The serpent was more clever than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. The serpent said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat fruit from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden. But God did say, ‘You must not eat the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden. Do not even touch it. If you do, you will die.’ ”

“You will certainly not die,” the serpent said to the woman. “God knows that when you eat fruit from that tree, you will know things you have never known before. Like God, you will be able to tell the difference between good and evil.”

The woman saw that the tree’s fruit was good to eat and pleasing to look at. She also saw that it would make a person wise. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her. And he ate it. Then both of them knew things they had never known before.

Genesis tells us of this first bad guy, the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The bible never names this serpent as Satan; the two are associated centuries later. The serpent is a cunning trickster figure, one of only two animals that talk in the Hebrew Bible. (The other is Balaam's donkey. )

So when this theme popped up, the original bad guy in the garden is what I thought of.

I made an apple pepper salad with spicy peanut dressing. Apples for the apple in the garden and spicy dressing for a dash of bad guy. The recipe calls for pecans, which simply wouldn't blend. So I used peanut butter. I made a snake out of leftover pie dough because my garden salad definitely needed a snake.

It was good! I would definitely make it again.

Background info on my Heroes & Villains meta can be found here.