Want to be Educated?

Do you ever forget that your wearing a hat? Or do you ever forget that there's a wall right next to you? ... Well, I have. I was at work the other day and I was in the bathroom fixing my uniform or blowing my nose or something, but anyway as I was walking out I took one quick peek at my appearance again -just to see if I looked decent -you know, no troll hair- and then turned to walk out. Well, I forgot that the wall was that close and that I was wearing a hat that stuck out like six inches. Needless to say I slammed right into the wall and my hat, somehow, ended up on the side of my face. So yeah, I have a giant bruise on my knee now. But I think that's the only part of me that got hurt. My knee. Of all the limbs to bruise! It hurts like crazy! I can hardly walk up the stairs. But it will be fine.

A guy that I was working with got me an ice-pack to ease the pain. You know those kind that you have to punch in order to work? Well, there's a big bag and inside there is a smaller bag with some sort of blue liquid inside and then outside of the bag there's all these little white puff ball looking things. Well anyway, you're suppose to punch the bag so that the blue bag breaks and leaks into the millions of tiny white balls, and then magically, the pack gets really cold.

Well anyway the guy set the pack on the counter and got all ready to punch it: jumping around and popping his knuckles -something you'd see a pro-boxer do just before a big match. Anyway, it was pretty funny, but it was even funnier when the guy punched it. He took one big slam to the counter with his fist and then looked at the bag to see if it had worked. After examining the pack he got all quiet and his face turned a slight shade of pink. It hadn't worked. I offered to do it afterwords, exclaiming that I looked like fun. Well, maybe not fun, but I did want to punch it.

I slipped my ring off and then leaned over the table, punching the bag as hard as I could. It broke on the first punch, but I had to slam it a couple of times to make it worth while. It wouldn't have been much fun to only punch the thing once. The metal counter hurt my knuckles, but the pack immediately turned cold. It felt really good against my knee (and fist too) But yeah, that's about the only exciting thing that's happened.

A while later I got into a discussion with one of my fellow employees and a couple of costumers about what the difference is between vegetables and fruits. We started talking about it because of the tomatoes we could no longer serve. Salmonella had gotten to them and that just made us wonder whether tomatoes were fruits or vegetables. Personally, I always thought of them as vegetables. I like fruits, but I didn't like the vegetables as much, and I never did like tomatoes, so I guess that automatically put them in the vegi group.

Fruit: any product of plant growth useful to humans or animals. The developed ovary of a seed plant with its contents and accessory parts, as the pea pod, nut, tomato, or pineapple. (Hence, the tomato is actually a fruit.) The edible part of a plant developed from a flower, with any accessory tissues, as the peach, mulberry (I didn't even know that was a fruit! I just thought it was some street name thought up by Dr. Seuss) Anything produced or accruing; product, result, blah, blah, blah.

Vegetable: any plant whose fruit, seeds, roots, tubers, bulbs, stems, leaves, or flower parts are used as food, as the tomato (...wait a second I thought they were fruits!), bean, beet, potato, onion, asparagus, spinach, or cauliflower. The edible part of such a plant, as the tuber of the potato. Any member of the vegetable kingdom; plant. A person who is severely impaired mentally blah blah blah.

Wikipedia says that Botanically, a tomato is the ovary, together with its seeds, of a flowering plant: therefore it is a fruit or, more precisely, a berry. However, the tomato is not as sweet as those foodstuffs usually called fruits and, from a culinary standpoint, it is typically served as part of a salad or main course of a meal, as are vegetables, rather than at dessert in the case of most fruits. As noted above, the term "vegetable" has no botanical meaning and is purely a culinary term. ...Well, that's helpful.

Hah! We asked one of the customers if he knew the difference between a fruit and a vegetable and he was like "Yeah, sure I do. Like an orange, and a carrot." We waited for a second for him to continue with some scientific definition, but when he stopped we just laughed. It was really funny, I guess you would have had to have been there...

And then we got onto the subject of cooking and baking. What's the difference? We guessed it had something to do with preparing food either in the oven or on the stove. I guess we were somewhat right.

Cook: to prepare (food) by the use of heat, as by boiling, baking or roasting. To subject (anything) (like dogs or cats, or computers, or houses, or hair) to the application of heat. To ruin; spoil, blah, blah, blah.

Bake: to cook by dry heat in an oven or on heated metal or stones. To harden by heat: to bake pottery in a kiln. To dry by, or subject to heat: The sun baked the land, blah, blah.

So, then I asked, if cookies were cooked in the oven and to bake something would be to put it into the oven, then why aren't cookies called bakies? I mean, it makes sense right? But then, so does cooking cookies. I don't know. Don't you just love the English language!