Last Morel Post This Year... I Think

With some of our last bucket of morel mushrooms, my wife made the mushroom sauce that you see above, seared some chicken which she sank into the sauce, added some more stuff and turned it into what you see below. We ate it over some linguine and I must say, it was delicious. The last of our mushrooms I made into a pizza and scarfed down last night so fast that I forgot to take a picture. So I'm fairly certain these will be the last morel mushroom pictures to tease you with until next year.

Grandmas On the Internet

I remember the first time I was exposed to the beginnings of the internet. I was in a computer lab in college working on some project and a fellow student told me to come over and look at something. He showed me how he could go to this address and follow directories down to this particular folder belonging to someone and it was full of pictures... dirty pictures, if you know what I mean. So I understand when others have said that the first two areas to utilize a new form of media is porn and religion.

Back then, when you found a site that you wanted to return too, you wrote down the address as a series of numbers and dots on a piece of paper. Eventually those address got emailed around to a group of friends websites became famous by word of mouth. Soon though a browser hit the scene and made things much easier to find. I remember Netscape as the browser I was first introduced too.

Decades have gone by and I am amazed often at how much things have changed. My daughter is growing up in a world that I never knew at her age and will never be able to imagine a world without the internet. But the world changes and so we must... that is unless we have a finite time left in the world and choose just to ride things out the way they are... or were.

That brings me to the reason for this post. My grandparents are getting along in years and a handful of years ago, made it into the cellphone age. They still turn the thing off when home in Florida and only turn it on occasionally if they need to make a call.  Because of this, I assumed that they would just avoid the whole computer and internet thing altogether. They probably would have if not for another lady in their retirement village who convinced my grandmother to give it a try. My grandmother bought a laptop and someone else was able to connect her up to the internet.

Last Christmas during our visit in Florida, we spent time showing her the ropes of connecting to the internet, what the internet was and how to email people. Once we all got back home, several of us in the family sent her an email to give her some practice. In the response I got back, the entire body of the email was typed in the subject line.

A few weeks later, my grandmother tried to forward me something via email but whatever it was never came through. I emailed her back with general directions of how to forward emails to other people and two tries later, she succeeded. Her first forwarded email to me was one of those spam emails telling some touching story and warning people to forward it on to ten people less the chain be broken. It kind of struck me humorous. Several months have passed and other than the occasional picture I email to her of her great granddaughters, life has continued. Then last week I received the first email from her since the chain breaking spam one. This time is was one of those emails full of pictures on some cute subject like mothers feeding their young of various species. I got to give it to my grandma, at least she is still trying.

This and That

After last week's posts about blues in dealing with service providers and one about dead trees, I thought I would let you know that not all service providers in my life are duds. I did recently hire an electrician to diagnose a problem with two outlets that I couldn't quite figure out. They had no power to them nor could I figure out how they ever had power to them yet I figured that nobody would build a house with outlets that didn't work. As it turned out, a previous occupant had cut the wire to them up in the attic and used it to power some additional light switches added after the fact. The remnants of the wire going to the outlets they conveniently poked down into the stud cavity and left. The electrician was able to route a new power wire through the stud cavity and get it working again. Most surprisingly to me after my recent experiences, he called me ten minutes before he had told me he would be there to say that he was running fifteen minutes late and wondered if I was okay with that. So refreshing.

Baby Abbey is growing so fast. Any day now she is going to roll over completely and thus will be the start of the hard-to-keep-corralled phase. Already she is showing a much different personality than her older sister Little Abbey. Baby Abbey seems to pay lots more attention to her surroundings and her head is always bobbing this way and that checking things out. She seems a little bit more easy going than her sister about things too. Although they look like two peas in a pod when comparing pictures of the same age, I'm positive that their personalities are going to be totally different.

My mother-in-law is in the process of interviewing for her permanent greencard so that she can come and go as she pleases here in the United States. This means that she will be spending lots more time living in the same house. So I keep beating down the feelings of looking forward to this thinking that it will allow me to get a lot more things done that I want to get done while she looks after a mobile Baby Abbey. I keep beating them down because hey, who wants to live with their mother-in-law for more than an afternoon at best! I think that perhaps long term cohabitation might be slightly better once I get her room finished in the basement. That way I can look forward to at least eight hours of mother-in-law-free time plus more if I count the periods of time I will most definitely spend out in the garage and outside during the day.

Morel Madness Has Ended

Note: Dozens of morels WERE harmed (and consumed) in the making of this blog post.

That seasonal madness that hits this part of the world in spring has finally ended. I came staggering from the woods with bags full of mushrooms and headed home to pick off stray ticks and to dream of feasts to come. In all, we had seven and a half gallons of cleaned mushrooms, three and a half have already been consumed as of this writing and perhaps maybe five will be by the time this posts. It was a good year for morel mushrooms.

