Powell Butte

I decided to go to Powell Butte today, while we're having this crazy run of sunny weather. I haven't been in at least 5 years, so it's been awhile. Since we're still in the height of mushroom season, I figured it might be a good place to go looking. These mushroom walks have been a really fun thing to do with Cedar, he's so into it, and as good at spotting mushrooms as he is at finding agates.

Powell Butte is a small mountain, probably part of the volcanic/dormant cluster that we have here in Portland. As far as mushrooms go, it's a Douglass fir forest with an understory of vine maples, big leaf maples, and lots of ferns, so that means there's lots of mushrooms. In the summer it's also full of red huckleberries (Vaccinium parvifolium).

So we walked around for about an hour and a half and saw lots of mushrooms. Lots of delicate airy marsmius, tons of little mycenas and collybias, amanitas, russulas, various cup-type and polyphores, and on the logs in the parking lot, turkey tails, and some dramatic looking sulfur tuft.

On the way out, there was also a nice bonus of ripe huckleberries on the way out! Yum!

boletus

One of the distinct advantages of living on the Oregon coast is the plethora of wild edibles. Throughout the year, it's a virtual buffet of foraging happiness--seafood, of course, seaweed and kelp, berries of all sorts (especially huckleberries), and at this time of year, mushrooms. You don't really have to look hard for any of these lovelies, they're everywhere.

When it comes to fungi, we're blessed with an abundance. In addition to all the beautiful, but deadly creatures, and some interesting "recreational" types, we have an ungodly quantity of choice edible mushrooms in this oh-so-perfect climate of constant moisture (rain, mist, fog) combined with good habitat (the right combination of conifers), and consistently mild temperatures, regulated by the Pacific Ocean. Mushroom season is long enough to procrastinate a few weeks without worrying about missing it entirely.

So when I think of it, I go off rambling in the woods, and try to remember to bring something to carry them home in. But you don't have to go far off the beaten path here. You can find chantrelles in the darndest places, and boletus edulis can be found over by the neighbor's driveway or pretty much anywhere where there's a stand of pines (which is almost everywhere). Sometimes the slugs get to them first, but I've been able to find quite a few nice ones, and have been enjoying them in a variety of culinary adventures. (And no, I haven't killed anyone yet).

This is one of the many reasons why I think I'm very likely to get myself "stuck" out here for quite awhile...or at least as long as I can persuade the federal government to keep me on the payroll. When you can pick fresh chantrelles in the woods, why would you ever want to leave?

Portland Fermentation Festival

I definitely couldn't miss Portland’s first-ever Fermentation Festival (and a chance to say hello to Sandor Katz), so I made the trek down to the Pearl District for the Fermentation Festival from 6 - 8 pm at Ecotrust.

Fortunately it was easy to get there by bus. I just took the #9 and walked a couple of blocks around the backside of the downtown post office. The bad news, is said bus had no A/C and it was in the high 90's, so the trip was unbelievably hot and very uncomfortable.

Once I got there, I realized, Holy Cow, there's a lot of people here! You really couldn't walk through the conference room or anything. It's a wonder the fire marshall didn't show up, but I ran into Christi right away and said hello. It was a bit intense with all the people, so I didn't really do any sampling until the crowd thinned out a bit. Instead I walked down to the farmer's market right around the corner and meandered around there until some time went by, then tried again. While I was at it, I had a paleta. An hour later, it was slightly better inside.

Sandy was answering questions about fermenting (and its common mishaps), and I wandered around the room sampling stuff. Sandy's creative concoction featured okra and pears, among other things. Someone brought potato cheese, which was a huge hit. There were lots of samples of kimchi and kombucha, some lacto-fermented sodas, some coconut water kefir (agua de coco), lots of homemade wine and ale and cider, and other things I've probably forgotten about. A lot of people brought samples, and were there sharing samples of homemade fermented foods such as pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, kefir, and home brews. Someone even brought natto! I would love to learn how to make some of the things I've never gotten around to making before...I actually have recipes for most of these things courtesy of Wild Fermentation, but I still would need to obtain starters for things like kefir and kombucha.

I've been doing the home fermentation thing for awhile now. I don't know what initially got me into it--it could have been living in Japan and being exposed to things like miso and tsukemono (Japanese pickles), or simply eating my grandmother's homemade foods. I'm sure watching my dad brew beer in the kitchen was a source of inspiration too...

