Mushroom hunter

Ralph and I took a long walk on Sunday. We walked through the woods, up the hill and onto a neighboring gravel road. It is narrow and lined with sugar maple, butternut (valiantly holding out against butternut canker), red maple and a stand of balsam fir that smells like heaven when the wind is blowing just right. All those sugar maples are a vibrant, burnished, golden yellow. The afternoon sun shines through the leaves, turning them transparent and making the whole world seem dipped in gold. It's really, really beautiful.

It was a quiet walk, not a lot of talking, both of us lost in thought. I think that all that quiet made us both notice where we were walking more than we might have otherwise. This attention to our surroundings meant we both noticed the huge number and variety of mushrooms underfoot. And as soon as we started noticing a few, more and more started popping out of the background leaf litter. They were everywhere. We were both wishing we knew more about mushrooms.

When I managed a CSA farm several years ago, Ralph and I both participated in the cultivation of shiitake mushrooms. He worked with one of the farm owners to cut and haul the sugar maple, hop-hornbeam, and ash logs out of the woods, and I worked with the other farm owner to inoculate the logs with mushroom mycelium. There was just about nothing better in the world than the shiitake mushrooms when they burst like little miracles out of those logs in the springtime. And sauteed with olive oil and garlic, they were way more fresh than anything you see in the grocery store. They almost squeaked with freshness. I miss that a lot.

So I've been excited that Ralph has been getting into mushrooms lately. He came home after visiting a friend toting a handful of sawdust inoculated with wine-cap mycelium. He's cultivating them in a sawdust pile under our lone oak tree and we're hoping to see them do their mushroomy thing in the springtime. He also recently went to a mushroom talk at the University of Vermont's Horticulture Farm, led by a man who, when he's not a mushroom hunter, has a day job as a local public radio host.

When we discovered our fungus bonanza on our walk, Ralph picked some of the more common mushrooms and saved them. He took some photos and sent them to the aforementioned mushroom hunter, and low and behold, they're edible, even palatable. The mushrooms pictured here are Armillaria mushrooms, commonly called honey fungus, and they were everywhere. You couldn't walk without stepping on them. It was amazing to see all that food, there on the forest floor. It was another little miracle.

Ralph went back today to look for them again and they were mostly past their prime. Peaked in two days. It's a fleeting season, apparently. Just to keep things exciting, there is another species of mushroom that apparently closely mimics the Armillaria and of course, this mimic has the charming quality of being deadly to people who eat it. That's what you have to love about mushrooms. Amazing little organisms that could potentially kill you or add a lovely earthy note to your dinner plate. I won't pretend I'm not every-so-slightly relieved that they were past their peak when he went back. The last time Ralph brought home wild mushrooms, I was on the edge of my seat, just waiting to melt into a little puddle of poisoned death on the floor during dinner. I fool myself into thinking I played this off coolly. Now, don't get me wrong, he does his homework. The last mushroom was a morel and he was very clear about the ID. But it was thrilling in a mostly safe kind of way nonetheless.

Photos in this post courtesy of Ralph.

Gray skies in the garden

The skies are gray today and it was not-quite raining when I went out to the garden to pick some of the dry beans I've been anticipating all summer. I planted them a little late, so we're pushing it for ripening right now. But they're slowly doing their thing and soon we'll be eating those borlotti, cranberry, and Christmas lima beans.  Here are some garden images from the day including:

 

the ever-bountiful Swiss chard, 

the sort-of-sad bean plants, lettuce bed, and cover crop in the foreground,

 

a basket full of the aforementioned beans topped by the last of the eggplant, maturing lettuce in the background

 

and finally, botlotti beans in the upper right, cranberry beans in the lower left with a couple of Christmas limas thrown in, discarded shells in the background.

Happy Saturday.

Sunday pancakes

There is a tradition in my family of making pancakes on Sunday mornings. Growing up, my dad was the pancake maker - and I have no memories of him ever using a written recipe. The best part of the event was how he customized them for everyone. Mom likes bananas in hers. Dad likes butterscotch chips. I liked chocolate chips. Sometimes there were blueberries, sometimes nuts. He'd divide the batter into several bowls, adding the goodies according to request.

