Lincoln's Four-Score Olive and Seven Bean Salad

Reiko and I were cooling our heels in the base pass office this afternoon, wondering how it could possibly take someone more than 72 hours to substitute one teacher's name (Kathryn) for another's (Margaret), when I started giggling. This had been happening off and on all day, thanks to the first comment Diane left on yesterday's post, the one where she suggested adding four-score olives to a tossed salad.

I was launching into a rather pedantic explication of "score" when Reiko -- no doubt recalling my 45-minute synopsis of Guns, Germs, and Steel just last Friday -- cut right to the chase. "Isn't a score twenty years? Like in 'four score and seven years'?" "Exactly! Or maybe like in 'four score and seven bean salad.' Or how about 'four-score olive and seven bean salad'?"

Voila! West meets East and explosive synergy results! The package already enroute to Norfolk has been hastily re-imagined as a prize rather than a surprise. It's a Japanese cookbook published by our mutual friend/photographer extraordinaire Kim Jordan.

Erin and Geraldine will both be rewarded for providing presidential trivia questions, although I'm a bit tempted to deduct cookies from Erin for sending me cherry trifle recipes peppered with heinous adjectives like sugar-free and low-fat.

As for Reiko, she's going to be my Ikebana guest next week. We're going to make kimekomi balls at Hachimangu Shrine in Kamakura. It looks like quilting minus the threading a needle part. Christmas ornaments, perhaps?

Okay, I'm off to track down seven different kinds of beans.