FOOD ADVENTURES

Adventures with Provocative, Dangerous and Edible Woodland Creatures
or... my weekend with fungus at the Yachats Mushroom Festival



Here I am in the wilds of Oregon's damp and mysterious forest. I'm holding a mushroom that's looks like it might be edible, but isn't... so much.


"Where did you find those mushrooms?" I asked the mushroom hunting couple. "Over there in those hills," answered the gentleman.

Last weekend in Yachats, Oregon, folks gathered for the 8th Annual Yachats Mushroom festival. The town "mushroomed" with the fungi curious, expert mushroom hunters, mycologists and mushroom mongers.

DISCLAIMER: Contact the Cascade Mycological Society if you want to learn more about mushroom identification, don't take my word for it, I'm a mushroom hunting rookie and some of the facts in here might be skewed by my rookie ways. DON'T EAT THE MUSHROOMS unless you know the mushrooms.

I met up with some friends from Utah who were in town for the weekend and we headed to downtown Yachats to check out the mushroom fest.

The downtown Village Market sold boxes of several varieties of mushrooms in front of the market. We started downtown where the mushroom festival organizers had converted a section of a building into mushroom exhibits.

Here's one of the most dangerous dudes of the bunch.


My friends stand beside a line-up of mushrooms being taught by a mushroom hunting veteran Joe Spivack




Here's an exhibit that shows you how mushrooms change appearance with age, just like people..

I opted to do the mushroom walk beginning at the Cape Perpetua Visitor's Center with Joe Spivak as our guide.

Joe was a very likeable and knowledgable guy who encouraged us to touch and handle the mushrooms. It's a MYTH he says that you can get sick just from touching a mushroom. (Side note, I picked up one tiny fungi with a tall stem that turned red where I touched it.) It left a slight tingling feeling on my fingers.

Joe chewed a portion of "certain" mushrooms and waiting for the taste to come. "This one is peppery," he said and offered it around. You never want to ingest until you know what you're eating.

We walked up the trail and every 20 yards or so, stopped to identify new mushrooms we found covering tree trunks, branches and the forest floor- among a million other places. I even found a cute mushroom growing out of a pine cone.



A very old mushroom. Not good to eat.

Joe made us all feel special for finding such lovely mushrooms along the route, he especially charmed the young mushroom hunters in the group-- making them feel as if they had found mycological wonders undiscovered until that moment.



I took this photo because this is a mushroom I found that Joe said has a very unusual quality. It looks a little like the morel mushroom, but this mushroom, when cooked, gives off a vapor that's much like rocket fuel- so that those rare people who cook it should be advised not to breath the fumes.


DISCLAIMER: Please don't go edible mushroom hunting by yourself or with a novice... this is not a sport for the faint-hearted. Mushrooms are tricky to identify. I met one guy along the route that told me he'd made it his goal to identify ONE mushroom a year.

The most recognizable edible mushrooms- in my humble opinion

chantrells: Orange with a signature stem and pattern on the back...the underside of the cap tapers to the stem and has deep gills.

oysters: pulls off the tree in clusters.

lobster mushrooms: Are the color of Lobsters

chicken of the forest: Big ugly burgeouning orange things that look something like characters from the Muppet Show.

Most valuable mushroom?
Besides the truffle of course- it's the Matsutake, which are hard to find, you have to really hunt for them.

Here's a photo of a Matsutake on top of some lobster mushrooms:



Jason, the mushroom hunter



At the end of the guided walk, a handful of us thought we'd try our skill at identifying mushrooms- a new-found skill for me (excluding the years spent plucking morel mushrooms from the forest by my home in the Rocky Mountains.) Morels don't really count- they are so easy to identify. Well, I wound up walking around with Jason, this colorful guy who had been subsisting in Yachats by working on an organic farm. He'd been traveling for 6 months- sort of Lost-in-the-Wild style- from Michigan to Missoula to El Waco, Washington and now to Yachats, experiencing life by trying to live off of nothing because he believed the state of affairs in our world will soon require it. At first I thought he had a point, but then again, he told me he dumpster dives sometime and it doesn't seem like the best route to self-reliance. I admired his desire to learn about how he could feed himself on farming and foraging, which most people don't seem to have "time" to do. I mean, shouldn't this be one of the first places we START when considering how to be more self reliant? Gardening and foraging... I love that concept.

