or another, I’ve been having trouble keeping up with them. It could be that I’ve received 30 pounds of tomatoes in the past 3 weeks, and that I’m pretty much the only one in the house who eats them. I do love tomatoes, but I seem to have my limits. There were even a couple of days when I didn’t eat any tomatoes. Tonight, if I can get myself motivated enough, I plan to roast up a bunch of the smaller tomatoes with garlic, for some sort of sauce, which I’ll then freeze. I also haven’t managed to cook up my pretty eggplants, and I’l be sad if they get demoted to compost. But I’m a bit wiped out to start cooking.
I just got Phoebe off to bed, an hour and a half late. Phoebe and I went on an excursion to meet a friend, involving visiting a playground, and then dinner out. We didn’t get home until almost 8:00. Yes, I realize that in a previous life, 8:00 would be time to go out, not late to get home. But, you see, Phoebe’s bed time is 7:30. I can never quite figure out how to fit things together without messing up Phoebe’s schedule when we go out. She naps right smack in the middle of the day, from about 12:30 or 1:00 to around 2:00 or 2:30. I hate to have Phoebe miss a nap (for many, many reasons), and while she will sometimes sleep in the car, it results in a 20 to 30 minute nap instead of the usual 1 to 2 hours. So we often try to wait till after the nap to go out. But that almost invariably leads to a later bedtime. Arg. It’s worth it to get out of the house, though, I suppose.
John has just left this afternoon for a short trip to the west coast for some business, which means I get to do the solo parenting thing for a couple days. I’m cheating a bit by having Phoebe go to daycare an extra day. I have my violin lesson tomorrow, and John usually stays with Phoebe when I go to that. My other options were to cancel my lesson, or bring Phoebe (an event which I can envision, but which would likely result in a less than ideal learning experience). I opted for a fourth day of daycare, rather than switching a day. Because since John will be away, my working time will be otherwise reduced. And I’ve had a very productive past couple of weeks, and want to keep rolling with that.
Yesterday was my CSA share pick-up day at the farm, again. And like the last 2 weeks, the share included 10 pounds of tomatoes. Here they all are in their polychromatic glory:
We also got some onions, a couple of small summer squashes, eggplants (I traded in my peppers for some extra eggplants), and some more basil. Inspired by Magpie Musing’s face of last week, I have put together my own vegetable face, based on the tradition started at The Great Big Vegetable Challenge.
I have quite a bit of thyme left from last week. (Also some basil and tomatoes.) I just roasted some potatoes with olive oil and thyme. But I may have to freeze it, as I don’t think I can use all of it before it goes bad. I don’t want to waste it. (Yes, I am fighting the pun. Fighting it!)
We had some friends over on Saturday, and I was able to use some of the thyme in a couple of dishes. My guests (at least those over the age of 5) each lent a hand with some food prep, including plucking thyme leaves off the sprigs.
The problem with cooking with thyme is that it is an herb that asks, begs and screams out to be used in puns. One of my guests abruptly cut off another guest in mid thyme-pun with a “don’t!”, but then shortly after succumbed to one of her own thyme puns. (“But you wouldn’t let me!” the interrupted guest cried.) It is a devilish thing. Some of the puns were not even entirely intentional, such as:
I challenge you not to think up any of your own.
Anyhow, dinner went well, and I had a grand time. (Though I was busy cooking most of the evening.) Here’s what we had for dinner.
And because one of my guests does not like a goat cheese, I made a second fritatta.
4-ish medium cucumbers, peeled (the skins were very bitter) and thinly sliced
For the dressing I mixed (and the measurements are guesses. I don’t measure when I improvise):
3 TBS plain whole milk yogurt
juice and olive oil from the roasting pan from the tomatoes and garlic (about 1/4 cup)
2 cloves roasted garlic, chopped
thyme leaves from 4 or 5 sprigs of thyme
a bit of fresh basil, shredded
a splash of red wine vinegar
salt
Dessert was ice cream. I didn’t make it. (In a previous life, I would have made 2 or more desserts, and served things up in courses.)
I wanted to show my guests how pretty the vegetables looked, but realized that I wouldn’t have time to do all the preparation after their arrival and still eat at a decent hour. So I took a photo. The round orange vegetables that look rather tomato-like are actually Turkish eggplants. The photo also includes a bowl of the roasted tomatoes, and a small bowl of the roasted garlic cloves, as well as the little bundle of thyme that I have not yet wasted. Plus a couple of little zucchinis that didn’t make it on to the menu, and which I ended up wasting. I just can’t think of any good jokes about wasting zucchinis. Certainly not any puns.
collecting tokens 