Chocolate, Mushrooms, and Mud

My sons love good food. They especially love good home-cooked food. Even more, they like food raised and grown on the homeplace. Their wives and children are right there with them.

So when the guys come home, it means cooking. Quite often son Derek takes on some of it, being the master grill chef that he is but this weekend's forecast of rain, cold and wind dispelled any idea of a cookout. And I had a turkey ready to roast. And the mollymoochers (morel mushrooms) are in season. We were set for a feast. I went ahead and cooked the turkey and put it in the fridge so it would be easy to prepare anything we wanted with it. I also cooked potatoes in advance for potato salad, and made 2 loaves of bread--one white, one rye. I was ready.


We started the weekend by eating out at our favorite breakfast place, the Downtowner. Granddaughter Grace decreed that.

Then it was off to the Chocolate Festival in Ripley, a small but growing event--I'll post more pictures in a later post. Yes, we bought some chocolate! We came home and after a lunch of homemade bread and home-canned vegetable soup, we headed into the woods in search of mushrooms. Larry has been bringing them in for a week so I wondered if we'd have any luck at all. I was not even into the woods when I heard excited voices. "We found some!"

Sandy found a nice one:

Luck was good and we brought a good mess of mushrooms back for dinner. We found other things of interest in the woods too, and that will be yet another post.

For dinner, I made potato salad and sliced cold turkey breast. I chopped and sauteed some of the morels with a few fresh ramp leaves in butter, then stirred in some of the creasy greens we froze earlier this month. Wow! All I can say is that this will be a repeat dish. The smell of the ramps and morels as they sauteed was heavenly. We also had fried morels, fresh strawberries, pineapple, crudites, and more fresh-baked bread (the two loaves from the day before were gone!).

Then there was dessert. Tomorrow is my oldest son's birthday so Grace and I made a cake for him. We selected our recipe in the morning and stopped at the store while we were in town to get the ingredients. What did we make? I'll show you in tomorrow's post--it was too good for a quick mention here.

The evening ended with the two guys and a couple grandkids taking off in the truck one son was buying from the other. They went

muddin'!

No matter how old they get, there is always enough boy in them. Both have responsible positions, one as a bank president and the other a Sergeant Major in the military. But a good rain, a tough four-wheel drive truck, a Saturday night, and they were off. I kept waiting for the phone to ring and a voice saying, "Hey, we're stuck! Tell Larry to get his truck and a chain and come pull us out!" Amazingly, they returned on their own steam, just slightly worse for wear.

Today the guys went golfing and the rest of us stayed home to cook a brunch of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, grits, cider and toast with an assortment of preserves. (Diet was out the window this weekend--back on track tomorrow).  Larry took the grandkids off on another mushroom hunt and my daughter-in-law and I washed dishes and talked. Everyone returned by early afternoon--hungry again. This time our oldest son was the chef, making homemade spaghetti sauce while the wives made salad and I made garlic toast.

Finally it was time to say goodbye. A bag of jars of apple butter and pickles, dried ramps and jams was gathered to take back to their home. The trucks were packed and arms waved until they were out of sight. The house was quiet. The cats slept. We gathered towels and sheets and started the washer.

The visit was over and now all we have left are good memories and photos.

And very full tummies. And a lot of things to write about this week.