Whatever it was, I've taught a number of people how to make sauerkraut and kimchi, and when I lived at Declerye, we used to make pickles and kimchi and various wines all the time, since we had lots of produce from the garden in the summer. Since I no longer have such an enthusiastic audience, I don't do it quite as often these days, but I still make sauerkraut, brine pickles, and wine fairly often.

Home fermentation is pretty easy to do most of the time. It's a very low-tech process, after all, it comes from the days before refrigeration and pasteurization. You just need suitable containers, a ready supply of produce, and a few other relatively easy-to-find items (such as Kosher salt). Things that can go wrong are neglect (not paying close attention to a project), temperatures that are too high (things sometimes ferment too rapidly in warm weather), or too much oxygen (most things ferment more successfully when they aren't exposed to the air). Once you get used to the idea that it's totally normal to see some of the culture or bacteria growth on the surface of your pickles (just rinse if off if it bothers you), it's less problematic. You quickly learn what's normal (for example white stuff floating on the surface of kraut is normal), and what isn't.

pears!

You know summer's almost over when you start seeing those greenish-golden Bartlett Pears falling on sidewalks around town (much like the month of July is a shower of plums, an event I use to mark the midsummer point). To me, windfall pears--and apples--signal the hastening of fall's inevitable arrival, and a time when I need to start thinking about getting into a back-to-school frame of mind (and practicing the lost art of getting up early).

Walking around the neighborhood with the dog, I've noticed the neighbor's Bartlett Pears are landing in convenient locations that I can easily reach, so I've been helping myself. Over on Holgate Ave. on the north side of the street between 39th and 52nd, there's a whole stretch of pear trees, one right after another, that an enterprising pear-loving soul could potentially profit from. North Portland's also a fairly good spot to find large pear trees, as I recall...

Soon, though, it'll be time for apples and figs, then fall will be upon us in earnest. Don't know if I'm ready for it right now, but just like fruit flies...it's inevitable.

It's plum season!

Plums are one of my favorite fruits, and I eagerly look forward to their arrival every year. Related to cherries and peaches, around here, plums arrive after cherries are over, just before peaches are really going strong. This usually happens sometime in late July-August, depending on the variety. Here, that tends to overlap with blackberry season, more or less.

There are tons of species of plums that grow very happily in Oregon, and luckily lots of people plant them ornamentally as street/yard trees, so there's tons of free plums for the asking. On a casual walk around town, you can easily find European plums, Japanese plums, and Damson-type plums growing in yards, alleys, and along streets.

A neighborhood walking inventory reveals that we have several of the small, sour Japanese plums; a few Greengage plum trees with greenish, custardy tasting plums; a guy down the street has a "yellow egg" plum (very tasty), several Italian Prune plums (also decent fresh), and a Santa Rosa (the red kind you see at the store).

Fortunately we have a good climate for plums here, so there's few problems or issues with disease and splitting due to too much rain. During most years, you can find plenty. We happen to live in one of the states where commercial plums are produced, so numerous varieties are available. If you get out into the wild a bit, you can even find the wild native varieties, some of which are edible.

Finding a plum tree for your free picking pleasure is pretty easy. In many cities they are planted as street trees and are very common. Often, you can find them in parking lots, if nothing else. In the spring, the bloom profusely like cherries, only a bit earlier. Shape-wise, many of the Japanese plums resemble cherries, but they often have purplish leaves, making them easy to identify. European plums are a bit trickier because they're larger and more erect than Japanese plums, but you can often identify them by their blooms, which come much later than Japanese types. Luckily, the plums themselves are very easy to spot on European plums, unlike Japanese varieties that hide inconspicuously under the camouflage of the leaves.

Japanese plums ripen the earliest, and the European prune & canning varieities ripen later in autumn (after the school year is underway). Because Japanese plums set a lot of fruit, they usually drop tons of it on the ground, which makes it easy to find a tree. One thing you may notice about them is they don't fruit consistently every year. Usually one year is a "heavy" year (where the tree produces tons of plums), and the next a "light" (or non-fruiting year, where few to no plums are produced). Be aware that there are some trees are strictly ornamental (and will never fruit), but most varieties, even those labeled as "ornamental" will produce some fruit, some years, during the course of their lives (thus annoying people who want "landscape" trees but don't really want any fruit). Luckily for the rest of us, this handily ensures there's plenty of unwanted fruit to be had. This also means that if you've spotted a likely tree, and it appears to be a dud, you should try again next year.

