Wild Mushroom Stroganoff with Moose Hamburger

      I went on a mushroom foray with my friend Ian a few days ago.  We drove up onto Tonga Ridge  where Linda and I had found the mother lode of Boletus Edulis a few weeks ago.  We walked a lot more and found a lot less mushrooms than I had before.  I suspect its late in the season for a place with that altitude. However, we did find three King Boletes, two of them very large prime specimens.  We also found a gallon or so of Woodland Blewits and Golden Chanterelles.  I sent Ian home with the Boletes while I kept the Chanterelles and Blewits. Chanterelles are relatively easy to identify.  Their gills are blunt edged rather than sharp edged like most gilled mushrooms. Also the gills run down onto the stem as evident in the specimens below.  I included the photo of the non-chanterelle as a warning.  This mushroom was growing among the Chanterelles, but is obviously not a Chanterelle. It is important to look at each and every mushroom and not just throw them in the bucket because they are all the same color.

Chanterelles. Note that the gills run down onto the stem

Not a Chanterelle. Note that the gills end at the stem

     I found a package of moose hamburger in the freezer last week. It was a gift from a friend that had gotten misplaced in the freezer.  I decided to use the hamburgers and my Chanterelles and Blewits to make a lovely Moose and Wild Mushroom Stroganoff. It turned out quite tasty.

Moose and Wild Mushroom Stroganoff

      The other excitement we had this week was Linda's broken foot.  As we were leaving Tuesday evening to attend grand daughter Abby's band concert, Linda slipped on the back steps. At first she thought she had just bruised her foot. By the time we got to Granite Falls High School her foot was hurting much worse.  We passed on the concert and went to the emergency room instead. As it turns out she had broken the outside metatarsal bone in her right foot.  Fortunately the bone was in the right place so it didn't require setting. They put a boot on it to protect it and gave her a pair of crutches.  Today we went into Everett and they put a pretty purple cast on her foot.  Its been an inconvenient week for all concerned.

The finishing touches on Linda's pretty purple cast

A Pleasant Weekend with Grand Children

    Linda and I have had a very nice weekend hanging out with the Veatch children.  Linda picked them up Friday evening so they could spend the night Friday night.   I got up early on Saturday to drive Madelynn to Granite Falls High School so she could catch the bus to her cross country meet.  After I got back home, I coached Natalie through making homemade biscuits.  She did a pretty good job and should soon reach biscuit self-sufficiency.

Natalie cutting out biscuits

Natalie rolling out the biscuits

     After breakfast, we went to Lakewood High School to watch part of the Hole in the Wall Cross Country Invitational.  We specifically wanted to just watch Madelynn's race, scheduled to start at 11:40 am.  We arrived ten minutes late, which was okay as Madelynn's race started 20 minutes late.  It turned out to be a much bigger event than we had expected, with about sixty schools participating . That is an estimated 750 runners divided into ten separate races.  This was the third year Madelynn has ran in this event. They have a shorter middle school race while the high school kids run 5,000 meters.  While she didn't come close to winning her race, she made substantial improvement on her time with a personal best of 25:05.  It rained cats and dogs throughout her race so she gets extra credit for grit. After the race, we took Madelynn back to her house while we took the  rest of the Veatchlings back home with us.

Madelynn crosses the finish line

    Linda has always had a strong liking for all baked goods made with pumpkin. That includes, pumpkin bread, pumpkin roll, pumpkin pie, pumpkin pancakes, and pumpkin waffles.  I saw an interesting recipe on the Yummly website a few days ago that I thought she just might like. Pumpkin Snickerdoodles. Combining one of Linda's favorite cookies with pumpkin seemed like a surefire winner.  This particular recipe came to Yummly from the Iheartnaptime blog.  The blogger adapted it from a Martha Stewart snicker doodle recipe.  She had simply added cooked pumpkin and traditional pumpkin pie spices to Martha's recipe. This seemed like a worthy use of the leftover baked Potimarron squash I had in the fridge so I mixed up a batch of the cookies in my tangerine colored kitchen aid mixer. The cookies turned out very well. They even met with Linda's approval and she maintains pretty high standards when it comes to cookies.  The only unfortunate thing was that I had made three dozen wonderfully tasty cookies just before Fast Sunday. However, the cookies will still be there to enjoy on Sunday evening.