The recipe has undergone serious changes in the last ten years or so with the onset of allergies in my family. First a batch with no cow dairy. Then a batch with no cow dairy and one with no gluten. Then no dairy at all, no gluten and no eggs. I can't imagine that the recipe looks much at all like the original. But it's still customized according to request with fruit, candy, nuts.

My grandfather, however, is who started the Sunday pancake tradition. My grandmother cooked all meals for the first thirty years of their marriage. On their 30th anniversary, she told him he could cook her breakfast for the next 30. He made breakfast every day of their lives together since then. I don't know if he's still doing it since her passing this spring, but I hope so. It was never a simple affair. His breakfasts were always hot, always elaborate, often with complicated place settings and cutlery. You have to appreciate the effort and artistry involved.

When my husband and I went to visit my grandparents in Colorado several years ago, he modified his recipe to accommodate my inability to eat gluten. Those pancakes were half cornmeal, half buckwheat flour with chopped walnuts. I came home from that trip and made pancakes the next Sunday, and Ralph and I have been eating them most Sundays since.

True to form, my recipe changes a lot, mostly according to what's in my refrigerator. I never have buttermilk, which is what the original recipe calls for, so I use plain yogurt or ricotta. I started off with a combination of buckwheat and corn meal and have since shifted to corn meal alone after running out of buckwheat and deciding I liked it better with just the corn. I've used frozen raspberries, purchased on a whim (10# of them) last fall from Adam's Berry Farm, or fresh blueberries. I've made them with diced nectarines, plums, and peaches. I've made them with bananas, walnuts, frozen blueberries. When our first strawberries were coming out of the garden, I chopped them and added them to the batter. I hesitate to say it definitively, but I think the peaches might have been my favorite.

Ralph laughs at my constant adaptation of this recipe. Each Sunday, I open the door to the refrigerator and announce, Oh, we don't have any...(cornmeal, buckwheat flour, yogurt, ricotta...). He laughs at this but it's really what I like about them. Just about the only ingredient I haven't done without or substituted for is the single egg. Though given my dad's current recipe, there's no reason I couldn't, I suppose. I don't usually offer actual recipes on this blog, but with the assumption that if you try this one you'll change it to suit your taste, here's the one I made today.


Cornmeal raspberry pancakes

1 egg
1 c. plain, whole-milk yogurt
2 T. grape seed oil
1 c. coarse-ground corn meal
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
~1 c. frozen raspberries

Whisk egg, yogurt and oil together in a mixing bowl. When smooth, add all dry ingredients at once. (Yes, I know, bakers would shudder that the dry ingredients aren't mixed together first. This is what I like about this recipe- one bowl. You are perfectly welcome to adapt it to two bowls, but I can't imagine why you'd want to). Gently mix the dry ingredients together, stopping as soon as they're blended. Add fruit and mix gently.

Heat non-stick griddle over medium low heat. Spread spoonfulls of batter onto griddle and cook on the first side until bubbles appear and start to pop. Flip and cook for another minute or two until sides look firm. Don't smoosh them with your spatula. Transfer to a plate in a warm oven. Repeat until all batter is done.

We eat these with butter and maple syrup. My parents skip the butter. My grandparents ate them with jam. This recipe serves Ralph and I with leftovers to toast the following morning. I double the recipe when we have more than the two of us. Enjoy.

An equinox harvest

The first day of fall ushered in another kind of harvest for us. Today was the day that the pigs our friends raised this summer were slaughtered. They raised two of them- one for our freezer and one for theirs. I woke up this morning, forgetting that today was the day until Ralph mentioned it. I was significantly ambivalent about whether I wanted to go or not. And I hadn't really intended to. But I suppose, in the end (and it was most certainly an end), I am glad I did.

It was raining when we arrived to find Earl milling around his dooryard watching two drunken pigs. Apparently, giving the pigs a quart of vodka mixed in with their feed dulls their senses enough that the process is less traumatic for them. They were staggering and visibly drunken, eating from their trough while slumped onto their haunches. Is this how it ends? I was disconcerted to find that it was a little funny and a little tragic and thinking shouldn't it be a little more solemn than this? I guess not from the pig's perspective. A half-hour later, Joe rolled up in a blue pick-up truck, donned his rain pants, and with a .22 in hand said, "Well, no time like the present." Indeed.

