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Updated 58 Days ago
Pack A Perfect Picnic For Pumpkin & Apple Picking (or Pickled Peppers?)
I started thinking (I know, scary - but bare with me) that a day trip to go pumpkin and apple picking doesn't have to be an activity only for families and kiddies. With a little ingenuity there is a very romantic date nestled in there to warm even the coolest of fall chills. Since we are approaching the prime time for pumpkin buying, and with my favorite apples (Fuji) being at the peak of their crop, I think this weekend is the perfect time to pack a picnic lunch (complete with vino and cheese) and hit the orchard with my hubby and the proper accoutrements to make a date of it.
While the weather outside and the which picking activities are available at the location I choose will factor into exactly which foods I bring (i.e. cold = soup), I am thinking here is most likely what will be in my handy-dandy backpack:
- Blanket - only a few of the place I talked to had picnic tables and those that did said you can't reserve them so I am bringing a big, old blanket along. Plus, sitting on a blanket seems much for date-like especially when you are drinking out of...
- 2 Plastic Wine Glasses - plastic because they won't break and wine glasses because I am bringing...
- Wine - I will probably grab a sweet variety, something in the way of a Riesling since it will pair nicely with the sweet apples we will be picking. Speaking of picking apples I will need...
- A Pairing Knife - I will need to either find a little case for it or use an old wine cork to protect the tip. Speaking of corks we will definitely need a...
- Cork-Screw - to open up that bottle of Riesling. And while we are drinking our wine and munching on our freshly picked apples we might want some...
- Cheese - the grocer usually has a nice little package of pre-sliced cheeses or I could slice up one of the many varieties I have at home (I might have a cheese problem, but that's for another post). Speaking of cheeses, we would probably like some...
- Dips - for the apples. I am thinking I could either whip up a batch of sweet, cream cheese dip at home or grab a prepared variety from the store. We might also think about...
- Lunch - if the weather was going to be cooler it would be great to bring a thermos of homemade soup, but it will be in the 80's all weekend so instead I will pack deli sandwiches to munch on. After we are done we will need to...
- Clean Up - I will definitely be bringing cloth napkins, moist towlettes, and a grocery bag along with us to make clean-up easy and short so we can get back to the fun stuff quickly.
Right now I am thinking we will probably head over to Eckert's since it is open for us to pick our own apples and select our own pumpkin canvases for our carving masterpieces at one location. If it were only a pumpkin farm date I would probably bring a couple of apples along and keep everything else I would pack the same. But since I have never picked apples before (perhaps due to a deep seated fear instilled in me by a certain Wizard of Oz scene?) I am pretty excited for what promises to not only be a fun and relaxed date, but a whole farming experience. Here's to hoping I haven't left anything out because I am a farmer newbie!
About The Author:
Got a story you want to share, or just need someone to talk to? Email Me! melody@toastedrav.comI have a penchant for pizza, a love of books, and a strong cup of coffee always makes me smile. When I'm not writing for ToastedRav I like long walks on concrete sidewalks, hanging-lamp lit dinners, and a good bottle of Shiraz.
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You may want to check and see if alcohol is allowed at whatever farm you go to.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.