Blow, Wind, Blow!

56 this morning, after a wild night of thunder, lightning, and heavy rain. Today the wind is incredible. 

The power and the phones have been off and on all day. It's not safe to be out, so we are hunkered up and waiting it out, all other plans on hold. I did seed two more kinds of tomatoes: brandywine black and Giant Belgium., and some cayenne peppers,  all in pots in the little greenhouses now. Expecting cold tonight but not freezing.

I am feeling so sad for all those who suffered from last night's storms. How terrifying it must be to find oneself in the path of a tornado. It seems like there is really no place that us completely safe from some type of natural danger. Canadians have snow and ice and extremely low temperatures,  we in West Virginia have floods (although we personally are safe, being high above any streams). Out west is drought, flashfloods, avalanches in the mountains, the South gets hurricanes, tornadoes and floods...and the list goes on. It certainly keeps us humble in the face of Nature, doesn't it? Maybe the day will come when man controls the weather, and I bet we'd make a right mess of it!

Larry went out this morning before these winds arrived to look for molly moochers, the local name for morel mushrooms. And look what he found! 

While he was gone I made one of our favorite breakfasts,  one that we don't have very often: toast spread with guacamole,  then a slice of ham, then a fried egg, a slice of tomato, and topped with a spoonful of Greek yogurt. Absolutely sinful, I swear. But leave out the ham and the toast, and it is fairly healthy. Here is mine after I began demolishing it. You should know, this is a salad-size plate, not a full dinner plate!

So, back to doing pretty much nothing while the wind howls. We are not complaining though, we are both just enjoying the rest. Tomorrow I expect we will be right back at it as usual.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Putting Up Chicken (of the Woods)

62 this morning, and only warmed up to 68 all day. Beautiful,  bright, clear fall day.

Ah, glorious fall! Today has been nearly perfect weather; tonight we will have a taste of later fall as the temperature is predicted to be in the mid 40's. A perfect evening for the firepit but it's breezy and still dry even after the shower last night.

The story of the COW (Chicken of the Woods):

My phone rang the other evening, a call from our friend Jeff. "Hey, want some Chicken of the Woods? I just found one who is was squirrel hunting."

Yes indeed I wanted it! Chicken, as most mushroom hunters call it, is one of the most flavorful of wild mushrooms, with a white flesh that pulls apart very like cooked chicken meat. A good-sized mushroom provides a lot of good eating.

Here is what Chicken looks like:

There are a few other mushrooms that look a little like it, and often beginners will think the Jack O'Lantern mushroom is Chicken. While they can look similar, there are marked differences once you know the characteristics of each. I am not expert enough to describe those differences but here is a Jack that our son Derek found today:

So, cooking Chicken: most people simply bread and fry the "shelves" as the layers of lobes are called. I was making rabbit stew so I added some cut up pieces to that, and then canned the rest.

First though, the mushroom needs to be cleaned. Some people soak them in salt water to drive out bugs, but this particular mushroom was fairly clean and I saw no sign of bugs. I cut it apart and washed each shelf individually under running water, cutting out any tough or really dirty parts.

Then I cut each shelf into bite-sized pieces and put them into boiling salted water for 15 minutes.

 I strained off the water and packed the hot mushroom pieces into sterilized jars, filled with boiling water, and put on the caps and rings. Mushrooms must be pressure canned, 40 minutes at 10 pounds pressure for pints and half-pints.

That's all there is to it. I use these canned mushrooms just like any store-bought varieties. I ended up with 7 half pints.

We are learning a lot about mushrooms this year, not a planned thing but something that just kinda happened. I joined a few Facebook groups of mushroom hunters and that has been invaluable. A neighbor and her boyfriend have also been foraging and he is quite knowledgeable.  

So far I feel comfortable identifying 4 kinds of edible mushrooms: morels, Chicken, honeys 

                         Honey mushrooms

and Chanterelles. I hope to continue expanding my knowledge but will be doing it slowly, to be sure that what we gather is safe. I have found this book to be a great resource: 

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Covid Journal, Day 54: Outdoors and One Morning in May

40 this morning, but what a lovely day! It hasn't warmed up much but enough to spend a lot of time outside.

Larry has been working on the mower--again--and weed-eating. He has figured out the problem. Did you know, these new riding mowers have plastic carburetors? And they need 93 octane non-ethanol gasoline or those carburetors will get all gunked up and then there's trouble, trouble, trouble. So new fuel filter, a few other parts, cleaned-out gas tank and new gas and it's finally running almost right. Geesh--and it's only a year old! Some time on Google and Youtube were a great help to finding the problem.

I've been piddling today: ebay listings in the morning, then baking brownies.

Finally I got outdoors in the afternoon and messed around pulling some weeds, harvesting some herbs,

picking flowers,

Sweet Rocket (I'm sure it has some other name, but that's what I call it) and lilies-of-the-valley. So fragrant a bouquet!

and watching birds.

The bird-watching station. My chair is on the right in the photo, a gift from m youngest son and my hubby about 20+ years ago. His was a $10 auction find that just needed a little love.

It's a great way to spend a day. I also went out the ridge to a patch of wild blackberries and picked leaves to dry for tea. They might be free, but I can tell you they exact their pound of flesh! Even the leaves have thorns, so it's a prickly job. And guess who forgot to take gloves with her?

Blackberry leaf tea is delicious; I like to mix the leaves with orange peel, rosehips and red clover blossoms. Now that's a great tea. I'm waiting on the red clover to bloom next.