When you have someone come to your house to do them in, the animals get shot in the head. I could not watch this. I was firmly planted in the shed, fingers in my ears, trying not to pass out. A peek outside after the first shot confirmed that it was definitely not something I wanted to see if I also wanted to appreciate pork in the near future. It was pretty grim. There's a lot of movement after they're dead- a lot more than you'd think. Enough said about that. The second one was not as simple as the first, apparently. The shot missed it's mark and then the gun jammed. It was unpleasant- I could tell just by watching Ralph and Earl's faces. But eventually, they pigs were both dead and still and at that point, I eased out of the shed to watch from the periphery.

And the rest was physics and knife work. The animal is skinned, disemboweled and the head and feet cut off. It is then cut in half and taken to a butcher who breaks it down into cuts and packages it into something you'd recognize from the grocery store. Ralph and Earl were right in the thick of it the whole time. They're both deer hunters and no stranger to skinning animals they've hunted, but even so, they both felt there was something different about the pigs. More deliberative, harder to imagine carrying out, and they both said they'd likely not do it themselves in the future. Was it that they'd spent time with these animals, feeding them, watching them root around, listening to their grunts? We'd had a fair amount of discussion about doing the slaughtering ourselves. It would have taken us all day, at least, and I'm definitely glad I wasn't in there with a knife.

Joe worked efficiently, quickly, and considering his kidney stones ("they get agitated when I bend over,") I was seriously impressed with how hard he worked. Moving a 250# dead weight from where it fell to where it was strung up on a tripod looked like back-breaking work. But Joe had his system perfected and his motions were economical and swift; the motions looked like they came from muscle memory rather than something he had to think about. I was likewise impressed with how often he honed his knives. Any cook who has used someone else's dull kitchen knives can appreciate that. And as he skinned it, it definitely started to look more like the kitchen and less like the barnyard. What a strange transformation this is.

Well, until Joe pulled out the guts. That was seriously disgusting. By that time, I was sitting 20 feet away under cover in the garage and the smell hit me like a ton of bricks. Good lord, it was terrible. I can't even describe how awful that was- I've got nothing to compare it to. I had started to get a little bit accustomed to it- I forgot to be guarded. And I seriously wished I'd been prepared for that. I was queasy all morning and that was the peak of it.

And getting accustomed to it was strange. Definitely by the second pig, I was less queasy, less concerned that I'd disgrace myself by vomiting on my sneakers or passing out in the dirt. The blood-stained trough that first thing in the morning made me turn aside and hold my breath was just part of the landscape an hour later. The steaming gut pile on the ground a couple of feet from where Joe worked lost a bit of it's chilling hideousness and again became just part of the process. I suppose it lends weight to the argument Michael Pollan cites in Omnivore's Dilemma- that it's good not to participate in the killing too often so as not to become callous about it. It is taking a life - or two - and that should be noted rather than passed over and worn thin with familiarity. It certainly felt significant today but I can see how it would become routine.

When the second animal was loaded into the truck and Joe pulled away, we all looked at each other and shuffled into the house. Ralph and I were sitting at the kitchen table working on the cut list- the sheet you give the butcher, telling him how you'd like your cuts divided - and Earl called his wife to tell her the deed was done. And as he was relating the events of the morning to Tami, I saw him reach into the liquor cabinet and pull out the tequila bottle. I laughed at the time, but it felt just about right. We had tequila and orange juice at 11 in the morning, and then had tequila and limeade when the orange juice ran out. We sat at the table for an hour or more, talking over how we wanted the meat cut, rehashing the process, slowly getting buzzed on tequila as the sun came out.

I took quite a few pictures of the process, intending to post them here, but looking at them now, I'm not sure they're entirely appropriate. They're pretty grim. If you're interested in seeing them, let me know and I'll send you a link. It's not something I'd like to do again any time soon, but I am grateful to know that they lived good lives, had swift deaths, and that they will never travel far from the place they were raised throughout the whole process. I suppose that's as good as it gets.

