I need honey raw for my French bulldog allergies

This is for you grammarians out there. I need your help.

Let it Bee received this email:
The subject line: I need honey raw for my French bulldog allergies

The text: Empty.

What would you do?

Initially I assumed the sender needed raw honey for his/her French bulldog, who suffered from allergies.


CSB said no, I had misread it, that it was the sender who was allergic to his/her French bulldog.

But that seemed strange, because why would you have a French bulldog if you are allergic to French bulldogs? (English bulldogs are another fish altogether.)

Or, if the bulldog is allergic, how can you tell?

Do bulldogs even like honey? Or miel as we say in Paris?

Why it is (almost) impossible to work at home, if home is here, and a farm

It is 9:16 in the morning, CSB has gone to work, I am drinking tea and working at my computer on a new story about two people on an airplane, and funerals. Although I should be finishing the horseshoe crab novel, at least I am working on something, and the day seems to be progressing properly.

“Honey, can you open the door for me?” It is Jorge the painter, and he is standing outside my office window. (First thought: at least I am not in pajamas, because the possibility of wearing pajamas well best midday is one of the dubious perks of working at home.) I don’t like it when Jorge calls me Honey and I am also annoyed with him because he comes and paints for half a day, then disappears for two weeks to South Carolina (once) and other places, unknown, and so the job (painting the western side of the house, theoretically a week-long job) has been unfinished for a long time, weeks, many weeks, and that is the sort of thing that can make an already slightly OCD person get worse. Plus, he started calling me Honey when he started the job and I didn’t bother to correct him at that time (which would have been the correct time) by saying something like: “I am not your Honey. Honey is a product of the Bees. Only one person gets to call me Honey.” But I was too lazy or polite to set the record straight at the proper time, and now it seems that it would capricious and nasty to do so. But the truth is, every time he calls me Honey it grates on my nerves a little bit more, because now I have only myself to blame.
So I go & open the guest room door (because Jorge needs to get inside and open certain windows that need painting, painting that should have been finished weeks ago), and then I realize that the guest room is quite untidy, and since CSB’s son, Colby (just in from Nicaragua) and a girl who may or may not be his girlfriend are staying there tonight, I feel compelled to tidy the room a bit. This involves moving stacks of Bee Culture into a cabinet, and also moving stacks of Fine Woodworking into the same cabinet. And moving the collapsible beach chairs out of the guest room and into the shed. And gathering up random items such as drill bits, beehive mouse guards, tape measures and loose change.
Then I note that with all the boxes of honey jars are stacked up in the hallway, and it will be challenging to vacuum up all the dust bunnies and dead bugs that are guaranteed to be lurking there. So I move all the honey jar boxes into the basement hearth room – where they more or less belong, assuming they belong anywhere. Except for the 12 boxes of small jars that we bring upstairs to the kitchen because we need to bottle this week for Charlie’s wedding.
And since I am already in the kitchen I scrape all the oven-dried tomatoes off the racks and put them in a container, and label it. And since I am there, I also put 3 eggplants in the oven to bake them, in order to make the rissoles later, because rissoles seem to be the best thing to do with vast amounts of eggplants, which we tend to have this time of year. And also, because they are quite delicious. To my immense satisfaction, I have fooled several people (two) who claimed to never eat/loathe eggplant into eating and enjoying eggplant through the medium of these rissoles. Having put them in the oven, I check to make sure I have the other ingredients for rissoles: cheese, breadcrumbs, parsley – that will have to be picked. And since I am already in the kitchen I eat the half of a melon that CSB grew and is rather ripe, because I haven’t had breakfast – I was so happily working away in my office mere minutes, or hours, ago - and then I see the compost is full again – of course it is since here are loads of squishy tomatoes in there – but I don’t go out to empty the compost and check the eggs. I come back here instead. And write about why it is impossible to efficiently work at home. No, not if you are me.
And now it is 10:27.

