Mushrooms for dinner again...

So, it would seem to be a *STELLAR* year for wild mushrooms, at least for me.
I bragged in my last post that I finally found white matsutakes in Temagami, after looking for them in vain for about 25 years. Then, yesterday, while walking my dogs at a favourite park, I noticed what appeared to be a rather large, well-organized squirrels nest, lying on the ground under an oak tree. My heart went pit-a-pat.
What IS that? I asked the dogs, who didn't answer. But I wondered if it might not be the polypore called "hen of the woods" and I approached the thing with bated breath.

To make a long story short, we have been eating mushrooms for about 24 hours now and I, for one, am full. The thing weighed thirteen pounds and was nearly all usable; we gave some away and made a huge soup yesterday. There is talk of frying some up, later tonight as we still have a huge chunk in the fridge. I've been bragging non-stop to my long-suffering family.

As a forager, I feel fulfilled.

Pictured above: thirteen pounds of "hen of the woods" or Grifola frondosa. Also known as "maitake", it is one of the mushrooms that has been used medicinally by the Japanese for time immemorial.

Back from the woods

Hey, we're back from our canoe trip!
We were in Temagami for 20 days.
We were rained on for 19 of them.
We ate 12 different species of wild mushrooms! (Not all at the same meal...)
I did not find it warm enough to swim, even once. One day I was almost going to do it, then the wind picked up again and I came to my senses.
We stayed at 12 different campsites.
We made 12 portages.

Highlights:

I found white matsutakes, for the first time ever. I have been looking for them for about twenty years.
We ate a lot of boletes and suillus mushrooms. When fried in ghee and salted, they taste a lot like bacon, or chicken skin or something very meat-like, fatty and satisfying.
River otters: What could be more thrilling?

The One Big Thing

Today, while dehydrating peaches, I noticed that we appear to be having a hurricane. It is exceedingly hot and humid outside; over 40 with the "humidex" but windy as hell! The branches were beating against the windows and I kept hearing things falling over outside. Every now and then there is a tremendous BANG! from behind the house; the sound of a black walnut falling on the tin roof of the neighbour's carport.

It is going to be a good year for black walnuts. The trees are loaded and the nuts are big. It is a pity that I seem to always take my yearly holiday during black walnut season. (Not true of last year's trip to Guatemala and Belize, done properly, in the dead of winter...) But fall is the best season for most things, including canoe-tripping.

I was going to follow this up with a short list of things I hate but find I am totally uninspired. As it turns out, there aren't really that many things I hate anyway. It pretty much all comes down to the one thing and I don't really know how to sum that up.

How a few have everything while most have nothing? How we are cautioned to be grateful for our "freedoms", while everything is taken from us? How we learn to disrespect the natural world and the other animals, and instead worship human celebrities? How we are duped into supporting the war machine?

...Yep, I'm really looking forward to getting into the woods for a few weeks...

The dehydration station

Every year, we go on a canoe trip, usually in September. Last year, for the first time since 2001, I missed out; Rob took a spring trip with a guy I'll call "Neighbour Boy", shortly after the ice came off. I don't remember now why I couldn't go then, but I did manage to put enough food together for their meals and also for Seamus, who went along for the trip. Blue and I stayed home and as I recall, had a nice time. But when fall arrived and it was time for our usual trip, I was involved in a medical drug study that was going to earn me some money. I couldn't just drop out, no matter how badly I wanted to. So, last year, I didn't go canoeing. At all.

Rob came home from Temagami with an awesome camera that he found while picking up garbage from the dock.
I attempted to console myself with a trip to Guatemala and Belize, during which we blew most of the drug study money. And we took a lot of pictures.

