Spaghetti with grilled summer vegetables, chanterelles and hickory nuts, page 180-181

I've been looking forward to making this recipe for some time. I love mushrooms and Bernadette has taught me to love nuts in pasta, so this recipe seems like it's going to be right up my alley. The recipe calls for lots of summer veggies: peppers, onions, tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, etc. so we bought a nice basket full at the farmer's market Saturday. It's nice to have a purpose at the farmer's market.

I hope this recipe lives up to my expectations tonight. We'll see.

Well, that was good. The veggies are all grilled outside, mushrooms and garlic sauteed, and the pasta mixed with all that plus nuts, parmesan cheese and herbs. I used some of the chanterelles from Portland and supplemented them with oyster and button mushrooms from the store. I want to keep the remaining chanterelles I have for the next two recipes.

So, today my family ate entirely vegetarian: muffins and fruit for breakfast, grilled peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and this pasta for dinner. Henry sometimes panics about making sure can can have meat. The boy loves his protein. He thinks he could never make it as a vegetarian. I reminded him, after his third large helping of this yummy and satisfying pasta, that he's gone all day without meat and hadn't even noticed. It's good to know you can mix things up and enjoy a variety of kinds of foods, I think.

Henry has a classmate who is diabetic and also has celiac disease, (which means he should not eat gluten). With such a restricted diet, wouldn't it be nice if the child liked a wide variety of foods? It would be so much easier to safisfy your cravings and stay healthy on a restricted diet if you had a wide palatte of foods you cared for. I feel so sorry for kids and their families when a child is faced with a dietary restriction, yet only likes a limited variety of food, like pizza and chicken strips. It looks really hard to keep them happy and healthy.

So, eat up kiddos. It's mushroom and veggie pasta tonight and chanterelle and proscuitto pizza tomorrow. Get used to it.

Pickled "hens"-Italian style, page 191

You should have seen my cousin's daughter's face when I told her about the pickles I just made. "Molly" I said. "I just made this jar of pickles. They are actually pickled mushrooms with peppers, onions, and anchovies."

Poor thing. She of course scrunched up her nose at the sound of the pickles, but then my tone was so excited and proud. You could see the turmoil on her face thinking the pickled wild mushrooms with anchovies sounded so bizzare (and likely nasty), but thinking she should compliment me on the dish I just made. I love to torture children!

I used the hen of the woods from Portland for the recipe and cut it down so I was just making 1/8 of the amount called for. I just didn't bring home enough mushrooms to cover the eight cups called for in this dish! One cup of mushrooms was enough to make one jar of pickled hens. These are supposed to rest in the fridge for a week before eating.

I should ask Molly over for dinner that night, don't you think? And speaking of dinner, what in the world is the best way to eat pickled mushrooms with anchovies? On a burger, straight up, on a ham sandwich? This is definitely new territory for me.

Barley and blewit salad, page 190

Ann here:

We used up all the chanterelles from the Waldport, Oregon farmer's market in the two recipes we made out there. But, I still had my woods to food thinking cap on during the finale of out trip. Fred came back from Oregon with the boys and I stayed in Portland a few more days for a conference. What I was hoping was that I could catch a Portland farmer's market on my last day, find someone selling wild mushrooms, and be able to bring them back with me on the plane. And, guess what? The far fetched plan worked like a dream. I took the city train  into the heart of Portland on my last day, found a farmer's market, one person was selling mushrooms, and I was able to buy a couple of pounds of chanterelles and hen of the woods. Wahoo! I spent the rest of the evening buying souvenirs with my bag full of mushrooms, a little worried about how in the world I was going to carry them home with the 84 other pounds of luggage I had to struggle with. Uncomfortably, I guessed. I didn't have any sort of hard-sided container to put the fragile 'shrooms in, so crushing and bruising them was a real possibility. And, my already full checked bag had to fit the gifts I'd bought plus a new tree climbing saddle, which is a bit heavy and bulky.

Anyway, I slipped the mushrooms in the fridge in the hotel, woke at 3:20 a.m. for my flight home, hoisted up the mound of carry on and check bags I had to get home, tucked the mushrooms in a shopping bag and was off!

Fourteen hours later, I was dropped of at home with all my luggage . . . and a bag of nearly bruise free mushrooms. I did it!

Cooking Wild in Missouri, here I come!