But there was something a little too doomsday-ish about his ideas that I admit made me wary. He was convinced our society was on its way out and the financial collapse was due to some convoluted conspiracy that would prove our eventual demise. Before we parted ways, he mentioned something about Yachats being a great place to settle because it has bridges on both sides and if the community of Yachats wanted to keep people from coming in and begging for food, they could just dynamite the bridges. What?? Sound like a sci-fi novel. Yeah, there was something not quite right about that. But in case any of you agree with his assessment, Yachats IS a beautiful coastal town full of ample mushrooms with easy access to sea life to eat in case the world is INDEED coming to an end.

But I shouldn't give him such a bad wrap, Jason did help me identify the beautiful white oyster mushrooms growing on the trunk of a tree (they looked like fairy food or something- so white and dewey.) I can see why people love finding these beauties; it was magical plucking them from the tree trunk and stuffing them into my pockets. And Jason found some great chantrells and a chicken of the forest mushroom too.

When I first met Jason, I had asked him what he was doing traveling and this is what he had to say:

"I'm trying to see how far I can go on my WORD.."

"Your what?" I asked him, unsure of what he has said, I repeated what I thought I heard: "How far you can go on your WIERD?" ....I asked. It was a pretty funny exchange, in retrospect.



Here's Jason posing by an Alice in Wonderland type mushroom (Fly Agaric) that is poisonous.. Jason was considering "trying" this shrume to see how it made him feel.






So our group walked around the damp, quiet woods of mushroomville, Oregon. There's something foolhearted, I must admit, about going wild mushroom hunting with someone who would eat just about anything "just for the experience," someone who talked about making a stew out of nothing but the thick flesh of a bright orange Chicken of the Forest mushroom; someone who looked hungry and what was more believed the world may be about to end.

Jason was on the look-out for the elusive psychedelic mushrooms and anything that might be edible, or slightly edible. He found something like a death cap and carefully plucked it from the ground and as if we were pilgrim naturalists finding new species and capturing them for historic identification. I now chalk up his enthusiasm for the Death Cap as curiosity, but at the time I wondered slightly if collecting this mushroom was his secret stash, his "Romeo's vile of deadly elixir" in case the world DID happen to end.

By the end of my trip, I felt comfy identifying chantrells. And though I had a bag full of chantrells and oysters, I actually didn't eat them because. . . well, hey, I picked them. Was I ready to put the comfort of my intestines into my own hands? NO!

I recognize now that I was pretty paranoid about eating the oyster shrumes even though 3 people (a ranger and mycologist) verified that they were indeed edible mushrooms. Why the fear? I think it was something about being lost in the Oregon backwoods with a goofy, novice mushroom hunter and being overwhelmed by such fascinating and possibly toxic creatures growing out of dying trees. There's something so fecund about mushroom hunting- fecund and potentially dangerous. I loved it!

On the trip, my friends and I cooked up a stash of mushrooms we bought at the store.





Here's Jen eating buttery fried mushrooms with fresh pasta noodles in our beach house south of Yachats.

FOOD MEMORIES



Confessions of a Spud Harvest Drama Queen

Since my new home in Oregon is farm-ville USA, its been fun to drive home beside tractors and farmers motoring through fields and watch sweet dust rising from the ground, lit-up by the early morning light. I love the smell of hay fields freshly cut and I love how a field of winter squash looks after the rain. I have an affection for farming and farmers- there's something about this time of year that brings back memories of growing up in Idaho surrounded by farm fields.