We dry all our own food for the trip, with the exception of a few things that we buy already dried, like mashed potatoes and onions. Generally, food prep is my department. Rob assembles our gear and makes sure it is ready for the trip. I plan our meals, cook them, dehydrate them, weigh and sort them, assemble "extra" ingredients and condiments, buy snacks, make and dry dog food. We calculate about a pound of dried food per person, per day. The dogs eat a lot. Their appetites seem to double in the woods. Some of their food is meat - we don't take meat for ourselves but I like to take some for them. We usually buy ground beef from the drug-free meat place at the market and dry it raw. Then it gets mixed with a variety of other ingredients, to make their food. They get oatmeal and skim milk and vegetables and supplements. The mix is so superior to kibble that we always notice a positive change in their coats very shortly after we leave. They get glossy and their eyes get brighter. I'd make it for them year round if I wasn't so lazy. Oil cannot be dried so we have to take oil for all of us, separately.

Our longest trip was 18 days. That worked out to almost 60 pounds of dried food. (We generally take a little extra in case some is lost to circumstance.) This year, we're aiming for around 20 days on the water. I have been a slave to the dehydrator for the last couple of weeks. And I got a very late start. Usually I spend the entire month of August more or less chained to the dehydration station.

Today is a turning point. In the beginning, getting ready for a trip of this length is a formidable task. You dehydrate a basket of peaches and end up with a small zip-lock bag that weighs about an ounce. A head of celery fits into the palm of your hand. It seems like you will never be able to dry enough food, no matter how you sweat and toil. But at some point, you see that it's starting to come together. Today, as I bagged some peppers, I realized that we are starting to have enough food for a trip. We aren't there yet, but I can see that we will be.

This trip is shaping up to be bittersweet because my dogs are both aging so rapidly. This could be their last canoe trip. Every time I run my hands over them I find another lump, bump or growth. I worry about their ability to do long hikes; to portage over rocky trails; to swim, if necessary, a long ways. But they, like us, are looking forward to the trip. Ever since we started hauling out the stuff - the food barrel, the dry bags, our sleeping pads - they have become inseparable from the gear.
They stick close to the stuff, as if we might forget to bring them along otherwise.

Luck

The first time I ever played Lotto 649, I won. True story. I had just started working at a printing place where everybody went in on tickets every week. And, although my naturally frugal aspect was screaming, "Don't do it!" I threw in my $2.00, that first week, in order to feel a part of the group.
The next morning, there was great excitement in the shop. The owners son, a huge deaf-mute guy, was all flushed and sweaty. He motioned at us with his hands: five out of six numbers! We won!

After much checking and re-checking, it was determined that we had indeed won the "2nd" prize; five of six numbers. The jackpot was at least a million, but second place was much less; I think a few thousand dollars. Anyway, after we had divided it seven or eight ways, it came out to perhaps $260. each. At the time, about a weeks pay for me. A nice return on a $2.00 investment.

Imagine winning the lottery the first time you play it. How crazy is that?
It wasn't a lot of money but it was tremendously exciting. For me, it demonstrated two things. One, that lotteries were winnable. By ordinary people, like me and my co-workers. Two, that I was lucky. I couldn't help but think that while my co-workers had been playing the lottery for months and years before I came along, it was only when I joined in, that we won. I have always thought of myself as a lucky person; here now was proof.
For quite a long time after that, lottery tickets were irresistible. I justified buying them by telling myself I had that $260 in credit.

Fast forward twenty-three years or so. (My god, has it been that long?)
Although it embarrasses me to admit it, I still occasionally succumb to the lure of the lottery ticket. I cannot help but imagine winning. So many of my problems could be solved by an influx of cash, that the idea of winning is just too alluring to pass up. Yet I know, somewhere in there, that lotteries are exploitive. That they are institutional money-makers that exist because they make gazillions of dollars on the dashed dreams of poor people. A tax on the gullible and the desperate and the foolish. A tax on me.

I still think of myself as a lucky person but in reality, I almost never win anything. There are people who win door prizes regularly; whose names are pulled from hats; who pick the lucky chair; whose numbers are read out at the end of the evening. I am not one of them.
I only ever really won the lottery that one time. And the more I think about it, the less I think it has to do with me being lucky and the more it has to do with something else; something I'm not sure of and don't know how to name.

