Spirit week: there is always tents and games set up in the middle of campus. Today they had donuts for anyone wearing blue and pumpkin spice tootsie rolls. Can’t vouch for the donuts as I did not take one but the tootsie roll was pretty good (to be fair: I am biased. I LOVE tootsie rolls)
Grocery shopping today for the makings of sandwiches and wraps. Hard to stay focused. Planning to try bringing a shopping list in the future.
People are weirdly obsessed with huckleberry here. There’s huckleberry taffy at the store and huckleberry froyo at Kiwi Loco, which is the frozen yogurt place here. I went there today with someone in my FSY company and I also went a week ago to cash in a free froyo coupon I got at a fair. The veredict: not bad at all! They have good flavors and the flavors rotate so that even only a week later there were a few different ones. The froyo is also very cheap - less than a dollar per ounce. That really works well for me because I can try a lot of different flavors AND control the portion size (unlike a traditional ice cream shop like Kimball’s, which gives you so much of only one flavor that I’m sick of it by the end). They even had a flavor for the Mexican coconut drink - starts with an ‘h’ but I don’t remember exactly what it was called.
Pictures:
Construction is so common here. Massachusetts is hard to get around because the roads are so bad. Here the roads are better, but half of them are also blocked off for construction. So... not sure that that's any better.
I'm not a fan of Tootsie Rolls, but I am very partial to pumpkin-flavored things, so there's a solid chance we both would have enjoyed those treats.
ReplyDeleteMaybe huckleberry is a popular flavor there because huckleberries are native to that area. When we visited Idaho with the Boyles (you know, back when you were four years old) we went on a hike and ate wild huckleberries that were growing next to the trail. They can only be enjoyed locally, because they don't lend themselves to large-scale cultivation and transport.
Yes, I'm a plant geek.
hmm 🤔 so the huckleberry obsession is similar to the obsession all of America has with corn. It's probably less that the people like it, and more that they have lots of it and need to sell it.
ReplyDeleteDo you know what about huckleberries it is that makes them difficult to transport?
Actually, I think it's more that they're tiny (like pea-size), and grow on bushes, so harvesting would probably need to be done by hand and would take a long time. Also, they prefer to grow in the understory of a pine forest, which is kinda hard for a farmer to replicate on a large scale.
ReplyDeleteI think the local huckleberry obsession is less about having an overabundance, and more about celebrating a native, local crop (like New Englanders seem extra fond of maple things), especially since huckleberries are hard to find outside their region.