Trying to love kale and other autumn tales

Do you live in Vermont? If you don't or if you aren't here now, please come visit. This is the most beautiful time in this state where each season has its individual magic. This one, this last burst of color and light and clarity before winter's grays, this one is the best. We have a guest room, and we live right in the middle of all this beauty. I can't possibly capture it for you, photos don't do it justice, you'll have to come and see. It is a little bit frantic, full of an almost desperate need to fit it all in, to finish the last things before winter. Everything smells good, food tastes better...have I convinced you yet? Are you sick of my ravings about autumn yet? Well buckle up folks, we've got a few months to go before I sink back into seasonal affective disorder and I warn you, I may be prolific.

I came home from work today and hubby and I took a slow walk down the road, enjoying the cool air and checking out the leaves that seemed to change overnight. It was a nice walk, and we caught each other up on the events of the day. As we were coming around the curve of the road, two barred owls starting calling to each other over our heads, one on each side of the road. It was magical. Then one joined the other on the right side of the road and it sounded like they were chatting with each other- the calls were almost conversational. I'd never heard that before. It was a little spooky, a little exciting, and made it feel even more like fall. Why do owls feel like fall? I don't know, but see what you think. Here's a link to their call.

I spent some time in the garden with my camera today after the rain. Things are looking good- this spell of chilly air has made all the cool weather crops explode. The kale...I tell you, we've been eating kale since May, and I've never been a huge fan of it. It's nice enough in small doses. But we didn't plant a small dose. We planted an army of kale, and it has tripled in size in the last couple of weeks. So I'm trying to love it. Here's my first attempt, beginning with photos. And this recipe might help. I'll let you know.

I've been thinking a lot today about writing generally and about posting to this blog specifically. I never explained why I started writing this. So many blogs have some explanation of who the author is and why they sent their thoughts out into the world. Well, I've been thinking about it. Why do I write? Because I hope that you're reading. Because the idea that I'm writing to a potentially unknown audience thrills me unspeakably. I write for you known readers, Bill and Jenn and Dwight and Sara and Ralph and Tara, and the rest of you who have been checking in. And I write for those of you who I don't know who could possibly be reading (oh, the thrill of that!). And I want to share how I see my corner of the world. So much of that is food and growing and green things but it's also traveling and seeing friends and the sound of an owl on a Thursday night in September. This is my attempt to capture my life in ways that will resonate for me and hopefully for you. And your feedback has been so, so important to me. Thank you for that.

Monday night s'mores

The air is chilly and the sliver of moon hasn't risen yet. It definitely feels like fall when the neighbors call to invite us for a campfire and s'mores on a Monday night and we need jackets and sweatshirts. We sat out at the foot of their hill, adding wood to the fire, catching up on the last several months, and mushing toasty marshmallows with chocolate between graham crackers. My strategy is to shove my piece of chocolate into the center of the warm marshmallow and end up with a gooey, melty mess, sans graham. Delicious. Is it really fall now? Is summer really over already?

The dog, Rudy, is wagging his tail and avidly staring at his ball-on-a-rope, hoping that I'll throw it for him. Dogs always seem to misread me as a lover of mutts, but no luck, they've found a cat lover instead. So Ralph pulls the toy away and tosses it over and over and Rudy streaks off, all speed and muscle and energy. Elizabeth, our friends' toddler, who hasn't quite decided we're trustworthy enough to talk to, has marshmallow in her hair, and their newborn boy makes smiley eyes at us and chews on his fist. I forgot how good this sugar and chocolate mess tastes, all sticky and smokey tasting. It started to rain a bit- a cool, chill rain that makes the fire feel even better. Can summer really have passed so soon?

Walking back across the street, I can't believe how deep the darkness is. It's only by the feel of the gravel underfoot that I'm confident we're still on the driveway. My hair smells like campfire and I'm looking forward to flannel sheets on the bed and a down comforter. Sleep always sounds better when there's cool air coming in the window. It's when we finally close the windows that I'll give in to the end of summer, but tonight will not be that night.

Borlotti beauties

 

 

Borlotti beans shelled and in their pods. The plants look like Christmas with the bright red beans against the green leaves. I simmered them in water with olive oil and pepper and we ate them alongside risotto with leeks, wood ear mushrooms and chard.