But whatever it is, I don't think I'll call it "luck".

Mid-Season Bean Report

Okay. It is now mid-summer and the gardens are in full swing. I rode over to the community garden to take a look. Here is what I found.

My Rattlesnake pole beans are amazing; prolific and delicious. They are probably my favourite bean this year. The Northeasters are confusing; flat, yellow beans except for one plant that bears long flat green beans. They're all very good but... I actually didn't expect them to be yellow. And what's with that green one?

The Tongue of Fire are obviously pole beans. They were sold to me as bush beans and that's how I planted them in both gardens... so they're a bit of a mess, twining and sprawling around. They are not particularly prolific. Additionally, they are apparently extremely attractive to bugs. They have sustained more damage than any of my other beans. We've eaten a bunch of them both as snap and as shelly beans; they're nice enough but not quite as special as I'd hoped.

My tomatoes are all over the ground, due to mismanagement. However, they are starting to ripen up nicely and we've been eating quite a lot of them. The Persimmon variety is fantastically sweet and lovely. The Brandywines are misshapen but delicious. I don't think I'll grow the "Heart" variety again; they are humongous but slow to ripen. I have a couple of mystery plants in there that are producing tomatoes of dubious quality; one appears to be some kind of Roma and I know I didn't plant any of those deliberately. Sigh...

In Karen's garden:

The Thibodeau de Compte Beauce are growing well and are very prolific and quite lovely. They look like a slightly heavy Rattlesnake bean. I'm growing them for dry beans which is good because their pods seem very tough. The Jacob's Cattle are also growing very well. They are reasonably prolific and seem untroubled by bugs. My soybeans look good and seem to be quite prolific. I want to eat some of them as edamame, but I'm not sure I can get out to Karen's to pick them at the right time for that. They were still flowering and had only tiny beans when I went out last week to weed and look at everything. It was kind of thrilling to see all the different beans hanging down from their respective plants.

I'm enjoying the gardens, even though they are more work than I can keep up with. Because of this, I think I'll try to do the community garden again next year. The dry bean garden is an hours drive from here, so not really feasible to maintain. I don't know what kind of yield I'll get from it but I can't really imagine that it will be cost-effective. Still, it will be nice to have some different beans for baking this winter, even if we don't get a lot of them.

If you crawl under a rock and die...

Once in a while, I get the feeling that I'd like to just crawl under a rock and die.

But if you crawl under a rock and die, you will never get to swim in cool, fresh water again. Nor sit in the shade of a hackberry tree and watch the river go by. You will not watch with joy the little yellow warblers flying through the willows on the riverbank. Or feel a cold, wet dog's nose, followed by little wake-up kisses, so gentle, on your eyelids in the morning.

Yesterday, we rode our bicycles to Pinehurst Conservation Area and went swimming. It is one of the parks of Rob's childhood, so we spent the day re-visiting some memorable campsites and trails. We ate a picnic lunch under some big old white pines and oak trees and explored the gorgeous Carolinian forest. It's amazing to me that we can ride our bikes for just a couple of hours and end up in a place with noticeably different flora from our own. Notably, there were a lot of large shagbark hickories, some pawpaw trees, and various flowering plants that I am not accustomed to seeing daily. It was cool! We saw a little wood frog, a brown thrasher and a few butterflies but not much else in terms of fauna. It was a holiday Monday, so the park was busy but the roads were mercifully quiet.

I was pretty beat on the way home and thought that perhaps I'd be miserable today because I had to get up at 5:30 to go to the coffee booth at the market. But I feel okay today, despite the long ride yesterday. Except for this faint, lingering feeling of wanting to crawl under a rock and die. Other than that, and a slightly sore cycling ass, everything is a-okay.