A food transformed

 Hi Puzzlers! Let's take a shot at this week's Sunday Puzzle from NPR.

This week's challenge comes from listener Greg VanMechelen, of Berkeley, Calif. Think of a popular food item in six letters. Change the last two letters to a K to make a common five-letter word in which none of the letters are pronounced the same as in the six-letter food. What food is this?

Ah, a classic transformation puzzle-- take a thing from Class A, apply the given transformation, return a thing from Class B. We've done this a million times! Let's break it down.

We need:

• A list of food words:
• Foods are a common puzzle theme, so we can simply reuse the food lexicon we created for previous puzzles, here.
• We'll filter this list down to 6-letter words.
• An English lexicon:
• After we apply the transformation, we'll need to check if the resulting string is a real word.
• Here's a lexicon of 10k words we've scraped and cobbled together for previous puzzles.
• A script with the following functions:
• load lexicons from text files (i.e., food lexicon & general English lexicon);
• filter the lexicons to 6-letters and 5-letters respectively;
• iterate through the food lexicon and:
• transform spelling (replace last two letters of food word with "k");
• check English lexicon for transformed string;
• print original string and new string (if new string is in English lexicon);

But wait--what about the pronunciation bit? We certainly could do this easily enough using a pronunciation dictionary, as we did with the CMU pronunciation dictionary for this puzzle, for example. However, I think it would be overkill. I'm confident that the number of candidate pairs where we have a food word that is transformed into a real English word is going to be so small that we can easily pick the correct solution from the results. In fact, there may only be one candidate pair--we'll find out soon!

I've whipped up a script as described above; feel free to try to get it working. I'll be back after the Thursday NPR deadline to share my results. Good luck!

Update