Sweetness, and memories...

You'd think that, with a title like that, this would be an intensely personal post.

Nope.

It's Rosh Hashanah — shanah tovah, chaverim — and it's traditional to eat sweet things, because the new year should be sweet. Specifically, it's traditional to eat apples and honey together. Well, there are apples in the fridge, and I did buy some honey just for the occasion, but I was pulling out the roasted unsalted pistachio nuts from Trader Joe's when I had a terrible idea: what has honey and pistachio nuts in it? Baklava!

So, it so happens I don't keep phyllo dough lying around in case I suddenly decide to make baklava at midnight on Rosh Hashanah. But there is sliced whole-wheat bread lying around. So... baklava toast!

Baklava toast consists of bread, honey, chopped pistachio nuts, and cardamom. Toast bread lightly. Spread with honey. Sprinkle cardamom. Sprinkle nuts. Drizzle some more honey on top (on the theory that it will help hold the nuts on — this theory is false). Toast again. If you want the nuts to stay on, chop them really fine and shake off the excess, or make it a sandwich.

( Speaking of pistachio nuts... )

Speaking of linguistics, I was IMing with fiddledragon the other day, and made a number of egregious linguistics puns which I will now present in the form of riddles:

1. What team of superheroes have giant minimal meaning-bearing robots that combine to form a Word?
2. What super-villain is their arch-nemesis?
3. What kind of defensive systems do their giant robots have?
4. A British syntactician, fed up with arguing with a French colleague, tells him that he has his head up his butt. What is the Frenchman's retort?

( Answers... )