Unbaked pumpkin snickerdoodles

The finished product

    Linda was a bit tired after watching Madelynn run three miles in the rain.  While Linda took a nap to recuperate, I took the rest of the Veatchlings to see the new Peter Pan movie.  The outing turned out well although Conner was pretty squirmy during the action parts.   We returned home to one of the Veatchlings' favorite dinners, orange chicken.

    A little follow-up to my previous post about the King Bolete Mushrooms we gathered last Monday. I sautéed some in butter which Linda had then used to make a very yummy beef stroganoff. I dried most of them in our little dehydrator which reduced them substantially in volume.  Last night I ran the dried mushrooms through the blender which reduced four gallons of fresh mushrooms into four half pint jars.  That wonderfully tasty powdered mushroom can be added to soups and sauces.  The best pasta dish I have ever eaten was a fetuccini which had the powdered mushroom added to the pasta itself. It was absolutely heavenly.

Dried King Bolete mushrooms from the dehydrator

Into the blender 

 

The very compact finished product

   

A Glorious Day in the Mountains

    I took advantage of my day off on Monday to drive up into the mountains to find a nice place to sight in my rifle before deer season. I invited Linda to come along and we had a very nice day together.  First of all the weather was beautiful, the leaves of the Big Leaf Maples in the mountains are turning yellow, and the temperature was comfortably balmy.  The drive up to Tonga ridge was absolutely beautiful.  I found a nice quiet place off the road part way up the ridge that gave me an adequate distance with a good backstop for sighting in the rifle.  We actually stopped about 100 yards past the famous "Mother of All Huckleberry Patches" that I discovered with my mother almost twenty years ago, a good story that I will save for another time.  Sighting in the rifle went quickly. We then decided to drive further up the ridge to see if there were any huckleberries left.

     We drove another mile or two up the gravel road until the terrain leveled out some.  We parked alongside the road and explored one of the numerous old logging roads that crisscross that part of Tonga Ridge.  The bad news was that there was no sign of any huckleberries.  I suspect that it had been a bad year for the berries due to the extremely dry summer. October is rather late to be looking for berries anyhow.  We did notice a few mushrooms. There were some Panther Amanitas as well as some Amanita Muscaras. Both of them are very pretty, but poisonous.  We also found a few Russulas and various other types, but nothing to get my mouth watering.  Linda paid me a huge compliment when she told me that I was about the only person she would trust to tell her that a mushroom was edible. We decided to give up on the mushrooms and drive further up the ridge to find a place with a good view.  As I was waiting for Linda at the truck, I heard her call out my name.  She had stepped a little bit off the logging road and had stumbled upon a mushroom she thought looked interesting.  As it turns out it was a Boletus Edulis, known in English as the King Bolete, and mushroom that is not only edible, but described as choice and delectable.  As we explored the immediate vicinity we discovered a large number of the King Boletes and picked enough to fill our small ice chest.

Boletus Edulus or King Bolete

   Further up the ridge, near the trailhead, we found a place with a better view, suitable for a nice selfie of the two of us.  The views from the road are not as expansive as they used to be. I hadn't gone up to Tonga  Ridge in about ten years. During that time the trees have grown considerably taller.  After the photo op we drove back down the mountain, heading for home.  We stopped at Zeke's Drive-in on our way home for a celebratory ice cream cone and blackberry milk shake. We arrive home in time for me to watch the last three quarters of the Seahawks vs Detroit on Monday Night Football.