Every year Idaho school kids get out of class for two weeks to help in the potato harvest. It was and is a messy, dirty job that had me up to my elbows in soil all day. I wore ski goggles to keep dirt out of my eyes and often came home looking like an earthworm, blowing black snot out of my nose and feeling machine-lag after riding on the the digger out in the fields all day (a digger is a machine that pulls the potatoes from the soil and typically they put the high-schoolers on the digger.) That thing jiggled me around all day till I couldn't hear myself from the buzz of the machinery that still buzzed in my ears when I jumped off the digger and headed home in my dirty-as-hell clothes, my damp, soil-black work gloves from the farm supply store and with my goggles off and I looking raccoon-like with my face dirty except where the goggles had been. Sometimes friends and I would prop a potato onto a hot part of the machinery during the day and in a few hours, take off our gloves and dig into the white steamy flesh of the thing and each take a bite. Yum!

When dusk came, we were exhausted and couldn't tell which was a potato or a dirt clod that rolled along in front of us on the conveyor belt. How can I possibly romanticize that experience? It was miserable, truly. But we were young, so we tried to make it fun. My friends and I sang vigorously, substituting in the word potatoes for love in the cheesiest love songs. Try it, it's fun.

One year I was the only girl on the potato digging crew and believe you me, that was a tough year. Try working beside all your little brother's friends- in all their junior-high-school glory. These boys had two subjects of conversation: sex and farts. The first they knew very little about the later they were well-versed in, but they spoke about both as though they had written THE definitive guides on each subject. I remember one ill-fated day sorting potatoes from clods while massive amounts of soil flung itself upon my innocent body and I was a complete failure at deflecting the dirty jokes of my zitty, adolescent coworkers. Well, I became FED-up with my brother's little "perverted" friends and decided I was going to walk home early from work. I jumped off the digger and trudged across the trenched, soily field with a view of my house a few miles away. (Before I continue on, I need to insert a note that I was a DRAMA queen in high school... I was actually "Actress of the Year" and used to flit around the halls at Sugar-Salem belting Broadway songs with my friend Suzette and mortifying my big sister the "jock" (who was a STAR discus-thrower in track and who had bigger biceps than her boyfriend, the state champion wrestler). . . anyways, back to the story: I made it halfway across the field and decided spontaneously to throw myself at the mercy of the nematodes and other critters in the soil food web and did the most perfect Nestea plunge right in the middle of the field. I was crying hysterically, the tears making perfect miniature Ganges rivers down my cheeks. I just lay there and looked up at the clouds and breathed a little, then got back up a few minutes later and walked the rest of the way home where my mother guided me into the laundry room helping me unpeel the soil-blackened clothes from my weary body while she tried to remind me that all boys are perverts at THAT age and I just needed to take a shower and relax a bit.

But even amidst all that drama, I still recall potato harvest with fondness.

I don't really get it, but I said it, it's the truth that there's something sweet about it. What was it? Was it just working so hard and clean. How often do you get to exhaust yourself in a physical job like that? Office jobs sometimes seem to suck the life out of me. There's always either the deadline push, which makes me anxious or the downtime which makes me bored and feeling guilty about not being MORE productive. Working outside all day, we learned to tell the time on where the sun was in the sky overhead (I got pretty good at it.) We were gardeners- actually more more like peons paid to do a dirty job that not a lot of people liked to do.

But it's something I'll never regret- in fact, I hope when I have kids of my own, I can send them to work in the potato harvest too.

Foodlorists Wanted!
Help Us Build Foodlore Library


This image is Public Domain from the Library of Congress. It's a Qahatika Indian Woman using a long pole to harvest cactus fruit, Arizona. c1907.

