one complementary pair in a plastic pod

place: kitchen table @home (CAN)
mood: me - exhausted; photograph - fresh

I returned home exhausted from a gruelling shift at work and sitting right on top of the kitchen table was a reminder that I should do my homework as soon as I've settled in. In fact, it served as more than a reminder - it was a potential journal entry.

They were nicely laid out and just waiting for me to take a picture - my mom had placed a bunch of homegrown beans into a bright yellow plastic vegetable strainer. The lima beans, however, were not your typical green garden variety - they were spotted purple. According to www.seedsavers.org, their official name is 'Dragon's Tongue'.

Aside from the unusual physical characteristics of the string vegetable, it was the presence of the yellow and purple that caught my eye. Even without the yellow strainer, the beans themselves present the same complementary pair - the base colouring of the pods is not white as this photograph may mislead one to believe. It is actually a creamy pale whitish-yellow. And the 'backbone' of the bean may either be light orange or yellow - there is not enough of it to distinguish the exact colour, but there's certainly enough of it to catch attention. It divides and breaks up the purple spots and stripes with a sharp line in a contrasting hue.

Creating a food-themed image featuring a complementary pair made me realize that there actually are not that many purple fruits and vegetables, in comparison to the number of red and green organics. All I could think of was grape and eggplant, but surprisingly, I unknowingly had a purple vegetable growing right in my backyard.

And here I thought a dragon's tongue would be more of a fiery red. But that's a psychological colour association for ya.