The first of the recipes I tried with our contraband mushrooms (OK, I'm jazzing up reality here a bit with likening the purchase of farmer's market mushrooms with contraband. My life is really so very legal. Please forgive me.) was barley and blewit salad. No blewit mushrooms so we substituted hen of the woods. We had my cousin and family over for dinner and boy did that feel great. It's no nice to get back together with friends and family! The recipe calls for tamari. Had to call my momma on that one and ask her if she knew what in the world that was. I didn't even know what part of the store to look in. Apparently tamari is similar to but more intense than soy sauce. Who knew? Apparently my cousins did, actually, because when they came over Ben knew exactly how much it cost at other stores in town.

Anyhow, the mushrooms are sauted, then mixed with baked barley, and a sauce of garlic, mustard, tamari, vinegar and olive oil, kind of like a pasta salad. Then, you mix in greens, herbs and sunflower seeds. We served the dish with corn and grilled chicken. I really enjoyed it. It's a robust, salt of the earth sort of grain and green salad. I'd make it again.

Next up, 'shrooms with pasta. I've got to make these recipes in rapid fire succession before they turn!

Chanterelle and smoked-salmon bruschette, page 183

 

Fred here. Finding mushrooms at a market still counts as finding mushrooms in our book, when you have to go to a Farmer’s Market in Oregon to find them. And this market in Waldport was different than your typical Missouri farmer’s market. There was an African woman selling jewelry, another African woman selling baked goods, several artists of various mediums, one small stand of fruit and berries, and our mushroom lady. We felt pretty fortunate, and Ann wasn’t going to let the opportunity get by.

Before I go on, I need to take a moment to describe our accommodations during our trip. Because we were flying to Portland, we opted not to tent camp. We didn’t want to have to pack a tent and sleeping pads on the plane. But we did want to camp, so I used www.reserveamerica.com and www.recreation.gov to seek out camping cabins. Oregon is full of them, with cabins and yurts at state parks, but even though I was planning the trip a few months in advance, most were full.

For the first two nights I did find an old U.S. Forest Service fire guard station for rent. It was built in the 1930s as a CCC project. It didn’t have electricity, but had built in propane lights in every room, a propane stove/oven, and even a propane refrigerator. It also had a spring-fed trout stream in its backyard and was very near Oregon’s volcanic areas that we wanted to see. It was great.

After that we headed to the coast. The only available options were cabins at a KOA campground. At Waldport our cabin did have a view of the bay, although you had to stretch to see it past the blackberry bramble. The aforementioned meal was cooked at this cabin.

After two nights at this campground, we drove up the coast to another KOA campground in the Seaside/Astoria area. It’s actually located near the small town of Hammond.

I don’t want to disparage RV parks too much because I know a lot of people really enjoy them, but they are not our ideal situation. KOA offers a lot of activities, but the mere fact that they spell camping with a “k” starts us off on the wrong foot. This campground was across the street from the state park where would we have liked to have stayed, and the view from the front of our cabin looked out on our KOA trailer park. In the evening when everyone gathers around their individual fires and cooks dinner the sounds and smell of the smoke remind me of being in a African village. Ann’s been to some of those same African villages, but her connotations with RV parks are considerably less romantic. We decided our campground would just be used for sleeping.  

Oliver's eyes at Ft. Stevens beach.

After arriving we headed out to the nearest beach, Ft. Stevens. It was on a point, and very windy. They boys embraced it, but we found the sand and wind harsh, or Ann’s word for it was “inhospitable.”



3 C coffee shop with a hammock chair and monopoly!

So the next day we sought refuge in the village of Astoria. It’s a famously beautiful town, and lives up to its reputation. The day started off right with pastries in a coffee shop where they really knew how to make a Latte like Ann likes it. Then we went to the top of the Astoria Column on top of the hill and sailed balsa-wood gliders off it into the woods below. We took a trolley ride and enjoyed the town.

Launching a plane off  Astoria column.

While there we visited a place recommended for its smoked fish. There we found the smoked salmon needed for our next mushroom recipe. The $40 per pound price tag was a little shocking, but we only needed about a ¼ of a pound, so we bit the bullet and got some. One more stop at a liquor store to buy a tiny bottle of brandy to use to sauté the chanterelles and we were good to go.

The recipe we were planning on was a salmon and mushroom spread on bruschetta. Ann had thought this might make a better lunch than dinner, and didn’t really want to cook back in our campground, so we planned on making it in a city park in Astoria. Instead lunchtime came and went, and we ended up having a very late lunch of wings and shrimp at a Rogue-brewery that looked out on ships coming up the Columbia River, having just arrived from China and Japan.

So the recipe was bumped back to dinner. We decided to give the beach another try, but this time we picked one a little farther down the coast, on the other side of Seaside. When we arrived we took a hike among the giant rocks on the coast, and then another hike in the woods on top of the bluff overlooking the ocean.