Bulgarian holidays & rhino-insertions

My sister just called and, in that faux-innocent tone that any sister recognizes as the sure sign of the younger sister’s looming instance of superior knowledge, she asked me if I knew about St Haralambos the patron saint of beekeepers. I thought about this, hard, because I normally have confidence in my mastery of that particular niche of hagiology. Was she referring to a radical misspelling of Saint Ambrose of Milan, the most commonly cited patron saint of beekeepers? No, she was not. Nor was she referring to Bernard of Clairvaux, Modomnoc, Valentine, Godnait or even Bridget.
So I gave up. I ceded superior knowledge and cried uncle.
With undisguised glee, my sister read aloud the entire article as it appeared in the Portland-Press Herald, datelined from Blagoevgrad. It relates how on this day Orthodox Christian Bulgarians gather to celebrate the feast of St Haralambos, who is the patron of bees and honey, and also known as the “lord of illnesses”, a dubious distinction. The Bulgarian faithful place jars of honey and candles on the floor of their church in the shape of a cross. It is unclear what happens next, but I imagine it is weird and sticky. Why the only American paper to report on this Bulgarian festivity is in Portland Maine is a mystery for another day.
Distraught at being so humiliated in this hagiographic matter, I did some research. And for starters, I would like to point out that only in Bulgaria is he called Haralambos. Nor can I find any documentation of his patronage of bees. He was born in 89 CE in Magnesia, Greece, of which milk he drank. He was martyred 113 years later. In the rest of the world, or the parts of the world where they practice Eastern orthodox Christianity -

This program is interrupted because my daughter has just walked in, agitated.
“Mom, do you have a snot-sucker. Iggy just got a pea up his nose.”
“Not any more. I gave you the snot sucker*.”
“That was NoseFrida the Snotsucker. Don’t you have a plain old snot sucker with a bulb from when we were kids?"
“No. Those rubber bulbs get old and dried out.” All the dried up and old snot sucking bulbs have been thrown out in one of the recent purges. All the current residents of the house can pick their noses and remove their snot without any external suction.
Shrieks drift in from the other room.
“Never mind, he ejected it by himself. I have such a brilliant child.”

-so we can safely return to hagiography: The name is Charalampus. But my sister, who feels proprietary about this particular saint having brought him to attention, thinks Charalampus sounds silly, as contrasted with Haralambos. There is no adequate response to such an assertion.

*It is perhaps worth pointing out that the very same sister who knows so much about Haralambos gave me the marvelous NoseFrida device, which I then gave to my daughter. For obvious reasons.

Rooftop bees

Aside from occasional traffic infractions, I tend to think myself as a law-abiding individual, so it with a certain frisson that I read about the illegal activities of Let it Bee honey in this article in yesterday's CHOW, an on-line foodie magazine.

So, is honey kosher?

A couple of days ago I took Let it Bee™ honey to a CSA/Food Co-op (Community Sustainable Agriculture) in White Plains. When the organizer asked me to bring honey to the CSA, she didn't mention that it took place in a Temple, not that it matters, but it did raise the question: Is honey kosher?
So there I was was with our honey, between Adamah (“Young Jewish Farmers Changing the World One Pickle at a Time”) and Kosher Cheese and Kosher Wine. And it was only when I suggested to the cheese vendor that I trade her a jar of honey for a chunk of cheese (frankly – a good deal for her since the honey goes for almost double the price of the cheese, but was I hungry and could only lick honey off my fingers for so long) and she asked if the honey was kosher, that I realized I had no idea. She told me that to be kosher the honey would have to have a rabbinical seal of approval, stating that there have been no cows or pigs touching the honey extractor. A highly unlikely occurrence, I told her. But my assurances were not enough. No cheese for me. Later I asked the CSA organizer if honey was kosher, and she told me that according to a rabbi she asked, honey was exempt from the usual kosher requirements, because it was made entirely by the bees.

I just checked on the web (this is much too easy) and several sites tell me that even though bees themselves are not kosher, honey, according to Maimonides, is kosher because it is not a ‘product’ of their bodies, but only stored in their bodies. The nectar they bring into the hive is mixed with their enzymes & saliva, but because this does not take place in their stomachs, the honey can be kosher.
Now it may be that comb honey is kosher, being that it's only wax and honey, without the step of human intervention, and extracted honey is not. Unless it is.

Add Honey, Semper

This just in from my excellent clipping service: Apicus, the Roman gourmand credited with writing the first cookbook about 1600 years ago, recommends adding honey to everything. That would include ostrich, flamingo and lobsters. The early Romans were nothing if not omnivores.
+
We would do well to follow his instructions.