Getting ready to get ???Bossy???
March 26, 2012
Yesterday, Bossy Acres, the entity whose CSA (community supported agriculture) I bought into for the upcoming summer, held an orientation coffee meet-up. I was eager to learn about my first-time vegetable venture, but I was also excited because my mom is visiting this weekend and I knew the presentation would be a good information exposure for her with regard to my switch-over to the co-op/organic/free-range, etc.
My parents will never come over to the organic side because they’ll never be able to get past the greater cash expense. But I was glad that my mom could hear a third-party talk about it. Karla, she at least recognized your passion for farming. But in the end, all she keeps saying is, “I remember when Carol Koehn did that and she ended up cooking head lettuce because there was so much.” I said, thanks for the positive reinforcement.
Well, everybody has their opinion. I sort of tried to convince my mom with taste, the taste of delicious, organic butter. The two things about my switch-over that have stood out are how much thicker the brown egg shells are, thereby necessitating a much firmer whack to break them, and how incredibly much more flavorful the butter is. People joke about eating sticks of regular butter. Free-range butter actually merits the declaration!
So the Bossy info session was, I thought, very exciting. It was fun to hear Karla extoll the virtues of returning vegetable scraps for her worm beds, and funny to hear Elizabeth interject the well-timed joke about the business end.
We voted on which of three varieties each of tomato, pepper, and melon we thought Bossy should grow (ironically, the only one of my votes that won was for the melon, which I care about least). Then, we sampled fare from their CSA add-on partners. Beez Kneez sent along tastes of their regular clover honey and their less usual buckwheat honey to try. My mom got really excited about the buckwheat honey but again balked at the cost when I asked if I should get some in the summer. I might get it anyway and give it to her.
Barkley’s Bistro had dog biscuit samples to send around. I liked the peanut butter ones. See the thing is, they’re all natural, too. Bossy Acres grows the vegetable ingredients. Barkley’s informed us that the biscuits were basically what they’d make for human consumers but because their market is canines, they leave out the added salt and sugar. Fine by me! The lamb ones were pretty good, too.
Bossy’s final add-on partner is Moonshine Coffee. That’s the one that I might actually get in on. And they contributed a jar of beans for each of us to take home. I made some of the coffee this morning, the Brazilian beans. Pretty good indeed, even though it was a fairly light roast and I usually prefer very dark roasts.
Finally, Karla and Elizabeth sent home with us a box of their famous microgreens (are they famous yet? I assume they are!) as well as a dirt-box of pea shoots. Yummy breakfasts will ensue for the following week, because I will fold brown, lightly scrambled eggs over chevre, topped with Bossy microgreens.
I can’t wait for the harvesting season!
Mail a random person a cryptic letter
April 7, 2010
I had grand intentions of pointing to a name in the phone book and mailing a piece of paper through the USPS. (Phone book, huh? Does anybody even use a paper phone book any more?) But then as usual, I ran out of time and took the easy way out, doing it online. I did it twice, each time with the emphasis on one aspect over the other.
My first cryptic note was, I feel, the more cryptic of the two, as it was a response to the cryptic note that had been sent to me. The sender explained his selection process: “This message sent to a recipient I determined randomly from a list of people who were most likely to not reply “wtf” Fortunately, I did not wonder wtf and instead found a translator with which to craft my reply.
Later in the day, I received another cryptic note: “Zegabee-dash-coovran-dos-leek-va-ich-nop-hu-8797-hay-deek-dosh.” I initially thought it was a cryptogram like a few other notes had been, but it looked too much like actual language. I briefly though that maybe it was an elaborate anagram as the sender was British. I searched for the entire phrase and found nothing, so I searched in smaller and smaller chunks. Eventually (I don’t remember how, because I’m unable to recreate the search results now) I got to the lycaeum.org website. What I saw there looked very much like the cryptic note I received. When I entered any of the words in my message in the Search box, it seemed to generate a page based on that word. Weird, and interesting. Thanks, Jack!
The second cryptic note I sent was not so cryptic, but it was to a random person. A truly random person. I found an online name generator, entered the minimum parameters, and got a name: Ella J. Harrison. I performed a Google search for Ella Harrison (okay, you sticklers, my computer performed the actual search) and clicked on the first result. That took me to a seemingly regular person on Facebook with about a thousand friends, so I was hoping she’d be receptive to my overture.
I posted my not very cryptic note to Ms. Harrison: “I used a random name generator to make a name. Then I did a Google search on that name. Yours was the first result listed, so you’re the lucky one! If you’d like to know what I’m up to, please visit this link. It’s good, clean, creative fun!”
She has not responded.
March 12
Kelly’s Unnecessary Blog 