Do You Make Tomato Soup With Tomatoes?

Today, I looked at myself in the mirror and asked the essential life question: How can you be from the south and have never tried chicken and dumplings? The sad part about this whole talking to myself in the mirror scenario is that I didn't have a good answer. My mom never made them for me? I didn't like the sound of a dumpling? Rubbish. No excuses. Katie's birthday to the rescue! She decided to make all the interns chicken and dumplings, mashed potatoes, corn, green beans, and fresh pie. I know what you're thinking...why is she making her own birthday dinner? I don't know. We all tried to tell her we'd take her out or make her something, but she's a stubborn Indianian (After a long debate, we decided that's what people from Indiana are called). But I digress. I'm pretty sure her grandmother's recipe didn't turn out quite the way she expected it to, but it was still edible. There was so much leftover that we ate chicken and dumplings for a week and still had to throw some of it away.

Plant of the Day: Musa spp.

Banana tree in the west conservatory.

I wanted to highlight bananas in this blog post because they are such fascinating plants. Despite the fact that we all refer to them as banana trees, they have no woody parts, and the 'stem' (called a pseudostem) is actually just the base of the huge leaf stalks. Each shoot of a banana has a terminal inflorescence, which means the shoot grows up, flowers, fruits, and dies. Somewhere in the middle of the growing and the dying, a new shoot (or pup) is produced from the mother leader stem. Once the leader stem produces its fruit, it must be cut back to the ground so the plant can use all its energy for growing the pup into the new leader stem. This cycle continues as long as the corm (swollen underground plant stem that serves as a storage organ) remains alive. Since the hybridized bananas we buy from the store are seedless and therefore sterile, throwing up pups is the plant's way of reproducing. Fertile bananas growing in the wild can have seeds up to the size and consistency of a golfball and reproduce through pollination.