it's mushroom season!

i love these magical amanita muscaria. i thought they were the stuff of legend until i moved to denmark. i also thought there weren't going to be any this year, they're here a bit later than usual. chalk it up to climate change. that last one looks like it might need to visit the doctor. 

i also found some edible mushrooms - porcini and puffballs. dried the porcini in my dehydrator overnight and added the puffballs to some kale from the garden for dinner last night. 

raps!

the danish name for rapeseed is much better than the english one - raps. i absolutely adore this time of year and i go out of my way to take the back roads to enjoy it. it also smells amazing and i recently found out it tastes great too! i've been "foraging" small shoots from down low on the stalks in the fields in my area, they're not quite open yet and they taste so much better than broccoli, which must be the most boring vegetable ever.

i made a beautiful ramen with broth i had in the freezer, soba noodles, some fish from the fish guy, eggs from our hens, bok choy from a nearby farm and some of the rapeseed shoots. i brushed the fish with noma projects' delicious dashi rdx. it was honestly perfect. i'm sad i discovered the joy of the rapeseed shoots so late in the season, as i want so much more and they're almost done. but maybe it's good to have those things that you can only eat during those few weeks when they're in season. this fall, i'll be planting some in the garden so i don't have to "forage" them next spring. 

100 happy days :: day 47

homemade nettle pesto.

and you thought nettles were a nasty weed.

actually, they're way better than basil.

especially these new, tender shoots.

(dear google, please stop "enhancing" my photos aka painting them purple.)

wherein we actually have summer

summer is actually upon us.

that's not always the case in july in denmark.

but we've had an absolutely glorious few days.

the kittens have spent time outside, learning to climb trees and chase frogs.

there's been time for tie-dye projects.

sabin's transforming a brand new pair of white vans into a bright rainbow.

the good bit about our summer is that it's never too hot.

it's actually just right - upper 70s and a nice breeze.

i hate to be one of those bloggers who seems to be bragging about a perfect life.

but it has been pretty perfect for the past couple of days.

what's better than creativity and kittens in the garden?

even my old, faded, scuffed yellow converse got a rainbow facelift.

i can't wait 'til they dry so i can wear them.

rainbows are just so happy and cheerful.

these long summer days stretch out and there's time for everything.

time to wander the treeline separating our property from the neighbor's

and pick a basketful of wild rose petals.

our strawberries are in full production mode.

we picked more yesterday than we've ever picked in one go.

i didn't weigh them, but that's an enormous bowl.

and it was heaped to the top.

a little break during the strawberry picking.

i hadn't put the beers in the fridge, so i just poured it over ice.

that was good too.

a separate bowl of strawberries set aside for dessert.

we're eating strawberries every night right now.

 fresh, fragrant, sprinkled with a bit of sugar and some cream.

i must remember this taste of summer

when the clouds and rain inevitably return.

this is the summer we actually had some summer in denmark.

a rolling stone gathers no moss

i've had this little fluffy bit of  moss on the windowsill for awhile now. i found it on a walk in the forest some time ago and brought it home. i liked the color of it.

yesterday, i was watching the river cottage, i learned that it's called oak moss and that you can eat it. i also learned it's not actually moss, it's a lichen.

it's also a key ingredient in lots of different kinds of perfumes. and i can see why - i sniffed my dry little sprig of it and it smells all manly and woodsy.  oh, and how awesome is this stone? husband found it for me on our christmas day walk on møn's klint - those white "eyes" are actually another kind of stone within the stone. we'll definitely be doing something with that natural face when i find the right piece of driftwood.

after learning oak moss was edible, i set out into the yard to see if there was more. it's such a gorgeous color - not quite as aqua green in it looks in this shot, but lovely nonetheless.

they call it oak moss for a reason, as i found it almost exclusively on oak trees, tho' i also found some on a birch that is standing right next to an oak tree. it seems to mostly grow on the older trees - the big, oldest one in our yard is covered in it, tho' much is too high up to reach. luckily, it's been a bit windy and a few sticks of it had blown down.

mostly, tho', i left it where it was. the smell is quite striking, so i imagine that using it in cooking requires very little. on river cottage, they fried it quickly in hot oil and used it as a garnish.

heston blumenthal has some fancy dish where he puts a dish of it in the middle of the table and creates an oak moss fog. i'm not going to get quite that fancy about it, but i am going try the river cottage way.

these sticks had blown down on their own (it's a very old oak tree in the back yard). i've got them in an old cupboard, drying a bit.

i'll definitely report back as to how it turns out. and in the meantime, don't you love that color?

a little story and a new blog

i accidentally stole my bathrobe from a japanese hotel in 2007. i know what you're thinking, "sure it was an accident, you're not fooling us." but really it was. they kept folding it up all perfectly at the foot of my bed and as i was trying to stuff fold carefully all the crap totally necessary items of clothing i bought in the gap into my suitcase, i accidentally scooped up the neatly folded bathrobe as well. i didn't even realize i had it 'til weeks later when i properly unpacked my suitcase at home. it's very simple and plain and really not me, but i love it anyway. it's made of this waffley-woven creamy cotton with a simple brown binding. it wears like iron and despite numerous washings, still has perfect creases down the sleeves, tho' i've never touched an iron to it. those japanese, they know what they're doing.

