aka Chenopodium album, tender, nutlike, easy to cook — and of course very easy to grow. All you need to do is stop pulling it up and start harvesting the tender stems and leaves to sauté in olive oil with garlic, steam in lemony chicken stock, cream just like creamed spinach or make killer lambsquarter quesadillas.
This guest post is by Bill Bakaitis, founder of the Mid-Hudson Mycological Association, consultant to the New York and New England Poison Control networks, wild mushroom guru for the Culinary Institute of America (and, full disclosure, my husband). Although collecting is over for this year, morel hunting is not. A big part of success next spring is learning to find their haunts now, as Bill describes in:
A Successful Strategy for Finding Morels
by Bill Bakaitis
As seasons go, 2008 was a pretty good one for Morels. I investigated only a small fraction of the potential collecting sites near my home and was able to pick a peck or so at each visit.
A Peck of Morchella esculenta
Others had the same success. The best collector I know, Dennis Aita, wowed Coma members in May with his large flat of pristine fist to corncob sized esculenta collected only hours before the evening’s lecture.
As it happened, several digital images of collections circulated in emails and I soon received calls and questions from curious mushroomers. “Just how do you manage to find all of those Morels?” they wanted to know. “I have looked and looked and still come back empty handed.”
Think of Chet Baker in a mellow mood on a summer night, the music drifting in your direction against a background of insects chirping and the sometmes rumble of trucks on the highway and you’ll get a faint approximation of what it’s like to be in our Hudson Valley house when the trumpet lilies are blooming.
Their heavy, classic lily fragrance has a distinct undernote of spice, and while a bouquet’s worth of it indoors would be so intoxicating you’d have a hangover in the morning, having it waft in from the bed under the dining room window is just about perfect.
So much pleasure from so little work!
Close up, you can see why they’re called ‘Golden Splendor’. Good As Gold would be appropriate too; this cultivar is one of the most vigorous.
The peas are something I’ve taken for granted for a long time now, because classic Sugar Snaps never seem to fail. Good years and bad, those tall, late-bearing vines always come through with about 6 weeks of perfect snap peas: crisp, juicy and sweet. And twenty feet of double row pretty much guarantees enough. In good years, we give a lot away, and even in poor years like this one we still have plenty.
How much is plenty? I never measured before, but we just had an opportunity to check it out -
__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
We’re visiting the New York garden to weed, tie up the tomatoes, harvest the garlic … and get majorly appalled by the Japanese beetles. What a year! They’re everywhere, and they’re especially everywhere on the contorted hazel and hollyhocks and raspberries and of course roses but NOT on Jens Munk,
once again proving itself to be as trouble free as roses get.
__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
What’s to say? Leigh asked for my chocolate chip cookie recipe, so here it is: my personal no compromises not suitable for publication in general interest magazines favorite soft center or crisp or both
Extremely High End Chocolate Chip Cookies
How dry we are! It’s just the worst - our sliver of the Maine coast has had less than a half inch of rain in the last 5 weeks and we have only a shallow well, barely enough for dishes and showers. I’m watering the joint with my tears, and when friends complain they’ve been stuck dragging hoses around for eversolong, it’s hard for me to dredge up much sympathy.
Some crops are going to be all right, and there’s still plenty going on - Lois had no trouble finding something to paint the other day
but if you look a little closer
__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
Over the years, we’ve grown at least a dozen kinds of strawberries, mostly standard garden varieties (Fragaria x ananassa) like Sparkle and Tristar, and so-called “wild” strawberries, aka fraises de bois and alpine strawberries (F. vesca), like these Mignonettes being used as an edging in the lower garden.
Cultivated strawberries are easy to grow, almost always tasty and sometimes very tasty. But none of them - yet; I keep trying - are as good as genuinely wild strawberries (F. virginiana), the intensely flavorful, amazingly aromatic gift that grows freely in woodland edges all over the northeast and beyond.
is the one making its debut in today’s New York Times , according to David Leite, who is responsible for it. Well, maybe. Although I prefer my own ( which include roasted cacao nibs), there is much baking wisdom in Leite’s story, including the use of high quality couverture chocolate disks, which really ARE the consummate chocolate chips.
Roasted cacao nibs, couverture chocolates from El Rey (round) and Valrhona (oval). The dusty coating on the nibs is just a bit of cocoa butter that rose to the surface in storage.
__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
Kristi the demon camerawoman was just complaining about it yesterday, so I know I’m not alone when I say
closeups are easy.
and mugshots present few problems
while landscapes are dificult
And anything in the middle is just about impossible
Yet the urge to photograph persists, along with the urge to get back to gardening and not be endlessly messing around with the equipment.
Bad Behavior has blocked 534 access attempts in the last 7 days.
