Orange, chocolate Han Solo, cheese breadstick

Orange and blueberry pudding

Custard the usual way with *egg blended directly into *milk and *cream with emersion blender, no fussing with separating, tempering and such, all that is nonsense. Scant *cornstarch for backup thickener. Orange flavor by grated orange *rind, cut *segments and *blueberries added to the wine glasses separately and not cooked. *Sugar, *vanilla, *salt.

The first time I made pudding from a box by adding milk and it thickened by itself by heat and then more so by cooling and resulted in something delicious, I thought, "This is magical." 

"Magicians do such things as this." 

"Chefs are basically magicians who know many spells." 

That's what I thought.

Arizona Oranges

I learned to never say, "No" to boutique Arizona oranges even when already deep in oranges, say, "yes" because oranges do not get better than this. 

Joe said the skins are thicker this year, "How did they know it would be needed for the freezing we had?" He wonders, "Because sometimes the skins are like that" he shows improbably paper-thinness with his fingers, "but this year it is all thick skin and little orange, so when I'm squeezing juice there is a lot of waste" he continues his orange-related enigmas, "and this year they have seeds. I do not understand that. But now you can plant them!" 

These oranges come from Paradise Valley, Maricopa, Arizona. Let's go there and see.

Back to the orchard.

Hummingbird!

Orange

Fruits orange à la crème. 

Extraordinarily insistent metal wand.

Naranja con crema batida. 

Oh hush. I'm warming up my face to make those sounds it doesn't usually make. Phonemes wot ain't in words I bin usin'. 

It is not a spell, Persey, it is more a positive insistence. Here's the idea.

Tear it up and keep the best part. One could also say optimus but this is the best of the bestest.

Bummer. That's all you get. 

Better. 

This is no way to put on pounds. 

I'm not even bringing out the cream, I'm just that lazy. The refrigerator is right here. I am opening the refrigerator door and pointing to cream. 

Different wand. Less insistent. This wand is persuasive. 

Orange, whipped cream

Orange

This orange does not have seeds. How can the orange tree make baby orange trees if the oranges do not have seeds? 

Manipulated?

That would be unnatural. 

One of my great uncles told my brother and  me tales of severe unnatural botanical manipulation out there in the orange groves that he owned in Florida but I imagined he was just trying to scare us. 

He said that he invented something orange-grove related. Something having to do with a smelter pot elevated on a short derrick or a wooden tower at tree top height. Orange tree top height. These little towers were interspersed among the grove with their pots and lit up to blow heat gently across the tops of the trees on those early mornings when a few degrees for a few hours makes the difference between a successful crop and disaster. See, they already had pots but the pots were on the ground and they already had towers that did something else, like hold a windmill that pumps water, or hold elevated water tanks for pressure, and so forth. Heat rises, yes, but it cools as it rises and the tree itself traps the heat away from the tops where the frost damage happens, he wanted to get the heat right up there at the tippy top of the trees where it was needed most. Soon enough all the groves were using those wooden towers with fans in combination with heated pots. That's how I understood his story anyway. He left us with the impression they really had to pay close attention to weather and storms and natural events. I've seen photos of what he was talking about, but again, I do not know him at all, he could have been bullshitting for all I know. British, they do that. My dad sure is enamored with him. 

Snack, apple, orange, cheese and pecans

Hey, you are the apple of King Tut's eye.

Do you want to hear something that I think is funny?

Every now and then you hear King Tut's name pronounced like King Two Tank Amun and this is wrong. Tut is right and Tank is wrong. Right after I wrote that I heard the name pronounced like that some 10 times by a guy on the History Channel. It was a very good show otherwise. If anybody ever says Two Tank Amun in front of you then think of this:

I'm not even going to link this because it's all over the place. Pick any random hieroglyphic site and look at the sign for the letter W and notice it is a chick. They will say the chick stands for the near consonant W and sometimes U. 

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

The chick stands for W and sometimes U.

Over and over they say that. Then, 99% of the instances the chick really does indeed translate to W, or so it is thought. Sometimes you get lucky and have solid cross references, but most of the time you do not. It is not known for certain if any vowels occur before or after or between the known consonants, and here is a near consonant, W, and not even a real one. Vowels are not denoted in hieroglyphics, and U is a vowel. 

How do I know it is tut ankh and not two tank or two tankh? 

Because the symbols say so. 

The word  'tut' means 'image' and the sign sequence looks like this:

But we've been told over and over that means twt, and it does. The ankh, of course is clearly an ankh and is pronounced as such. The t does not go with the ankh so there can be no tank or tankh. 

The ligature offers kerning possibilities. Yes, the Egyptians were early kerning specialists. Because the chick is drawn at a diagonal, it provides space that is not to be wasted for the preceding and for the following 't' and that's another way we know the letters go together in a group and are not sounds floating around or part of another group.

And that is how you always see it. It looks like a percent sign immediately, %, see it? I'm not moving until you say you see it. Okay, fine, a backwards percent sign. 

But we are taught the chick is a W and  infrequently a U so our eye catches this percent sign and our mind reads the twt as twat, perhaps twit.

So, king Twat. That's a potty-mouth word in English. That's what I see every time I see the name and I do see it frequently. 

Now who else is going to tell you these things?