Close to Home by John McPherson for December 10, 2020

Be careful Bleeb if the guy suddenly leans back you could get squashed.

Aahh, the Thanksgiving diet. Stuff “healthy.” Yeah I want another piece of pie!

Technically pumpkin is a fruit, but so are tomatoes, which I can’t accept.

I’m not buying it. A pumpkin is a fruit.

Carrot cake is another option.

It also has milk and eggs. With the crust it’s a full meal.

Exactly! And fruit, lots of cherry, blueberry, and apple pie. And don’t forget the protein in the pecan pie!

Uhh, isn’t pumpkin a fruit?

The red and green wrapped Holiday Hershey Kisses count as vegetables, too…

Pumpkin pie, pumpkin spice, pumpkin bread. See? Veggie intake solved

Well, share! Bleeb wants some…

“Cake for breakfast!”

Okay, I’m going to use that. I will get my dairy for the day in whipped cream and protein with pecans. If you’ve never had pumpkin pie with pecans and whipped cream, you should.

Anybody want to point out that pumpkins are vegetables?

Here we can cite Nix vs. Hedden, the 1893 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the tomato is botanically a fruit, and legally a vegetable for the purposes of taxation. The reasoning is that it’s usually used (in cooking) in the same way as other vegetables – it’s eaten as part of a meal, and not as a sweet dessert after the meal as fruits usually are.

The same reasoning applies to squash in general, cucumbers, chayote, green beans, avocados, and olives… botanically fruits, but eaten as vegetables.

Pumpkin pie is an odd case. The pumpkin is botanically a fruit, and not particularly sweet. Cook it up as soup or in a “Three Sisters” Native American stew, and it’s a vegetable. Take that same pumpkin, chop it up, mix with eggs and pour it into a crust and bake it, and it’s pumpkin quiche… still eaten as part of the meal, and it’s still a vegetable.

Puree it as you would for a soup, add sugar and milk and nutmeg and maybe an egg, pour and bake it in the very same crust as the quiche, and it’s pumpkin pie… a dessert, and suddenly pumpkin is back to being a fruit.

… unless pumpkin pie and salad is all you eat at that meal, in which case you’re eating sweet quiche instead of pie-for-dessert, so it’s a vegetable again.

… or unless you put tomato catsup on it, which (according to the Reagan administration) counts as a vegetable.

… or if you put pumpkin pie on your cottage cheese, substituting it for the tomato catsup that President Nixon used to use, and thus making it vegetable-by-analogy.

I hope that all is very clear now. I’ll go have some watermelon now… clearly a vegetable since it’s just a cucumber with pretensions of grandeur.

“Honey, umm you appear to be smashing a little yellow alien bug looking thing in your chair… it looks like it’s trying to say sump’n… listen!”

“ᖘ꒒ꏂꏂ꓄ꀍ ꁅꏂ꓄ ꂦꎇꎇ ꎭꏂ!

ꌩꂦꀎ’ꋪꏂ ꌚꎭꍏ꓄ꀍꀤꈤꁅ ꎭꏂ“

“Oh sorry, I didn’t see it there when I sat down to eat my third piece of pie. What do you think it said?”

“Well… … it was hard to tell, but it sounded sorta like: “lay off the pie, porky!”

Technically, pumpkin is a fruit. Just saying…

Watch out for “Pumpkin Piarhea.”

Pumpkin pie goes well with turkey pot pie.

Bleeb’s in a bit of a tight squeeze.

He shoulda had Carrot Cake…

Thrown about yesterday, squashed today, Bleeb’s been having a rough time of it the last few days.