The First Vegetable of the Season

We have some pretty odd discussions in my household from time to time. Take, for example, the discussion we had over dinner the other night.

Mrs. D had pulled together another culinary masterpiece beginning with an appetizer of bacon-wrapped scallops, followed by tilapia fish over whipped potatoes and asparagus. It was the asparagus that got us started.

Now Mrs D is quite environmentally conscious and is a big proponent of the "buy local" school of grocery shopping. Otherwise, she says, you screw with the carbon footprint. How so? Well, she says, if you truck in potatoes from Mexico you mess up the environment. To which I reply, "Oh and the local farmers use donkeys to cart their goods to market?"

Anyway, Mrs D said the asparagus was the first vegetable of the season. I said if asparagus was the first vegetable then it should be spelled aasparagus. I got a blank look. "You know," I said "Like in the phone book, if you want to be first you add another "a" to the word."

Mrs D caught on and with a smug look said "Oh, c'mon, how many vegetables start with the letter "a".

Without skipping a beat I said "artichoke". "And" I added "'ar' comes before 'as'".

Well, I won that one, although we're now calling that vegetable "aasparagus".