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. 

karl johan and other randomness

it's good to have mushroom hunting friends who call and say, "we've got way too many mushrooms, can you use some?" and then they give you a full 10 liter bucket of beautiful karl johans (aka porcini). i'm thinking mushroom tart. dried mushrooms. maybe with butter and garlic atop a steak.

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i've been branching out in my podcast listening of late. i listened to a few episodes of on being. i can't remember what podcast directed me there. it's deep and explores big, existential questions, but the host, krista tippett is so incredibly pretentious and annoying that i had to delete it from my phone again. i also listened to most of the extant episodes of food52's burnt toast, but didn't subscribe. the hosts are ok, but some of the guests were, again, too pretentious for my tastes (that brooklyn beer guy was downright insufferable). it seems like pretentious doesn't do it for me at the moment. today, via the longform podcast i found my way to another round, a buzzfeed podcast. i'm not that far in, but am already enjoying it. no pretentions, plenty of slang that i'm utterly out of touch with, and funny stories told by hosts who are having a cocktail or two. what's not to like? what are you listening to these days?

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what is the deal with random people who think it's ok to give you unasked for advice? "you should put the link in a different spot on that post." hmm, just because you weren't computer savvy enough to find the highlighted word and click it, isn't my problem. and don't pull "well, i have a mac" shit on me. i. have. a. mac. 

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i dreamed that a tractor pushed husband's car (which was inexplicably a black SUV, rather than the white soccer mom van it is in reality) from in front of our house (which was a different house than our real house, but our house nonetheless), down a hill towards a lake (not our actual lake), where it almost, but didn't quite go in, because it swung around in a wide circle (despite having no driver at the wheel).  and then a raging elephant chased the guy in the tractor, who had for some reason gotten out of the tractor and was on foot, running back towards the house, pursued by said raging elephant. for once, i'm glad a meowing cat that wanted in out of the rain woke me up.

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as counterintuitive as it sounds, i kind of always wanted to be a flight attendant, it's actually kind of a bucket list item for me (if i had a bucket list). and now it seems that delta is looking for danish-speaking flight attendants, so i might even qualify. and here i thought i'd end up working for SAS, which, as we know, stands for Sexy After Sixty. :-)  but perhaps it's not too late and i'm not quite to 60 yet!

the view from sunday night or what a week it's been

it's been a full week. there have been tiara-wearing kittens (that got a whopping 252 likes on flickr, which is the most any of my flickr photos have ever gotten).

there were days of rain, and blustery winds, but also glorious, golden light spilled through in between showers, making it ok that it went from summer to fall overnight.

there were more photo sessions with kittens, where i came to understand why they say you shouldn't try to herd cats. they are at their most lovely and irresistible right now. i'm enjoying every yummy minute of them.

there was a bit of early access to the series 12 minifigures, which won't be in stores until october (hence the blurry photo). i've got 13 of the 16 and can't wait for them to be released so i can get the other 3.

there was teenage mutant ninja turtle homework to do. i do love the kind of homework i'm asked to do at my workplace, even tho' tmnt aren't my favorites. this little spaceship was mostly an upside down build, which was new for me. it's also quite a lot sturdier than it appears, which is cool.

we harvested the last batch of honey - boosting our total harvest for the year up to 90 kilos, a much better harvest than last year. now we just need a big box of new honey jars so we can fill them up and maybe even sell some.

and when we weren't eating shark burgers, the weekend was spent discussing the school options. we visited two schools on friday and both have their own advantages. so much so that we've not had a gut feeling that one is a better choice than the other. that's been a bit difficult for me, as i normally rely on my gut to tell me things and in this case, it's told me that we should definitely find a new school, but it isn't obvious which one is the best choice. the child, on the other hand, is sure which one she wants, so pending a couple of questions tomorrow morning, we are going to go with that one - she is, after all, the one who has to make the switch. it's up to us to make the logistics of it work and to ensure that she keeps her social circle intact, as well as building a new one. that one, we're not really worried about so much. probably, we'll ultimately choose the public school, because we pay an awful lot of taxes and education is something they should just get right. and the new school gives a good impression of getting it right (of course, we're currently easy to impress in light of how bad things are at her current school).

and the weekend ended with a long walk with husband in the forest. the rainy weather has been good for mushrooms, both the edible and the photogenic kinds (these are the latter). a long walk has a way of clearing out any last vestiges of restlessness and discontent. and now i'm ready for the week ahead.

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molly has been on a roll (of awesome posts) lately.

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me, probably not making all that much sense, 

in danish, on the radio last wednesday evening.

talking about what danishness is.

(hint: full calendars, booking people two months ahead,

being able to talk to the boss no matter your level in the org. 

and being afraid of conflict)

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i'm liking stuckinplastic

what's not to like? minifigs. life philosophies. lemonade. gratefulness.

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a heartwarming story of love that finally happened after 60 years.

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has amazon gone to the dark side?

magical teeny tiny mushrooms

it's a good year for mushrooms

the mushrooms are amazing this year. it's been a very good year for them around here - very wet and strangely warm (it was 20°C yesterday) - perfect conditions. i swear there's something magical in the way they spring up overnight in whole groves. and then they linger on until they're picturesquely withered and look ancient. i've got nature on the brain because i'm reading roger deakin's wildwood. in it he waxes poetic on forests and the pleasures of sleeping out in a shed in a remote corner of his property. and pencils. and i hope he does something about mushrooms too, but so far he hasn't (i'm not that far in). if he doesn't, i'll have to do so myself.

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.

more magical mushrooms

purple velvet on a green carpet

salmon pink

blue velvet 

stones that look like a broken, old mushroom

more light blue velvet

stitched around the edges

perfect stitches around the edge

lipstick

frog and a slug

shell-like

teeny tiny world

once again, i'm not so great at identifying these, but i do love finding and photographing them on a walk in the woods. i'm amazed at the range of colors mushrooms and fungi come in.  next year, i'm going to be prepared to use them for dyeing, but with harvesting the garden bounty and honey and making cider and getting ready to build a new kitchen and such things, it feels like too much to try to tackle mushroom dyes as well.  so that will have to wait. and the pretty pictures will have to suffice in the meantime.