*  *  *

i'd like to announce a new project. you can take a peek at it right here. 

my partner on forage: east and west  is amy. we worked together years ago at a newspaper. it was my part-time college job and she was the editorial editor. we had a lot of great times back then, but we lost touch over the years, but thanks to that old frenemy facebook, we got back in touch over the past year. we realized we had even more in common than ever and decided to start a blog together (you should know by now that's my answer to everything). amy lives in colorado and in addition to being a writer is also a chef, so you can expect lots of good recipes on the new blog. we're going to compare what's in season here and there, share recipes and inspiration and hopefully have a whole lot of guest posts/interviews with foragers more experienced than we are. i hope you'll stop by and check it out.

would you eat a false morel?

sabin and i spend a lot of time picking bunny greens (don't even ask how many rabbits we have). they love the new, tender dandelion leaves and we comb our property far and wide, filling a basket twice a day. today, our bunny foraging session took us down to our new apple orchard. to get back, we walked through our little shelter belt, which consists largely of pine trees.  there's a path through this little forest that our mole man once disturbingly referred to as romantic, and it might be that, but not when your companion is an elderly man carrying two dead moles in his hand (but i digress).  the path is cool and quiet and smells for real like those pine-fresh cleaning products they tried to force on us for years.  and along the way, i spotted this funny little mushroom. so i picked it to take back to the house and identify it.

according to my three mushroom books (roger phillips, john wright (for river cottage) and politiken) it is the false morel - gyromitra esculenta.  a cousin of the delicious spring morel (morchella esculenta), which is the mushroom of my childhood. its habitat is sandy soil in a pine forest - which is precisely what we've got. it seemed to like areas where there were quite a lot of fallen pinecones - which they blend in with very nicely.

john wright, the wonderful forager of river cottage, writes most damningly of the false morel. he says, "this is the puffer fish of the fungal world. raw or poorly prepared it is deadly, yet with proper treatment it is, by all accounts, delicious." he goes on to say that gyromitrin, the toxin in the mushroom, when coupled with human stomach acids turns to monomethyl-hydrazine more commonly known as rocket fuel.

yet still, the mushroom is considered a delicacy by many europeans. it's available in markets in finland (with a warning and careful cooking instructions) and in poland (where 23% of mushroom deaths are attributed to it). if you don't detoxify it - either by boiling it and then discarding the water and then boiling it again, or drying it thoroughly for several months and then boiling it to prepare it - it could very well kill you.

mushroom expert tom volk says that even the boiling process can be toxic, as the fumes rising while you boil it contain the toxin and can make you seriously ill. but interestingly, tho' my danish mushroom book mentions the rocket fuel aspect and the boiling, it doesn't actually suggest that you shouldn't eat it. in fact, it gives it 3 dots for edibility - which is the highest of any in the book. and the everyday name is spiselig stenmorkel (edible stone morel).

so what to do, when your forest yields a significant mess of mushrooms and they have a gorgeous texture and smell divine? i did take a small whiff, tho' i was a bit afraid after volk's warning about the fumes from the toxin. they don't smell toxic at all. mushrooms are such a wily foe. but wouldn't you know that any you can find in quantity might be quite dangerous. *sigh*

i picked a whole mess of them anyway - it was such fun. i sliced them and have them laid out on a tray on a high, dry shelf, to see if they'll dry, while i decide what to do. what's worrying about the warnings is that it's thought that it's a toxicity that builds up, so while you may not become ill the first time you eat them, you might the second. or third. and ill isn't just ill, but we're talking liver damage, delirium and coma. but still i couldn't bring myself to throw them out after i'd had such a blissful time in the forest, gathering them. the good news is, all three books say that it's likely that real morels will grow in the same spot. so i'll definitely be looking in the next couple of months for those.

happy weekend!

our first jacabob - patoot and our latest - pogwell, showing off a very small portion of the chanterelles i found today. finding dinner rocks.

wishing you all a wonderful weekend!

mushroom monday

all of the mushrooms in this post were seen and photographed on a single walk in the woods.

our property is 7+ hectars (17 acres) of land, divided into two - one of about 4 hectars where the house is and the other piece is a forest of mostly birches, but quite a few big pines, about 2 km down the road.

these mushrooms were all growing in our forest on saturday. so i guess the rain is good for something.

and what is it about a sense of ownership (tho' by rights, it's the bank that owns it) that somehow makes it even better?

are we programmed by our culture to think ownership adds an extra dimension?

or is it programmed in our very genetic makeup? a biology of ownership?

i don't have the answer.

but i will say that i felt these mushrooms, in their variety and number, were extra special because we found them in our own forest.

so they were OUR infinite variety of mushrooms. and that somehow adds an extra dimension.

i'd like to learn more about mushrooms. i mostly photographed them, tho' we brought a few home to try to identify them with our various mushroom books. (someone needs to invent one that lets you look things up by color.)

we're mostly too chicken to get very adventurous on eating just any old mushroom. which is probably also a biology of sorts - self-preservation.

so mostly, we just enjoyed the beauty of them.

and i enjoyed getting on the ground and getting up close and personal with the macro lens. devouring them with the camera, if not actually devouring them.

tho' these yellow swamp brittlegills are edible and we found enough of them (that we didn't have to share with bugs and slugs) to make an accompaniment to our pasta dinner.

they have the additional advantage of being difficult to mix up with other mushrooms,

so you can feel safe and secure in identifying them by their bright yellow tops.

they were delicious.