I might never have known this either, despite having been born and raised in the walnut capital of the world, had I not watched the harvest in action last week at Alpine Pacific Nut Company near Ceres, CA. Their long-reaching, lissome boughs rising from short thick trunks, the trees baked under a blastingly hot sun like orderly rows of anguished poets wailing with upraised arms, Why?
Many of those lines directly relate to much of what I have been doing in Birmingham and will be doing on the rest of the world tour: Make the Soup, Shine the Shoes, Climb the Tree, Bake the Cake, Walk the Mile, Fly the Flag, Build the Bed, Sail the Raft, Vandalise the Billboards.
According to his five-year-old son, Ian Colvin is nice, fun, as tall as a tree, and bakes the best cinnamon buns.
Fossils and petrified trees bake in the summer sun.
Surrounding tree trunks were baked by the blocks' heat.
The speciality is baumkuchen, or tree cake, which is baked in 20 or so layers and looks like one of those revolving kebabs.
A few garden club volunteers are decorating the squat Christmas tree, and someone has baked a black walnut cake to share when the lights are strung and the delicate ornaments are hung, just so.
"I bet where Jessica is from that hominy is made out of pine trees and Labatt's, baked with care and sprinkled with moose droppings," Ms. Caplan said.
There are turkeys to be reared and tree-shaped biscuits to be baked, but if you're tempted by the idea of a homemade tinselly advent candle contraption, let this be a cautionary tale.
The original DOS Master of Orion is a classic, well worth downloading an emulator so you can play it baked out of your tree today.