Published in: The North American Indian / Edward S. Curtis. [Seattle, Wash.] : Edward S. Curtis, 1907-30, v. 2, p. 108. (source)

I love the photo because in the post below, I have a similar photo of a friend harvesting saguaro flowers. A friend and I are starting a food ezine called Foodlore Library as a way of collecting images like this of food traditions from the past AND from the present. Help us build this library by reading below:

Foodlore Library is an attempt to gather, save and share food stories that might otherwise go lost. We love stories like those in prior posts: one written by Ann Gates Weaver about harvesting saguaro fruit like the Papago Indians once did - who knew it takes the saguaro 40 years to flower and that making the syrup is sooo labor-intensive. Other stories include one about wild strawberry picking by my friend Jessica Spencer from rural Pennsylvania and one written by Marilyn and Craig Toone about eating out of their garden and fishing for trout on the Yellowstone River in Montana.

Your story doesn't have to be complicated or sophisticated- just share a little part of yourself and your love for food. Share a story about a family food tradition, your fav. comfort food (and why it is) some kind of food ritual you do. Check out our developing Web site (note- it's still in the rough phases) e-zine Foodlore Library


Feel free to also send us photos with descriptive captions. Some examples: a photo of you carving out a pumpkin, cooking with your grandmother, mushroom hunting, visiting an exotic locale and the food you found there, eating at your fav. hole-in-the wall restaurant or a photo of you eating around the dinner table with loved ones.

Any questions? Email editor@foodlorelibrary,com

Happy Eating,
Jen

The Slowest Food: Saguaro Syrup



By Ann Gates Weaver
of Tucson, Arizona

Sure sure, there's that saying "slow as molasses," but what about "slow as saguaro." I'm sure a phrase like that exists in the Papago language, but it simply never caught on. But saguaro syrup is certainly SLOWER than molasses

I mean the syrup itself doesn't have that kind of thick gooey viscosity, but since the cactus doesn't even produce fruit until it is about forty years old and then harvesting it takes forever, it is the slowest food I know. For the Papago, saguaro fruit and syrup was an important source of calories at a time when the desert wouldn't produce much else until lat August. Hower, after all of the hours I spent harvesting in the hot sun not to mention scooping and boiling and straining, to end up with only two pints of syrup- well this syrup is VERY labor intensive so I can see why it's going extinct. It tastes very sweet, but has a very subtle medicinal aftertaste reminiscent of cough syrup which makes it less tasty than other fruit syrups, but we still like it on pancakes!



Saguaro blooms in the spring like most of the other cactus of the sonoran desert, but the fruit doesn't begin to ripen until June. As a fruit gets completely ripe, the outer skin splits open like the petals of a flower to let the pulp and seeds drop to the ground. Seeing this, the first conquistadors wrote that saguaros had red flowers that bloomed in June. This saguaro is just beginning to ripen.



The Tohono O'Odam people would gather the fruits with a tool made from a saguaro rib with a short piece of greasewood tied at an angle to it. This tool was used to push or pull the ripe fruit from the cactus, although they would also gather dried pulp from the ground when possible.



After trying the traditional tool, I decided that my telescopic pool pole with a metal bolt coming out of the side where the net is usually attached was a much better way to harvest the fruit, although I didn't need to telescope it to harvest from the saguaro in my backyard. Even with my new and improved tool, it takes hours and hours just to fill a 5 gallon bucket halfway, and unfortunately this is at the hottest time of the year here- right before the monsoons come to cool things down a bit. Therefore you can only harvest for a few hours early in the morning.



These fruits have started to split open.



The pulp has to be removed from the shell which luckily doesn't have spines. The shell or husk is discarded. This process is quick, but at the end you realize how much of your fruit was actually husk as two and a half gallons turns into about one and a quarter.





The pulp is boiled until it turns slightly orange. Then the fibrous pulp and seeds are separated from the juice by straining it with cheesecloth. There are thousands of seeds in each fruit, all connected by pulp. Therefore, the amount of product you have left at this point is once again diminished quite a bit. The juice is then returned to the pot where it boils until it starts to thicken up and stick to the spoon, although it doesn't ever get thick like maple syrup.



At the end of all the harvesting, scooping, straining, and boiling, I have only two pints of syrup. It tastes very sweet with a very subtle medicinal aftertaste reminiscent of cough syrup. The Papago used this syrup to sweeten everything through the summer while food variety was slim, but we like it on pancakes!

