Monthly Archives: May 2008

Sproing!

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Sproing! It’s a little hard to see in this photo — but two weeks ago, when I was making a cake for a party, my KitchenAid beater sprung a sproing! It broke! Now, to be fair, this beater is at least 35 years old (I’ve written before about my heirloom KitchenAid), and thanks to the miracle of Amazon I have a replacement beater, but it seemed that a breakdown after all this time was something worth commemorating.

And I’m really hoping that I’m just imagining that my elderly KitchenAid is beginning to sound a little sluggish. Since there’s no one left on earth who fixes things anymore, and I’d be heartbroken to have to replace it …

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Pickled Oyster Mushrooms

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Pickled Oyster Mushrooms Here they are — the first preserves of the season — pickled oyster mushrooms (just writing that makes me feel like someone in a Tolstoy novel — they’re always eating pickled mushrooms in Tolstoy).

It’s been unremittingly cold and rainy, which is terrible for just about everything except the oyster mushrooms. While I only found a handful of morels this weekend, I found probably 20 pounds of oysters — the small and tender ones I sauteed in lots of butter, some garlic, thyme and a little alleppo pepper, then finished with some wine and cream. Then I froze them in batches. Although they are pretty delicious, even a piggy girl like me couldn’t eat all those mushrooms in cream at one time. I also have to say that cooking with real, unpasteurized cream that does not contain any additives like carageenen is a revelatory experience. A cream sauce made with this magical substance does not get gummy, but rather, unctuous.

So, mushrooms in cream sauce aside, I had a number of enormous oyster mushrooms to deal with — the big ones tend to get woody, and I don’t love them sauteed. Last year, my beloved stepmother gave me The Complete Mushroom Book, which is where I got this recipe. You clean and slice the mushrooms, then boil them for 8 minutes in salted water. Meanwhile, you make a brine from vinegar, an onion quartered, some garlic, thyme, bay leaves, a little salt and I threw in a dried hot pepper from last summer’s garden. You simmer that for 15 minutes. When the mushrooms have cooked, you drain them, add them to the brine, and cook for another 5 minutes. Then pack into sterilized jars.

The original recipe says you can store them just like that, but I also processed them in a hot water bath for about 15 minutes (we lost the power part way through, so it might have been a little longer). They’re pretty vinegary, so they taste best when you take them out of the brine, and let them marinate in some nice olive oil for a little while before serving.

I did a batch last spring as an experiment, and I liked them so well that I was thrilled to find so many ginormous oyster mushrooms this spring. They’re delicious, and a little odd, and sort of out of the ordinary. Good hostess presents (for people who aren’t freaked out by wild mushrooms).

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Stumpy Dog

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Stumpy Dog Here’s my boy, back from getting his scary apparatus removed. He has a slick little lightweight cast and he’s stumping around like a champ. Poor guy, I didn’t realize those pins went all the way through his leg bones! The vet wanted to give me the pins as a souvenir but I passed — he was pretty sore that first night after they took the apparatus off, but he bounced right back.
Yesterday my local vet cut it off to change the bandages underneath and as we were lying on the couch watching dopey TV, I realized that the cotton batting had gotten wet in the torrential rains we’re having these past few days. Last time Owen got wet in a splint, his foot swelled up to twice it’s normal size and he got that bad toe rash. So, while we watched a little TV I had to blow dry the foot end of his cast — it took a while and although he fussed at first, eventually he wound up lying back with his eyes nearly closed, dozing as his foot dried out. So today he had to wear a bag on his foot, which made him very surly.

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Flood Season in a Dry Ecology

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When I first read Encounters with the Archdruid as an undergraduate doing summer field biology work in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, I couldn’t begin to fathom how Floyd Dominy and his generation thought that the best thing to do with a river was to dam it. I was young, for one thing, but I was also living in a very watery landscape — travelling by canoe from lake to lake, often camping in weather like we’re having today in Montana — 45 degrees and rain. Drought wasn’t something I understood growing up in the Midwest.

One year when I flew home to Chicago, I realized I’d become a real Westerner when I looked out the window and was astonished that there was still water in the rivers. Then I remembered that in the midwest, rivers don’t disappear in the late summer. Rivers and lakes, while they might flood a little in the spring, pretty much remain stable all year round.

And while I still feel that the Glen Canyon Dam is a blight upon the earth, a sin against nature, after twenty years in the west, after twenty years in an area where seasonal drought is the norm, I have a different understanding of the issue. I have to admit, as I stood on the bank at the dog park this morning watching all that water go by, water that we could really use later in the summer when it hasn’t rained in weeks and when everything gets crunchy, for the first time, I could see how that generation thought dams were a good idea. They were a practical bunch. They’d seen science and industry change things for the better — the introduction of antibiotics must have been miraculous in a world where children regularly died from infections.

I wouldn’t ever want to dam the Yellowstone. I love that it is the longest undammed river in the lower 48. And I love the spring flood — while most of the big trees went past days ago (there’s a sight — enormous dead cottonwoods flying downstream), there is still an enormous volume of water flowing past. The river’s been bumping up against the flood level of 8.5 feet all week. All I’m saying is that I can see why dams seemed like a good idea at the time to a lot of people trying to scratch a living from a very dry part of the country.

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Spring Herbs

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I’ve written before about the egg-scallion-tortilla thing I love for breakfast — all winter I have to make do with store scallions. They’re fine. Sometimes I add my own frozen blanched greens. But it’s hard — one of the things I hate most about winter.

But now it’s spring! And although it’s been a long time coming, there are finally things coming up in the garden. This morning, my breakfast omelette/tortilla contained a green onion (from the garden), a handful of wild arugula, a big sprig of lovage, some parsley and a handful of chives.

This is the thing about having a garden that I love — this isn’t one of those recipes that would make any sense if you found it in a cookbook — who would buy that collection of things? And lovage? where does one even get lovage if you aren’t growing it yourself? I’d never had lovage before — it’s slightly odd, kind of like a leafy celery. The wild arugula is another surprise — it’s terrific as a ground cover — grows like wild and self sows.

It’s my favorite thing about the garden — wandering outside with my scissors, looking to see what might be yummy …

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