Then back home to tidy the deck and just enjoy the rest of the day. Tomorrow more rain is in the forecast, and then temperatures will plummet to the point that even snow is possible on Saturday. I'll be monitoring the temperatures carefully and we may have to cover some plants if the weather develops as predicted. It has been many, many years since we've had frost or freeze in May.

I'll close today with this version of one of my favorite ballads, The Nightingale, also known as The Bold Grenadier, and also as One Morning in May. I know the Appalachian version; this first version is from someone's kitchen in Ireland (and near a place we visited in 2017) , and I just like it because there's the coffee and the cups on the table, makes me feel like I'm right there listening.

This second one is also from Ireland, by Liam Clancy.

And the last, I think is my favorite, but one of my favorite Irish singers, the late Al O'Donnell. This is a very short video, sadly.

Til tomorrow!

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Poke!

As we were traveling across the ridge the other day, I happened to look at the roadside and saw...

Poke! That most delicious of wild greens was thick in a most unexpected area. I usually look for it in places where the soil has been recently disturbed or a building torn down, but this was happily growing right beside a little-traveled road. We made a note to come back for it later in the day. (And we remembered, an amazing thing in itself.)


We were working away when an SUV with a young woman at the wheel pulled up. "Yall picking ramps?" she asked.

"No, we're getting poke," my husband answered.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Well, it's a wild green, tastes a lot like spinach, only better," Larry explained.

The girl wrinkled her nose. "I think I'll pass," she said with a grin as she pulled away. We continued to pick,

ending up with two large, stuffed bags of gourmet greens.

That young woman doesn't know what she's missing. Prepared properly, poke is about as good as it gets when it comes to greens. BUT...

There are many websites with preparation instructions, including this one. There are also abundant warnings about poke's poisonous properties which should be well heeded before attempting to gather or cook this wild plant. I'm serious--this is not a plant to mess with if you don't know what you're doing.


I first learned about poke from a book by Euell Gibbons called Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Fortunately, Mr. Gibbons gave very careful instructions for preparing poke and I followed that advice then and now. I usually wash the plants, strip the leaves from the stems and boil in at least 3 waters before eating. Most poke recipes call for cooking it with bacon grease; I don't. I boil it in 3-5 waters, drain and add butter, salt and pepper. That's all. It's delicious.

There is some research now into poke's medicinal uses for such things as HIV and cancer. I hope the researchers find that this beautiful plant can be used for such purposes.

As children, we called poke "inkberry" and used its berries and a stem of grass to write secret messages. We knew even then that the berries were poisonous to eat and never were tempted to try them, thank goodness.

Native Americans believed that poke had magical properties and used it as a purge. They also used it as a dye for feathers, body paint and clothing. According to Dave's Garden, pokeberry ink was used to write the Declaration of Independence, but official government sites state that the document was written using iron gall ink, which I would think may or may not have been made using pokeberries for dye. It seems that the folklore about the Declaration's writing may have begun with a Wikipedia article since a lot of website quote verbatim the same language (which immediately makes their information suspect in my book), but I have not been able to find that source article. If you know of a site that can confirm this legend, I would like to know about it.

Another website details one blogger's experiment making her own pokeberry ink. I'm not quite ready to try that but it does sound interesting.

For now, I'll be content to gather poke where I find it, cook it carefully and enjoy its tender taste.

Ink and other uses can wait. Poke fresh scrambled eggs and iced sassafras tea--now that's a dinner.

Creasey Greens

It's the season for creasy greens in our area, and that means delicious fresh greens, the first of the season, have been gracing our table.

As we were driving home Sunday afternoon, I spotted a large patch on the side of the road in Calhoun County. you know what I said--"Turn around!" Larry was willing because he likes greens as well or better than I do.

We parked on the side of the road by a little creek, and Larry was soon picking greens. I was too, although what I was picking wasn't creasy greens, it was daylily shoots. I am sure that people passing by laughed at me and thought I was picking the lilies thinking that they were ramps. But I knew what I wanted--the juicy, tasty young shoots taste marvelous in a salad. The tubers are also supposed to be edible but I have never tried them. I like the young shoots and leaves chopped up in salads, and the flowers batter-dipped and fried; I have also heard that the flower buds can be eaten and I plan to try them this summer.

Larry picked for quite a while, and he said there were plenty of greens left when he was finished. It's always a good thing to leave enough of a wild plant to re-seed and re-populate an area for the coming years.

Creasy greens generally prefer damp, rich places to grow so this hillside seems odd in a way. But they are prolific and will grow pretty much anywhere, even in poor soil. In 15 minutes Larry had filled his bag.

Dark green, rich in nutrients and with a flavor like spinach, creasy greens are a real springtime bargain.

We knew we needed to clean the greens as soon as we got home to preserve the best of their flavor and nutrients. Larry washed them and I cut off the bottom of the clusters (too much dirt hides in there) and checked to be sure all grass, leaves and debris were removed. Then I put them into a pot of boiling water for about a minute (long enough to wilt them thoroughly), drained, rinsed with cold water and bagged them up for the freezer.

We ended up with 4 packages that are just the right size for the two of us for a meal.

 

And of course we kept out enough to have for our supper that evening. Creasy greens and scrambled eggs--a perfect springtime meal. A lot of people like to drizzle bacon grease on their greens, and that's good but bacon grease just isn't on our diet these days.

 

I hope we can get out and pick some more of this delicious free food before they get too big and get bitter. Although when the flower buds form, those can be cooked and eaten like broccoli, so there's a "second season" coming for anyone who wants to give them a try.