Plums are some of the most tolerant of trees, so they can be grown almost anywhere, hence their popularity in the landscape and as a street tree. We're lucky enough to be far enough north to grow both European plums and Japanese plums, so in Oregon, you often will be able to find a source for both types. You can tell that the fruit is ready to pick when it is fairly dark in color (for purple varieties) and is no longer hard as a rock. Ripe plums have a bit of soft squeeze (or give) to the flesh, so you can test them by squeezing them lightly. If you pick them before they're ripe, they're usually very sour, but some people (especially Guatemalans) seem to prefer them this way. Regardless of whether you prefer sweet or sour, they're usually easy to pick. Most plum trees aren't very tall. The branches aren't as fragile as cherries, so you can usually pull them downward without them snapping on you. Sometimes, you can simply pick them up off the ground (if they haven't split on the way down).

Most plums are best eaten fresh. If you pick them yourself, they won't be rock hard (like the ones you would buy in the store), and are usually very juicy and sweet. I often just walk around the neighborhood and graze on them, a few at a time. European plums have wide variety of culinary uses. I am perfectly happy eating them fresh, but you can also dry them (prunes), or cook them (canned plums, jelly, or plum compote is pretty good). For beverage use, you could make plum brandy or umeshu.

Happy picking!

It's applesauce time!

Once again, it's that time of year, time to make gallons of applesauce. When August's dry heat grates on my nerves, fruit flies seem to get a bit too prolific, and the winds are kicking up dust, there's at least one thing to look forward to-APPLES!

I get very excited about September. For one, it's back to school (before the novelty wears off). For another, it's the season of windfall apples. From August-October, the alleys, curbsides, sidewalks, and streets of Portland are full of apples that have fallen off the tree. Generally speaking, it seems that nobody in this day and age has any idea what to do with the all those apple trees growing in their yards. Sadly instead of being used, they typically fall down, hit the pavement, rot, and collect an admiring horde of buzzing bees and boisterous yellow jackets. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Lucky for me, I guess, that there's so many free apples for the taking. One of the cruelest things that's afflicted me since childhood is the absolute inability to eat anything except homemade applesauce. The blame lies entirely with my grandmother, whose homemade applesauce is the standard by which I judge everything. I'm sure there was nothing terribly special about her recipe or technique. The only thing I recall her doing is chopping up the apples she picked and cooking them down until they were absolute mush (and adding sugar if perhaps the end result was lacking in sweetness). To my palate, it was absolutely divine.

For some reason though, apple sauce that comes in jars at the store tastes absolutely nothing like this. For one it's absolutely bland--it doesn't seem to have any taste at all. If can you get past the total lack of flavor, there's still the texture. It's all wrong...to me, commercially prepared applesauce has a texture that's just weird...kind of mealy and strange, not smooth and creamy like the homemade stuff. Needless to say, I NEVER EVER buy applesauce at the store. If I'm in situations where I have to eat it, I pour tons of cinnamon and sugar on it to trick myself into thinking it's not horrible.

Fortunately I did learn how to make it from watching her. Making applesauce is extremely simple (small children could easily help do this), although a bit labor intensive. I deal with that by making it one of my seasonal chores that I plan on doing once a year. The only thing you need to make applesauce is a supply of apples, some large pots, and something to store all the applesauce in.

The first step is to acquire some apples. A lot of apples. Needless to say, if you don't have to pay for them, that would be best. If you have your own tree, this is the answer to what to do with all those apples that you didn't know what to do with. Otherwise, be on the lookout for neighbors whose trees are accumulating tons of fallen apples at the base, old apple trees on vacant lots or abandoned farmsteads. Sometimes you'll find them in the darndest places due to the nature of urban sprawl and rampant development...I know of a rather lovely apple tree that's growing in a corporate office park. If for some reason you live somewhere where there's literally no appletrees around (like NYC) your next best option is a trip to the countryside where there's U-Pick apple orchards. Only as a last resort would I recommend actually purchasing them retail at a store. To make applesauce you need a really large quantity of apples (think of full grocery bags full of apples), so this is not something you want to buy if you're paying more than 79 cents a pound. If you're totally screwed and have nothing available but expensive store apples, you might as well do something more manageable like bake a pie...those are good too.