Me with my favorite mushroom hunting buddy

    I spent most of the evening cleaning and preparing the boletus for drying or cooking. The boletus dry very easily and can also be easily reconstituted. the dried mushrooms can also be powdered in the blender and used to flavor soups and sauces. The mushroom powder can even be used to make mushroom flavored pasta. The King Bolete is the only mushroom whose name I know in five languages. They are called Porcini in Italian, Cepes in French, Baravik in Russian, and Steinpilz in German.

Family History Pie and Grape Harvest Update

    I held a training session this evening for the family history consultants in our ward.  I felt that it went well. I'm particularly concerned about motivating our youth consultants to have more confidence in their abilities and the faith to trust God that He will give them the help they need.  As a post-training treat I served two pumpkin pies.  One pie was made with a "normal" pumpkin pie recipe, spiced with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves.  The second pie was spiced with just ground allspice.  This was how my grandmother, Sylvia Lee, made "squash" pies.  I really liked her squash pies, but I can't seem to get mine to turn out exactly how her squash pies tasted.  When I asked her for a recipe many years ago she told me that the only difference between her squash pies and her pumpkin pies was that the squash pies were seasoned only with ground allspice. As she didn't measure exactly, she couldn't tell me how much allspice to use.  I suspect I may be using too much allspice. I have been mirroring the cumulative amount of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves from my pumpkin pie recipe to determine how much ground allspice to use. I will have to start reducing the amount and see if that turns out closer to the taste of Grandma Silvia's squash pies.

Pumpkin Pie on the left, Squash Pie on the right

     The squash pie was well received by the family history consultants as well as by Linda, Don Jensen, and his wife Heidi.  I even got some compliments on my pie crust. I gave everyone a slice from each pie.  Everybody seems to like both pies, some preferring the pumpkin pie and some preferring the squash pie. Actually, they were technically both squash pies as they were made from the same Potimarron winter squash. I may have already done that little rant in my blog how the term "pumpkin" is botanically meaningless. There are four separate subspecies of squash, Maxima, Moscata, Pepo, and Mixta, all of which have some cultivars which are called pumpkins. Potimarron is from the Maxima subspecies which includes the hubbards and most of the better winter keepers. It looks like a Red Kuri and I still have a lot of them.

      Grandma Sylvia was not a wonderful cook in that she had a somewhat limited repertoire. I don't think she did much cooking for her family as she grew up. Then she married my grandpa Guy Dudley Tunnell when she was just 18 and suddenly had to cook for Grandpa Tunnell and his three boys from his first marriage. I'm sure that was quite the "Trial by Fire". However, she made the best of it and there were a few things she became quite good at making. Besides her squash pies, she made the most wonderful beans and cornbread.

    I finished juicing grapes yesterday evening. My total production for 2015 was 16 gallons of canned grape juice and a little more than 9 quarts of raisins. I may have made 10 quarts of raisins as Linda and some of the grandkids have been helping themselves to the raisins during the past few weeks. That is an incredible harvest from just eight grape vines.  Now the only canning projects looming on my horizon are chickens and finishing the applesauce.

     I had a wonderful surprise at work this past Friday.  My good friend Ian brought by a nice little bag of Chanterelle mushrooms.  I used part of them to make an eggplant dish.  The recipe didn't call for mushrooms, but it seemed like a good fit. I made this sauce using onions, white wine vinegar, chanterelle mushrooms, and cream. I wasn't particularly crazy about the eggplant by itself, but the sauce was very good.  As long as there was lots of sauce on the eggplant, it was tasty. Since I have more eggplant in the garden I need to find a few more good eggplant recipes.  The rest of the Chanterelles are going into a French mushroom soup. I went ahead and cut up the mushrooms and sautéed them in butter as Chanterelles don't keep very well as fresh mushrooms.

