Ooo-eee ooo-ah-ah, ting tang Walla-walla bing-bang

A few weeks back,* Luke told me that if he lived in the middle ages, he'd want to be the village baker. He likes the idea of waking up in the wee hours of the morning to bake big loaves in a stone oven. When he lived in Guatemala, there was a baker in one of the towns that was a good example of what he has in mind: a fat man with strong arms and a big laugh.

*On a side note: I have no concept of time. Anything that was longer than a week ago is "a few weeks back." It could've been two weeks, it could've been six months. I don't know.*

When he asked me what I would be, my first thought was of taking the job of midwife. But I should leave that to someone who actually likes birth, and not just the idea of liking it. The job I would really choose is the herbalist/medicine woman/witch doctor. I like learning about herbs and plants and mushrooms- edible things that can be foraged, medicinal properties, etc. It would be fun to have a job of it (and if I was the baker's wife we could combine the two and give medicinal breads).

For my friend Drew's birthday I got to play medicine woman, and made him some tinctures. It was fun to research which herbs I wanted to use, which medicinal properties they had, etc. I ended up making a St.John's Wort tincture for mood elevation; nettle tincture for colds and hay fever; and a sleep tincture using chamomile, spearmint, lavender greens, and lemon balm.

 

 

As I do any time I want something to have a cute label, I asked Luke to do it.

Also for his birthday I finished his Christmas present that I never gave him. It's a magic bag. It can hold his tinctures, stuff for reiki sessions, books on shamanism, whatever. The front of the gray linen bag is embroidered with wheels ("chakra" means "wheel") with the corresponding color and number of spokes for each chakra. The crown chakra is represented by a lavender lotus (just to make it more interesting and because I was not about to embroider 960 spokes). This was a fun project. Though I don't believe in chakras the same way Drew does, it was fun to learn about them and the ideology behind taking care of them. And it seems like something a witch doctor should make, right?

mushaboom

I got my garden all tilled up and spread with compost this weekend, and not a minute too soon:

Looks like it's really going to start being winter around here, and besides needing shoes that'll keep out the wet and cold, I'm ready to face my least favorite season.

While working outside, I found that a group of mushrooms that I'd seen growing on an old elm stump this spring are back again. I'd been told by a couple people from Mushrooms Society of Utah that they were probably Flammulina velutipes, or flaming velvet foot/flaming shank. Now that they've returned, I was able to take a spore print and double check with field guides to be sure.

And they are! So now I've got some really lovely winter mushrooms growing thirty feet from my back door, and I'm ready to experiment with them. Luke is too nervous to eat them (and even doesn't want me to), but I did my research and am confident, so I'll probably cook some up in a stir fry for one.

Tea season

With the weather cooling down, I've been drinking even more tea than usual. I bought plain green tea leaves at the asian market for just a few dollars, and have been supplementing with my mom's honey and things I've foraged and dried: rose petals (I'm excited for rose hips to be ready to be harvested!), chamomile, or lavender.

Besides the taste, I find I really like the ritual of making a cup of tea: Putting the kettle on, filling the infuser, steeping, and watching the honey melt as I stir it in. I think I'm going to start planning a tea garden for next year- bergamot, mint, lemon balm. Seems fun to have a variety of delicious drinkable things just outside my front door.

Lukey and I made nettle ravioli for dinner tonight. Delicious.
(rough pictures for the next bit- camera on the fritz)

Nettle

I talked my good mother into coming with me up Big Cottonwood Cayon to forage for stinging nettles. My mom's a good foraging companion because she knows more about plants than anyone I know (more than once I've sent her a crappy cell phone picture of a leaf or flower and she's been able to identify it faster than I could through the internet), so she teaches and quizzes me as we go along.

So to answer my mom's question of, "why on earth would we purposely pick stinging nettle?": it's soooo good for you- one of the most nutritious greens, in fact- more protein than most, lots of vitamin A and C, calcium, potassium, iron, etc. etc. And plus, it's kind of fun to learn how to live off the land, you know?

The reason the nettle stings is that the leaves and stems have little hairs on them that come off when you touch them, and inject you with formic acid (the stuff that makes an ant bite hurt) and histamines. I'll have to invest in some better gloves, because we quickly learned that the ones we were using were insufficient, and we got stung through them. When nettles are dried or cooked, the chemicals are neutralized, or something, and so they're safe to eat/touch (something Luke didn't believe. He wouldn't try the nettle til he saw me eat it with no throat/tongue swelling or death).