The boys in a typical scene of them helping Ann cook dinner.

Near the parking lot overlooking the beach was a picnic table with a fire ring beside it. This was an ideal setting for dinner. The sun had set early behind a bank of clouds over the sea, so the light was already getting dim when we started.

I built a fire, and Ann expertly sautéed the mushrooms, and added the sour cream and salmon, and then toasted the bread over the fire. The result was an unbelievably delicious meal at what must be one of the most picturesque settings in the country. And this recipe was no appetizer, it was made more than we could eat. We ended up giving the last piece to the last surfer who was coming in from the beach in the dark.

Overall, at the time Ann was saying that this was one of the neatest cooking experiences she has ever had, and I couldn’t argue. The ingredient list was pricey, but still much less than we would have spent at an average restaurant, and the result was better than you would get at any restaurant, and we had the best table in the house. This would have been a grand meal to end the Woods to Food project on, but we still have a few recipes to go. And I’m happy about that.

We're back from the coast! Chaneterelle and polenta foil packs, 186

Hello again. This is Ann. We've had the very good fortune of traveling in Oregon so sorry for the lack of posts for the last little bit. But, not to worry. We took the "good book" with us and I'm able to report on a few of the expotitions (as Poo would say) we had.

I was hoping chanterelles would be in season in Oregon while we were out and that I could find someone selling them at a farmer's market. Well, luck was with me. We were in the right town (Waldport, OR) at the right time for their farmer's market. One sweet lady was selling mushrooms, and she did have chanterelles for $12 per pound, which to me seems like a deal. After all, morels were $50 per pound this spring in Missouri.

Anyway, later that day we went to a beach and luck was still by our side, apparently. It was low tide and the coastal area we stopped at had fantastic tide pools with starfish, sea weed and mussels clinging to the rocks waiting for the water to rise again. The boys learned how to pull mussels off the rocks by a fellow who was doing the same, and they ended up with a nice clump of mussels to cook up with the mushrooms. Later in the day we tried to catch crabs in the bay where we were staying but we didn't get the timing right on that, so we bought a nice sized crab from a boy by the docks and took it back to our cabin.

Fred did a great job getting the fire right. We boiled crab, baked the polenta and chanterelles in foil (which was the Cooking Wild In Missouri recipe) and steamed the mussels in wine, garlic and lemon. Now, that's my kind of camp cooking!!! Oregon rocks!

Blackberry gelato, page 148-149

Four ingredients: blackberries, sugar, water and cream. What a lovely way to eat blackberries in the summer. These blackberries were from my mother's garden, actually. Thanks, Mom. I'm going to let the pictures speak for the recipe. I think you can see how yummy the gelato is.

City of Columbia Crawdads?

On a recent three day trip to Owensville Oliver and Ann’s Dad made some Crawdad traps. We had hoped to employ them to catch some big Crawdads down on Table Rock Lake, but time got away from us, and we weren’t able to get in a fishing trip that involved a four-hour one-way drive.  At least not for a while.

But we couldn’t just let these traps sit. So I decided to give the closest waters to my house a try: Twin Lakes, a city of Columbia park. Twin Lakes isn’t known as a crawfish paradise, but perhaps that is only because no one ever tried to catch them there before. This was my hope, anyway. It has a nice floating dock, so it was easy to put the traps out without getting wet or muddy. I set one near the shore, and the other two out at the end of the dock. On several peoples’ recommendations I baited them with canned cat food.

I checked them with the kids after about an hour and hadn’t come up with anything. I’d read that crawdads are more active at night, so I left them overnight and came back the next morning. I had caught about half a dozen minnows, and 1 crawfish.

Since that wasn’t working, the following night I moved the traps to Stephen’s Lake. There’s a bridge there that goes across that lake, so once again setting them out was a breeze. I put them out with the Henry and my nephew Carols at night. Both boys appreciated a nighttime adventure, since the in summertime we are usually calling it a day by the time the sun is down.

The next morning Ann’s sister Tracey (who was visiting for a few days with her kids) took the kids back to check the traps. No crawdads, and not even any little fish on this run. And the traps were stinky. Nine Lives gets rank after sitting out in warm lake water for two nights in a row. Henry immediately decided that if this was what cat food smells like, he never wants to own a cat.

So according to my field research, crawdads aren’t plentiful in city of Columbia lakes. I think we’ll stick to un-impounded waters next time.

(Editorial note: It seems you can use the terms crawdad, crawfish, or crayfish interchangeably, but for goodness sake never say craydads. That would just be silly.)