Cantharellus cibarius

Fall Canning

    As we are approaching General Conference weekend, I'm almost done processing our plentiful grape harvest.  So far I've made about two gallons of raisins with our little dehydrator and I'm up to 11 gallons of grape juice.  That is all from just eight grape vines. The grapes have taken a back seat for the past few days while I've been canning apple sauce. I bought 100 pounds of Jonagold apples to go along with the harvest from our own trees. I've done 20 quarts of  apple sauce thus far and I am not quite half done.  I know that is a lot of apple sauce and grape juice, but I look at it as canning for the entire family.  We try to distribute a fair amount of our home canned juice, pickles, and apple sauce among the family.   Besides, home canned apple sauce is so much better than anything they sell in the grocery store.  On the other hand, we can easily use several gallons of raisins in a year.  We probably have oatmeal with raisins three or four times in a week.

Freshly canned apple sauce is a beautiful sight

    I always look forward to General Conference.  I try to watch as many of the sessions as I can and listen to all of the talks several times. I love the sincerity of the brethren. They present such a stark contrast to your garden variety tele evangelist.  I will wait until the weekend to finish juicing the grapes just for the tradition of juicing the grapes between conference sessions.

     I ordered a load of dirt today so we can replace the big divit left from the above ground pool.  We're going to try to level our yard while we're at it.  Both the back yard and the side yard have a significant number of uneven areas which are difficult to mow. Three yards of dirt will be delivered to our driveway tomorrow morning.   I've already arranged for one of my young minions from work to do most of the shoveling.  It wasn't a hard choice. I could either pay him to hold down the fort at the Beez Neez while I did all of the shoveling, or I could run the store and send him to my house for some quality time with my shovel and wheel barrow.

     October is a good time of year to put in a lawn in Western Washington. Soon after we plant the grass seed, the fall rains will start, watering the grass more gently and regularly that I ever could. Grass grows very well in the cooler weather. Also once it starts raining we won't have to protect the new grass from visiting grandkids. No one wants to go outside to play in the rain.

   

A Fun but Brief Trip to Oregon

     I made a trip to the Portland area this past week. The primary purpose of the trip was to deliver Linda's baby blue Vespa to its new owner, our daughter Rachel.  Linda wasn't riding it and wanted it to get better use than merely as an ornament for our driveway.  I have to admit that I was a bit sad to think that Linda won't be riding her Vespa with an ear to ear grin any more. However, I'm very happy that its going to a good home. I'm confident the Vespa will make Rachel's heart go pitter-pat and provide the same happy place that it did for Linda.  Rachel will have to endure a little delayed gratification with the Vespa. It seems that Oregon has slightly stricter rules in that Vespa riding requires a motorcycle endorsement.  In Washington that wasn't necessary because the Vespa was less than 50 cc.  Rachel will have to take a class and pass a driving test before the Vespa can become her new happy place.

     I spent Wednesday with the Arnetts in Hillsboro, Oregon and enjoyed an evening of fine dining.  Rachel made alfredo sauce from scratch.  I know I shouldn't have been, but I was amazed at how much better it was than any alfredo sauce from a jar.  Rachel claims scratch alfredo sauce is pretty easy to make. We chopped up some smoked salmon I had brought down and sprinkled it over the fettucini alfredo for a little Northwest touch.  Rachel also transformed one of my sourdough loaves into the most marvelous garlic bread. She added some chopped herbs (Rosemary, Oregano, and Thyme) to the garlic butter she put on the bread. The meal was served with a simple salad with olive oil and vinegar as the dressing and aqua minerale.  We had plans to use some of Rachel's figs to make fresh fig clafouti.  As it turned out, we were all too full to even consider dessert.  She made the clafouti (a type of pudding) several days later and seemed pretty happy with how it turned out.

     While visiting with the Arnetts I also spent some time in Chet's recording studio.  It was a little brutal listening to a recording of myself singing. If I always remembered how badly I sound when I sing I would be much less inclined to play and sing in public.  Since I enjoy doing it, I've decided to exercise some selective memory and just forget about that incident. I will continue to sing in public and let the poor folks who have to listen to it to just deal with the consequences. The moral of the story is that it is always always better to sing and play with other people so there is some camouflage.