The next thing I should mention about free apples is they're usually free for a reason--don't expect them to look like those waxed beauty contestants in the produce sections at the grocery store (wax is what makes them look shiny, real apples are rarely "shiny"). For one, free apples are completely "organic" in the sense that they came off a tree that's never been sprayed with the dozens of nifty chemicals that commercial orchards use to deter the hungry hordes of insects and pests that like to afflict apples. So for those of you who are trying to eat mostly organic foods, congratulations, this is about as organic as it could possibly get. What this means though, is that there's probably some worm holes, bad spots, deformities, and other cosmetic afflictions. Fortunately appearances aren't everything when it comes to cooking with apples.

When it comes to applesauce, beauty isn't what you're looking for in apples. Just close your eyes to all those cosmetic blemishes, and pick up anything you find that's structurally intact, doesn't have huge soft spots, isn't blatantly rotten, and isn't crawling with ants and other insects. A few holes are fine. A small brown spot or two won't hurt you. You'll be peeling and cutting the bad spots out anyway, so as long as it's nothing major, you can ignore it.

As far as quantities go, you'll need as many apples as you can acquire. Think brown paper bag! Apples cook down to almost nothing, so you will be able to cram tons of chopped apples into a pot, only to discover that the pot's half empty when you open it and they're fully cooked. Fill up a bucket full! It make take several days to acquire enough if you're scrounging around an neighborhood, or you may happen upon one very heavily laden tree and it will meet all your needs. One thing I don't recommend is storing found apples indoors if you can help it because they will create a fruit fly problem quickly.

As far as varieties go, it really doesn't matter which ones you use. My usual strategy is to acquire as many different varieties as possible--some sweet, some tart. If you use a combination of red, yellow, and green, you should have a complex array of flavors to work with. Reds are usually sweet but bland. Yellow apples are often ideal for applesauce. Green apples of course are very tart. Any one of these alone might be too bland or tart, but combined with another, often works nicely.

Once you have your pile of apples, you will need to chop them up into chunks. I own an apple peeler (The Apple Peeler, Corer and Slicer), so all I do is peel and core, then cut out anything that remains that I don't necessarily want in my apple sauce. (If you decide to get serious about cooking with apples, this is a good thing to have.)

If you're doing it with a knife, get ready for some chopping. Invite some friends over to make it all go a bit faster. You don't necessarily have to peel the apples, in fact I actually like a bit of peel in my apple sauce. You do need to core them to ensure there aren't any apple seeds in the final product, however.

The apples will turn brown once they're cut up and exposed to the air. If this bothers you, then you'll need to sprinkle them with some lemon juice to inhibit the oxidation. If you don't have lemon juice, immersing them in water kinda helps too, but everything floating on top will still turn brown. I for one don't care if they turn brown-it doesn't affect the flavor any, and I kinda like the apple butter look.

Once you fill up your pot with apple chunks, add a few cups of water, just enough to coat the bottom to keep the apples from scorching. This also facilitates the breaking down process by creating steam. It doesn't take much water because apples are already mostly water and sugar. In fact too much water can be bad, you'd end up with apple soup instead of apple sauce. If you let them cook for about half an hour, you usually can start mashing them down a bit at a time. If you have a slow cooker like me, you can simply chuck them in there, add a little bit of water to prevent sticking, and completely ignore them for 24 hours. (If you want to cook them down even further into something more like apple butter, add some sugar, and cook on low heat for a couple of days).

Once your apples are cooked down and mushy, you can decide what kind of texture you want. If you like your applesauce on the chunky side, try mashing with a potato masher. If you like it smooth (like babyfood), run it through a food processer or a blender. If you need to adjust the sweetness, now's a good time. You can use sugar or honey or any other sweetener that's not too strongly flavored. (Note, if the applesauce is going to be eaten by any infants, don't use honey.) If for some reason you used really bland apples and it tastes a bit bland, you can perk it up a bit with a little bit of lemon juice and some cinnamon.

