Hedge Apples

My last night and morning have been fraught with the kinds of misfortunes that won't make anyone feel sorry for me except myself. Bottles of hair dye and expensive conditioner spilling while I'm trying to mix them, dogs digging giant holes in the yard and tracking the dirt all over the house, a robot vacuum cleaner that's better at sucking up discarded articles of clothing than the aforementioned dirt, the same vacuum cleaner deciding to die 6 inches away from its charging port in the middle of the night without ever getting around to cleaning the house, violent movies blasting in my ear when I'm trying to de-stress before bed, and dogs vomiting on the couch (the first time in months that this had happened, and the only time in several weeks that the couch cover wasn't on it...naturally)—that about sums it up.

Oh yeah, and we have cockroaches again. This is nothing new in the past 24 hours; I've been spotting them creepy-crawling around the house with disturbing regularity since late spring, but they make just one more nasty thing floating around in this cesspit of unfortunate circumstances. Do you feel sorry for me? I feel sorry for myself, that's for sure.

I was busy feeling sorry for myself as I biked slowly and grumpily to work this morning (shoutout to the dude at the bus stop who probably just said good morning—I'm sorry if I glared at you, I couldn't really hear you and was caught by surprise), when what to my wondering eyes should appear? A hedge apple, reposing beautifully by the side of the bike trail!

This photo is a reenactment, using
another fruit I found in the afternoon.

A hedge apple? you say. I don't blame you. I said it to myself as I rolled even more slowly down the path, debating whether I should turn around for a closer look. But if you, unlike me, were not merely trying to decide whether to make yourself late for work with a botanical side trip, and were instead wondering what a hedge apple is, well, in short, it is a fruit that is said to have cockroach-repelling properties.

I was first introduced to hedge apples the last time we had a cockroach infestation, when my stepmom was nice enough to have a box of them shipped to my house. Upon receiving this unexpected bounty, I learned that if you place a few hedge apples strategically around your house, you might (emphasis on might) be able to keep the cockroaches away. Apparently the evidence for their efficacy was mostly anecdotal, but hey, it couldn't hurt to set a few out, and if they did work, they would certainly be more humane than poison.

So I distributed my five (?) hedge apples around the house and kept them there until all of them had rotted (some of which took months). By the time I got rid of the last one, my roach problem was  completely eliminated. I have to admit that that may have been thanks to the Advion cockroach gel that my boyfriend had bought, but I can't say conclusively that the hedge apples hadn't helped! So come this spring, when cockroaches began to again rear their ugly heads, I began to think about hedge apples, and wonder if I might ever run across some at a farmers' market or something, and should that occur, if maybe I should buy some for further cockroach prevention.

Well, fast forward to today, and a hedge apple had all but jumped into my path! What a way to reverse the streak of bad luck I've been having! After minimal deliberation, I did choose to turn the bike around and retrieve the fruit, even at the cost of my punctuality. In fact, as long as I had stopped, I decided I might as well see if I could find any more hedge apples, so I hiked up my skirts, waded into the brush, and managed to scavenge 3 more fallen fruits.

When I got to the office, I decided to check that what I had acquired were indeed hedge apples, and the Internet confirmed my hypothesis.

While I was there, I learned some Hedge Apple Fun Facts:

• Hedge apples are also (perhaps more commonly) known as osage oranges.
• They are scientifically known as Maclura pomifera.
• They are in the same family as mulberries.
• The tree they grow on has spines (good luck picking your hedge apples straight off the tree!).
• The sticky sap of the hedge apple tree and its fruit can irritate your skin.
• Some people use them to treat cancer, but that might not be such a great idea.

The most useful fact I learned is that, while certain compounds in the hedge apple have been scientifically shown to repel insects, the concentrations of them found naturally in the fruit are not high enough to really make a difference in practical usage. One article specifically warned, "don't be fooled into spending much to use hedge apples as an insect repellent."

Well, that is both disappointing and reassuring at the same time. It didn't say not to use hedge apples at all, it just said not to spend too much on them. As long as I can get my hedge apples for free by the side of the road, I don't see any harm in continuing to use them in my war against the roaches. At the very least, they make an interesting decoration!

Still Life with Hedge Apples. © 2018

Adventures in Cooking: Avocado Toast

You probably already know I'm a picky-eating vegetarian, and that means I often have to reject entire restaurants on the grounds that they have nothing on the menu I can eat. But there is one thing any restaurant can offer and be assured that I'll happily dine there—avocado toast! People liked to make jokes about how much Millennials love avocado toast (at least until avocado toast morphed into a metaphor for economic collapse), but regardless of the dish's spotty reputation, this Millennial is happy it became a trend.

Unfortunately, while avocado toast makes a nice splurge for a single-meal Sunday, it is entirely impractical as part of a daily diet. A dollar-twenty-nine for a single avocado on sale!? That is not the way I spend my money. In fact, I cannot recall a single time when I have ever purchased a whole avocado (though I have purchased a house, so maybe I'm not such a Millennial after all).

The other thing people like to make jokes about is how really bad cooks can't even cook toast. Well, I confess, I am the butt of those particular jokes. I cannot make toast. Just add avocados, and you've got another kind of toast I can't make either. But that's about to change, because I just snagged a free avocado!