Honest, I really am very happy on the inside

      The following morning I drove to Forest Grove, Oregon for some quality time with the Kangs. A half hour after my arrival we were on our way to Tillamook.  We had a very fun visit to the Tillamook Cheese factory (as always), bought some cheese, and enjoyed some ice cream.   While eating ice cream at the cheese factory it was forcefully brought home to me that I need to make a concerted effort to smile more.  Sarah took a selfy of us enjoying our ice cream and I looked seriously grumpy in the photo.  I guarantee that I wasn't feeling the least bit grumpy on the inside, but I sure looked grumpy on the outside.  After the cheese factory and a mandatory stop by the jerky factory, we finally drove to the beach at Oceanside, Oregon.   It was a bit windy, but we all had a great time.

Yes, it was a very windy day at the beach

This was the best Chloe could do for the wind-blown look

    After we drove home from the beach, we went to Autumn's soccer game (a 6 to 0 win for the Forest Grove JV) and took girls to dance class.  Fortunately, the dance class was located near Momo's Hawaiian Shaved Ice. I finally got to experience shaved ice nirvana.  We then visited Barnes and Noble before we picked up the girls from dance class and went home.  It was a pretty busy day, but probably pretty typical for Sarah.  Somehow we managed to squeeze in a little ukulele time before we spent the evening working on family history. Sarah helped me get my iPad better set up for family history and gave then me a little tutorial on using the Keynote program.

    I drove home the following morning as I always do much better driving in the morning.  Just for some variety, I took the back way to Ranier, Oregon before crossing the Columbia over to Kelso, Washington. It wasn't any faster, but it was nice not driving through Portland and having less freeway driving. I had a great time hanging out with my daughters and grandchildren, but as always, the visit was way too short.

 

Making Sauerkraut

    I helped teach a little provident living class this past week at the Snohomish Ward's annual Labor Day picnic.  This is my second year in a row teaching such a class so it now has become as much of a tradition as the ultimate frisbee game.  Last year we taught how to make dill pickles. This year the class was on making sauerkraut.  I was gratified that there was a fair amount of interest in the topic of home production and storage and that I wasn't the only sauerkraut fan in the ward.  The class was hands on and about a dozen people participated in making the sauerkraut.

     Sauerkraut is a great home production and storage project for a number of reasons.  First of all, cabbage are relatively easy to grow in our maritime climate.  The only serious crop failure I've had growing cabbage in Western Washington involved a goat that escaped confinement. The goat was quite satisfied with my crop of "baby" cabbages, but I considered it a serious crop failure. Secondly, cabbage are relatively inexpensive to purchase and are plentiful in the grocery stores and farm stands at this time of year.  Thus one can practice making sauerkraut even if they are currently unable to have a vegetable garden.  Thirdly, sauerkraut is pretty easy to make. I know there are things that can go wrong in the process, but I've been making sauerkraut off and on for about ten years and it has always turned out well.  Lastly, sauerkraut is very nutritious, even more so than the raw cabbage it was made from.

    In preparation for my class, I printed out a little internet article about a Captain Cook voyage (I don't believe it was the fateful one he made to Hawaii). This was the first long sea voyage undertaken by the British Navy that involved zero deaths from scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C in the diet.  A previous voyage lead by another captain, consisted of four ships and 2,000 men and had resulted in 1,300 deaths from scurvy. The big difference stemmed from the fact that Captain Cook brought along 4 tons of sauerkraut. This wasn't canned sauerkraut. It was simply fresh sauerkraut packed into wooden barrels.  It was a two year voyage and the kraut lasted all that time in wooden barrels. They still had a bit of the sauerkraut left as they neared England. Supposedly, they gave the last of their sauerkraut to an Italian fishing boat. I don't know if that was part of a trade or if they were just sick of sauerkraut after eating it for two years.  I knew before that sauerkraut is a great source of vitamin C. I only recently learned that there is more vitamin C in sauerkraut than there is in raw cabbage. Somehow, the lactobacilli actually manufacture vitamin C while they are converting the cabbage into sauerkraut.