We went down to the family farm on Mother's Day to celebrate the day by going mushrooming. To me, it seems like the perfect way to tell mom you love her. Although my daughter 'found' some mushrooms last year if we guided her in the right area and did the old hot/cold routine, this year she actually found some on her own. I'm so proud of her. Her patience for tramping for hours in the woods is not quite what it needs to be but she will get there.

It is hard to teach the art of finding morels. I can teach how to find a mushroom machine which is a recently dead elm tree with dozens of mushrooms growing underneath. One only must know what an elm tree looks like and see that it died last year sometime. Teaching to find morels outside of the reaches of a dying elm however is a much harder art to teach. Sometimes I've found them under living silver maple trees but most often times not. Sometimes I've found them in a grove of young boxelder trees but most times not. Many of the mushrooms I find are just there, out in the open in a place that only experience can tell you they are there. I sense the mushrooms many times before I ever see one. I just know that I'm in the right area, the ground cover looks perfect, the amount of sunlight reaching down through the leaves is perfect, the slope of the ground is perfect. It just feels right so I will stop, slowly scan the ground and more often than not, will find wild morels popping out of the ground.

They are not easy to see and blend into the ground cover which is why I miss many of them. Sometimes I find them recovering the ground on the way back to where I came from, other times my wife will sneak behind me and find them but most of the time, they probably remain behind, dry up and spread their goodness for next year. At least I hope they do.

Back home, we soak them in old ice cream buckets and salty water to kill any bugs though this year's crop has been bug free. Then we rinse them and consume them. My favorite way is to lightly bread them with a little flour and Parmesan cheese and fry them. But I will often saute them in a little butter and serve them over burgers, steaks or just about any meat for that extra BAM. Once when we found mushrooms as far as the eye could see in a young boxelder grove, we dehydrated pounds of extras and used them in recipes for the next couple years. However, I've never since been able to find that many and thus we consume what we pick. A couple days ago, I had a mushroom sandwich with a bit of dijon mustard with some leftovers not eaten from the fry the night before. Life is good. Since we have quite a few this year, probably more than we can eat but not enough to bother with dehydrating, I've been contemplating making a wild morel mushroom soup of some sort.

Soon they will be gone and the last of those spores will be consumed by my body and life will return to normal again. It is hard to believe that I've been hunting and eating those things for over three decades now, soon to be four decades. I can't imagine life without morels. I'm certain it wouldn't be worth living in such a world!

(Graphic) Wild Morels In Captivity

This was last weekend's haul.

For some reason, I made the mistake of encouraging my oldest daughter to try one of the fried morels during supper. She loved it. From that point on it was a free for all to see who could consume their share of fried morels the fastest!

The Dead Oak Blues

I suspected last fall when I cut down 16 dead trees and then hired four more next to the house cut down in early winter, that I hadn't seen the last of them. After several extremely wet years followed by one of the driest in history, the stress put on the trees was just more than they've seen in decades. Unfortunately, it seems as if the hardest trees hit were the black cherry and red/black oak trees. Of the 20 I have had removed, I think 14 were black cherry, 5 oak and one hackberry. Technically the hackberry was a living tree but it was an extremely poor specimen that was leaning way over my garage.

I had three more large oak trees that were losing bark all winter long. All three had leaves on them last fall and all three had buds on them this spring but I suspected that they were all three dead. Two of them were in locations that even I could fall them without endangering anything but one was in a tight spot. It was near a city light pole and the street out front and perhaps of worst of all, was leaning heavily in that direction. I wasn't comfortable with my skills for falling it without landing it across the street or taking out the light pole or both.

A couple weeks ago, my younger brother was up for a visit and as it happens, he is an expert when it comes to falling trees having taken lots of classes and then used those skills for decades with the forest service. I decided to ask his opinion on the oak in the tight spot and he volunteered to help me fall it down the very next day. The next afternoon, he and my father came up and within about 15 minutes, he had fallen it exactly where we wanted away from streets and light poles. It took us another 2 hours with two chainsaws running to cut and stack everything up.

What surprised me was that though the oak tree had buds, it had died after that because all the branch ends were dead and brittle. Based upon that knowledge, I was fairly certain that the other two oaks were also dead but we didn't have time to cut them down so I decided to just wait for everything to leaf out and make sure. Two weeks later, all the oaks have now begun to leaf out except for those two suspect trees. Now I have two more to cut down and process. If I play my cards right, I may be able to time things so that I'm free to do so this fall when my brother is back up for another visit.

Fortunately I still have quite a few living trees scattered around the property and now that things are getting thinned out, the remaining trees should get much stronger since they don't have to compete so much. Next spring, I hope to do some repopulation measures but scattering out some red bud and service berry trees along the perimeter to get some color into our spring.