Let's have an Adventure in Cooking together, and make...

A Recipe for Avocado Toast!

Ingredients

• 1 avocado. You can't afford to buy an avocado, because you're a Millennial, so use the one that your coworker left on top of the mini-fridge 3 weeks ago. The first week, it was wrapped in a paper towel and you didn't know what it was. The second week, the paper towel had disappeared but the avocado remained. The third week, you went away for a vacation. The fourth week, your coworker went away for a vacation, and you decide that if anyone is going to eat that avocado, it's going to be you.
• 1 piece of garlic bread that you took home from a restaurant and stashed in the freezer.
• 1 tomato, because you wanted to put radish slices on top of your avocado toast, but you could only buy too many radishes in a bunch, so you needed something else red to make your toast photogenic.
• A handful of arugula, because your boyfriend loves that stuff and you usually have it lying around, plus it seems to be a common item to put on avocado toast.
• Salt

Instructions

1. Stealthily remove avocado from lunchroom and rehearse the story about why you took it, should anyone come questioning you.
2. Slice avocado in half and remove pit and skin.
3. In a small bowl, mash up half the avocado with a fork.
4. Cut garlic bread in half and put in toaster oven. Feel the sweat bead on your forehead as you turn the temperature dial to "toast," and the timer dial to "something slightly closer to light than to dark." This is the moment of truth. Will you make toast, or will this Adventure in Cooking end before it's even begun!?
5. Wipe your brow. You made toast! Now it's time to up the ante and make avocado toast. 
6. Take the mashed avocado and spread it on the bread.
7. Sprinkle the avocado with salt, top it with sliced tomatoes and arugula, and dig in!
8. NO WAIT! You're a Millennial! Instagram the shit out of it first!

I used a Hudson filter, with a dash of cropping.

If you're good at math, you noticed that the recipe only calls for half an avocado, so I made it twice. The second time, I even put some cheese on top, because I was feeling extra.

Another Adventure in Cooking, successfully survived.

Please comma back

As written English gets lazier and lazier, I have been witnessing the demise of one of my favorite punctuation marks—no, not the em dash—the comma.

Direct-Address Commas

One of the comma usages that I miss the most is the direct-address comma. The direct-address comma is the one that you put next to someone's name or term of address when you are speaking directly to them. Sometimes the comma goes before the name, sometimes after, and sometimes both, but it always serves to separate the recipient of the sentence from the content. Some classic examples? "Hello, Clarice."  "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

I notice the absence of this special type of comma almost every day in my emails, which begin with greetings like "Hi Valerie..." I've learned to accept and even adopt that particular non-usage because a direct-address comma in a 2-word sentence seems like overkill (You still know exactly what I mean if I write "Hello Clarice"), but there are plenty of times when a direct-address comma is still right and proper and downright required. As people are fond of putting on T-shirts, commas save lives.

Oxford Commas

Another kind of comma that clarifies meanings, yet is frequently disregarded, is the Oxford comma. If you haven't heard the debate about the Oxford comma, you've either been living under a rock, living in a house but without internet, or you have no interest in grammar. But if by some stroke of luck you do have internet and you are interested in grammar and you have not heard the debate about the Oxford comma, here's how it goes.

In a list of 3 or more items, every item must be followed by a comma. The final item is preceded by the word "and," which is in turn preceded by a comma. For example, "My outfit today is blue, white, and orange." That last comma is the Oxford comma. It is considered indispensable by some style guides, and unnecessary by others (notably the Associated Press, which rules most journalistic publications). Many people who do not adhere to any particular style guide nonetheless have very heated opinions over whether to use the Oxford comma (also known as the serial comma, though I like to give it its capitalized name, because that in turn gives it an air of refinement).

As you might guess, I myself am firmly in the pro-comma camp, as I believe it serves a valuable role in helping the reader quickly determine where a sentence is going. The serial comma is a visual clue that the next word you are going to read is another item in the list, rather than something that should be grouped with the item before it. For example, "The company has three branches: finance, research, and development." In this sentence, the Oxford comma lets you know that development is the third and final branch, and not just part of the frequently combined "Research and Development."

Take a gander at this sentence, lacking the serial comma: "The company has three branches: finance, research and development and marketing." What a slew of 'and's! And which is the combined branch? Research and Development? Or Development and Marketing?

In most cases, the context usually clues you in to the meaning, with or without a comma, but that little punctuation mark just helps makes comprehension occur that much faster. And sometimes it's downright necessary!

In conclusion

I don't make the rules; in fact, sometimes I purposely break them (If you don't believe me, check out the doozy of a sentence in my second paragraph about Oxford commas, beginning with "but if by some stroke...", which is short no less than three commas by the dictates of a more traditional grammar—I chose to leave out the commas so it would read in one breathless rush), but there are times when inserting a comma is just the right thing to do. Sure, if you want to go around writing your sentences just a little faster at the expense of clarity, I won't yell at you, but I'll definitely judge you.

It only takes a fraction of a second to type a comma, and in many cases, it makes a world of difference in meaning. Regularly using the Oxford and direct-address commas would almost certainly make your communication more comprehensible, and it would definitely make me happier. So if you've got a few extra seconds to put your punctuation where your breath is, why don't you comma on over to my side of the debate?