If you want to can it, simply ladle it all into jars (quart size or smaller seems to work best) and process as usual in a boiling water bath. If you're freezing it, you can use freezer containers or freezer bags. Apple sauce is pretty good as is, but it also makes a great ice cream topping, apple pie filling (way better for you than that sugar stuff), pancake batter ingredient, or oatmeal topping.

bag fulla hazelnuts

I had no intention of picking hazelnuts (Corylus avellana) this morning as I did not remember that there were any along the route to the site where I picked the black currants, but lo and behold, there were a few growing there.

Hazelnuts are one of the blessings of living in this part of Oregon. Aside from walnuts, they are the most successful nut tree you can hope to grow here (although lately I've been seeing a resurgence of interest in growing chestnuts and chinkapins nuts). Typically, you see hazelnuts, (tons of them!) growing on farms down by Salem and around the Willamette Valley, but there's nothing to stop you from growing them in other places. They are an attractive small deciduous tree, (most are the size of large shrubs) and often can be found growing together in small thickets. When they aren't full of nuts, they can be identified by their ovate leaves, which remind me a bit of Witch Hazel (Hamamelis) (which also produces edible seeds). Like many other well-adapted plants, they do well in the poor, dry soils that make up many parts of this state, can take full sun or part shade, do well in places that can't be irrigated (dry sites), can be used as a barrier plant, and can be used as landscaping features in naturalistic areas like trails and parks.

I began to notice that it was that time of year again. The blue jays were absolutely mobbing the hazelnut trees out by Powell Butte, so I decided if I was going to pick some I better get about it. If the jays don't get them first, the squirrels surely will later.

Like most nuts, when still on the tree, they look absolutely nothing like those nuts they're hustling in the store. On the tree, they're usually hiding under the leaves, near the ends of branches, covered by a rather distinctive looking husk, that only become noticeable towards the end of summer when they begin falling out of the tree onto the ground. Be cautious when picking them, the outer husk and leaves have little irritating hairs (especially the husk). You can usually pry them off the branches bare-handed but I do not recommend removing them from their husks without gloves...I've learned this the hard way.

A tree has grow for a good bit before it will start producing any quantity of nuts, but if you find one or two good-sized mature trees (10 ft and over), you can usually easily find enough nuts to gather for the winter, while respectfully leaving some for the wildlife to enjoy as well.

stalking Ribes nigrum

After speeding past them on my bike the other day, I decided to go back and fill up on some black currants.

In Portland, at least, currants are easy to find. Currants are frequently used as landscaping plants in Oregon as they are a mid-size slow growing shrub that is highly tolerant of less-than-perfect situations and are perfectly fine with no additional watering in the summer. It is my opinion that in this bioregion, they would make a good home/garden plant to use as a shrub bordering a sidewalk or street as they are not a needy plant. Other worthy features besides their berries are their attractive lobed palmate leaves, the racemes of pinkish flowers in the spring, and don't tend to be messy. Trimet has a good stand of them planted at 158th & Merlo by the park and ride, and you'll often see them growing on the edge of the woods here.

Ripening in late July through August and even into September, they can often be found in rather accessible public spaces and are very easy to identify which makes them relatively safe to pick for beginning foragers.

Aside from making possibly the best wine ever, they are very high in vitamin C. On a rather intriguing note: "In addition to the high levels of vitamin C, studies have also shown concentrated blackcurrant to be an effective Monoamine oxidase inhibitor" (Bormann, et al. 1991.) For more medicinal info on Ribes nigrum, go here.

So I was quite pleased to have a cool cloudy morning free to ride my bike over to a good spot where I could pick them to my heart's content. A process that requires much in the way of patience, I filled up a quart container with plump black berries before going to hang out in the park.

In the next part of my tale, I'll be talking about hazelnuts...

get together

Today i combined a good long bike ride with a gathering with a couple of friends. We hung and talked over some strategies for combining sustainability with teaching. Later we walked around the neighborhood, and went to the nearby park.

Unfortunately I got a really painful wasp sting on my foot while I was there. Desperate to stop the stinging so I could keep walking, I tried rubbing some of the copious jewelweed on it. Although I wasn't expecting it to do much (can't hurt, might help), it seemed to help and after only a couple of minutes I felt a whole lot better. (Now there are skeptics that say that jewelweed doesn't really help, but whether it was the plant or a placebo effect, I'll readily admit I sure felt a whole lot better and was able to ride my bike home (several miles)).

Right down the street, there was a wonderful plum tree, so the three of us got giddy as children and raided it. I think we picked about three quarts of plums and they were delicious.