The plant is easy to find up in the canyon from spring to the end of summer. You wanna eat the young, not-woody ones, so earlier in the season is better, but the plants spread through rhizomes so you can find young ones even at the end of summer (you just have to pass up a lot for being too old). After bringing them home, I blanched them and froze them, and have been using it when I want to add something healthy to a bowl of pasta. It tastes like if spinach and swiss chard had a love child. Very good.

Elderflower syrup

My mom took my sisters and Luke and I up the canyon in search of elderflower. We should've gone a week or two earlier, but we were able to find enough. I've been googoo gaga about elderflower since I first tasted a fizzy elderflower drink from the British store, and wished that it wasn't seven dollars for a liter. So I decided to make my own elderflower syrup, which I'll mix with soda water for practically the same drink for pennies, rather than dollars. (I hear that IKEA makes an elderflower syrup like this, which I will see if I can find next time I'm there, since I don't think I'll have enough to last me until next elderflower season).

I think this an awesome picture of Luke. I like how he wouldn't miss out on the flower-picking action just because he was smoking.

My sisters

The process is a bit time consuming, because you have to get all those tiny little flowers off the stems and into a bowl (the bark and leaves of elderflower plants are mildly poisonous), but it was a good thing to do while watching a movie.

I used about twenty heads of flowers. I put the flowers in a bowl with the juice and zest of two lemons. Then I dissolved four cups sugar in four cups water over medium heat, and poured the simple syrup over the flowers.

The mixture sat steeping on top of the fridge for five days with a towel over it, and then I strained and put it in the fridge.So that's it! Mix two ounces of syrup with two cups of sparkling water, and you have a refreshing, flowery, sweet-but-not-too-sweet elderflower soda!

When I started getting into new crafts/hobbies a couple years ago, I promised friends and husband alike that I wouldn't become the kind of girl who made sachets to stink up the house, car, or my underwear drawer. So far, I've kept my promise. Stinking up the house has been the unintended effect, though, of tonight's project: drying lavender.


My mom harvested me a big bucketful, and tonight I opened the back door to let in some fresh air, and turned on some favorites, like this one:

Meiko - how lucky we are Found at abmp3 search engine

Then I de-leafed, tied, and hung up the lavender to dry. The whole house (granted, we've got three rooms) smells lovely, and I think it'll be a couple days before I get the smell off my fingers. I'm looking forward to exploring lavender's culinary uses- I see a lavendery summer in my future.

Sundays at home

Luke and I spend one Sunday a month at each of our parents' houses. The other two Sundays are for us to relax at home and spend time together. We decided that we want to start making big breakfasts together on the Sundays at home, a 'tradition' we'd like to continue when we have kids, too. This week, the first week, we made tomato/spinach/bell pepper omelettes, toast, and the strawberry basil lemonade.

Isn't our new table cute? I've spent almost a month looking at consignment shops and antique stores, and finally settled on this blue formica one, which fits perfectly with the 50s tablecloth-turned-curtains in our kitchen.

We took our coffee out to the porch, and then we spent the afternoon up the canyon hiking and mushroom hunting (it's still a little too early, I think, but we found a couple kinds).

I think this summer, Sundays are going to be my new hobby day. And this was a good one.

Crystalizing flowers

I think it's cool that when I tell Luke that I've been learning about edible flowers, and now I want to use little paintbrushes to paint individual flower petals with egg whites and then sprinkle them with sugar, not only does he not think I'm an idiot, but he wants to do it with me. We candied/crystalized about a hundred little flowers, both cherry blossoms and forsythia. After the painting/sugaring, the flowers have to dry for at least twenty-four hours.


A lot got ruined trying to take them off the pan the next day (next time we'll use wax paper), but we still had enough to make spring cupcakes for some friends. Paired with cupcakes and frosting, you couldn't really taste the light floral flavor, and they just tasted like sprinkles (for a full tutorial on crystalizing flowers, go here).



I think it'll take a few more times before we really master it, but I'm excited to try crystalizing other flowers (like johhny jump-ups!), and just exploring edible flowers in general. Tulips supposedly taste kind of like cucumbers or fresh peas, marigolds like saffron, bachelor's buttons like clove, etc. etc. There's a lot to learn.

Daffodils

This week I stole these:

And embroidered these:

Forsythia

My mom and I used to drive around our local neighborhoods at the beginning of spring, looking for forsythia. She would get upset when people would trim the bushes down into neat little hedges because, "They're supposed to be free and wild!" This year, my husband and I went out walking with our clippers for some late-night forsythia-stealing. One branch from the neighbors across the street, two from down the street, and pretty soon we had a nice bouquet to put in our bedroom.
This week I embroidered this little forsythia bush on white cotton knit (which was a nice material to work with). I haven't decided what to use it for yet, probably a little clutch wallet or pencil case.