Here's my niece with Zucchini from her mother's garden.

Mexican Rice, Zucchini, and Chicken Salad

I'm going to make this recipe tonight with all the zucchini that is growing out of all my kitchen cupboards this week. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm going to use local Fraga Farm Cheese instead of the queso blanco cheese that it calls for. Fraga Farms is an artisan goat cheese from a farm in Sweet Home, Oregon. I plan to visit the farm and meet a few of the farmers there. I'm also going to replace some of the brown rice with quinoa and use fresh serrano peppers.

From "The Classic Zucchini Cookbook," Ralston, Jordan, Chesman

Ingredients:
3 cups diced zucchini or yellow summer squash
1 ½ cups cooked white or brown rice
1 ½ cups diced cooked chicken
½ cup chopped scallions, white and tender green parts
2 tbsp minced fresh parsley
1/3 cup canola or other light vegetable oil
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
½ tsp chili powder
½ tsp salt
freshly ground black pepper
½ cup crumbled queso blanco or farmer cheese
Preparation:
Bring a medium-sized pot of salted water to a boil. Add the zucchini to the boiling water. Blanch for 1 minute, until barely tender crisp. Drain, plunge into cold water to stop the cooking, drain again, and pat dry. In a large bowl, combine the zucchini, rice, chicken, scallions, and parsley. In a small bowl, whisk together the oils, lemon juice, chili powder, salt, and pepper to taste. Pour over the salad and toss to coat. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Transfer the salad to a serving bowl, sprinkle with the cheese, and serve.
Serves 4.

FOOD AND RELATIONSHIPS

Nine Ways to A Man's Heart (through his stomach)

You know the old saying: The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Well, I tested this out last weekend. So, here they are:


1. Take him to your favorite hole-in-the wall restaurant and let him buy you your fav. dish -here's pizza at $3.50 a slice- even the most frugal guy will foot the bill!



This is a photo of me eating at a favorite place of mine called American Dream Pizza in Corvallis, OR.

2. When you drive to the beach, give him some fresh smoked salmon to eat as he drives.

3. Ask him what his favorite foods are and plan a meal for him. Buy the freshest fruit at the market.



In this case the farm stand was in Florence, Oregon.



4. Let him help you in the kitchen. He can cut up veggies or stir the pot, etc.



5. Do something silly/cute while you cook. This will show him that while you are a serious chef, you don't take yourself too seriously.



6. Milk is comfort food- make something creamy. Don't tell him you're using goat's milk or he may not eat it- though you know it IS better for digestion.



7.Cooking should be a sensory experience- forget the measuring cups & spoons, use your fingers.



8.Eat on the back porch on a tablecloth that you inherited from your mother. Keep things simple- this will make the man pay more attention to you than the place settings or any of the bling, bling that is SOOO overdone in a more formal dining experience.



9.For dessert, pick wild berries. This will get him in touch with his primal instincts as a hunter/gatherer.



Photos by Casey Cranor...

You're never too old to play with your food.
String Bean Season is Here!



This is one of the string beans from my neighboor's gardens, which I will write about soon. It's a wonderful heady garden full of all kinds of ripening veggies. My new neighbor invited me to help thin her Ruby chard.

I'm a bit of a late bloomer to gardening. I grew up in a place where the snow didn't melt until June, so we didn't really have too long of a growing season :) But now that I live in Oregon, I'm becoming a green thumb! Here's a photo of me sitting beside my whiskey barrel planter full of tomatoes and herbs. I painstakingly rolled it and transported it to my new abode. It's still flowering and fruiting. I love this little green space. I like the fact that I can step outside whenever I need a little rosemary or sage for a recipe I'm cooking up.



Oregon brings out the gardener in most people, I've realized. It's not uncommon to be around town and hear people talking about how their plants are flowering and fruiting as if they were talking about their children.

(photos by Casey Cranor)