    The process of making sauerkraut is not complicated.  I got my sauerkraut recipe from a Rodale Press book titled "Stocking Up".  They credit the USDA as the source of their recipe.   50 pounds of cabbage, shredded and mixed properly with one pound of pickling salt, and given three to four weeks to ferment  under the right conditions,  results in a whole lot of sauerkraut.  This recipe can easily be adjusted to whatever amount of cabbage is available.  In our case we shredded about twenty-five pounds of cabbage so we used half a pound of salt.  That was an amount that fit comfortably into a five gallon food grade bucket.  Sauerkraut can be made in all sorts of containers, including expensive crocks and glass jars.  I prefer used food grade five gallon buckets as I already have a lot of them and they are a nice convenient size.  The bucket or crock doesn't need to be sterilized. It just has to be clean.

      I was assisted in teaching the class by Lynell Nielson. She is an avid fan of fresh lacto-fermented food and is knowledgeable about its health benefits. In addition to being a good source of vitamin C, lacto-femented foods offer probiotic benefits.  They contribute to a healthy intestinal flora. There are numerous cultures which have some sort of lacto-fermented food as a daily part of their diet. An example of that is the Koreans eating kimchee on a daily basis.  There are other purported benefits besides the probiotic aspect.  I  found an interesting internet article about sauerkraut and the incidence of breast cancer in Polish women.  In Poland most women eat fresh lacto-fermented sauerkraut about three times per week. Polish women living in the Chicago area eat less fresh lacto-fermented sauerkraut, averaging about once a week.  The rate of breast cancer was significantly higher among the Polish women living in the Chicago area.  While there may be other factors which could have contributed to this result, there is a great deal of evidence regarding the health benefits of fresh lacto-fermented foods.

     Lynell brought a very nice shredding device intended specifically for making sauerkraut.  It worked very well such that it only took about 45 minutes to core and shred the cabbage.  We tried to make sure all of the attendees had to opportunity to shred cabbage.  We mixed in the salt as we added cabbage to the bucket.  When we finished shredding the cabbage, the bucket was full up to about an inch or so from the top.  I took the bucket home and dumped it into a large plastic tote and mixed it some more to insure the salt was evenly distributed.  After I had repacked the shredded, salted cabbage back into the bucket, a lot of water was being exuded by the cabbage. This time I was able to pack the shredded cabbage down such that it was about six inches from the top of the bucket. I placed a plate on top of the cabbage and weighted it down with a gallon of water in a used milk jug.  Within a few hours the plate was submerged under the liquid.

Our bucket of sauerkraut after six days

    The sauerkraut seems to be coming along just fine.  After six days of fermentation it has reduced itself down to a little more than half the height of the bucket. there3 is plenty of liquid to cover the sauerkraut. The liquid has a little foam on the top, but no evidence of anything moldy.  I skimmed off the foam and tasted a piece of the sauerkraut from the liquid above the plate. It passed the taste test as well, but is still several weeks from being done. When the sauerkraut is finished I will take it to a Relief Society activity where it can be divided up amongst the participants of the class.

    The process of lacto-fermentation doesn't depend on sterile conditions but rather on conditions that favor the lactobacilli over other bacteria.  The addition of the salt and the fact of the kraut being under liquid and thus not exposed to oxygen are both conditions which favor the lactobacilli. It is essential that the fermenting cabbage remain covered by the liquid.  Another important condition is the temperature.  Making sauerkraut won't work in hot or cold conditions.  The lactobacilli favor a temperature range from  50 to 70 degrees. That range is pretty easy to come by in Western Washington.  I usually make sauerkraut in September so that temperature range is pretty much what we get for most of the month.  In warmer climates, it might be wise to make the sauerkraut in the basement.  How long the process takes is a function of the temperature.  The cabbage becomes sauerkraut quicker in the warmer portion of the range and slower in the cooler portion.