FOOD ON THE FOOD

Mushroom Madness

So, while all of this medical shit was going down, there were mushrooms.  There was the first flush of oyster mushrooms back in May, as you might recall.  Then, there was a second flush.  And then a third.  But, as always, things didn’t quite go according to plan.

The plan, of course, was to eat the mushrooms.  But when the second flush appeared, as discovered by the 3YO, who seems to be developing a greenish- brown tinge to his thumbs, we were in the middle of making our getaway to the Cape for Memorial Day weekend and mushrooms were the furthest thing from our minds.  Still, I was delighted to note that there were four times as many mushrooms as before. 

A long weekend, however, was too long.  Upon our return, all of these mushrooms had curled up into sad little husks.  Damnit!  I went off and sulked.  The mushroom instructions mentioned nothing of a third flush, so I reluctantly moved on to other distractions.  A few days later, I noticed that these disgusting little wormy things were crawling all over the mushroom remains.  Whatever.  I figured they’d compost themselves and we’d try again next year.

Then came June and the rain.  And the rain and the rain and the rain.  The sun may have come out once in three weeks and, on that day, the 3YO checked on what he was now referring to as “his” mushrooms since he was doing all the work.  Look what he found among the shriveled remains of the last crop:

Whoa!  “His” mushrooms were HUGE, and instead of presenting as little individual umbrellas, as mine had, they were stacked and layered, seemingly clinging to the side of the bucket for dear life as the floods subsided.  Maybe two or three pounds worth, they were exactly what oyster mushrooms should look like (except for maybe the ass-shaped one). 

Wow, I thought to myself, this is my kind of crop!  The more you ignore it, the better the yields.  My mouth was watering.  I conjured up a mushroom risotto in my mind, something with brandy, beef stock, and thyme.  It would be the last meal I would prepare before my surgery, and it would be spectacular.

I could hardly wait to harvest them.  I got a paring knife and a paper bag at the ready and cut the top one off at its stem.  Right away, something didn’t look right.  Instead of the smooth, ivory texture I associate with mushrooms, the stem where I had cut it looked spongy inside, like bread.  I waved away a small cloud of bugs in annoyance.  And then some more bugs.  God, what’s with all the little flies, I thought?  Slowly, I turned the palm-sized mushroom cap over in my hand and saw it.  Every single one of the ribs housed at least one adult fly and large cluster of eggs.  On closer inspection, tiny mushroom-colored larvae were crawling out of every orifice.  What I held in my hand, I realized, wasn’t actually a mushroom at all but a mushroom-shaped conglomeration of squirming, miniature maggot-like worms.  I flung it to the ground.  It crawled away.  I passed out.

That picture doesn’t even do it justice.  In my semi-conscious state, I dreamt I got Monsanto corporate headquarters on the line: “Hello, Monsanto?  I take back what I said.  I need a case of Roundup, stat.”

At some point, Husband came around with the watering can to revive me.  Then, I faced the bucket once again, hand clamped over my mouth to contain the vomit.  I harvested the rest, one by one, to see if anything could be salvaged.  Not a single thing.  Total infestation.

God, this kind of thing can break your heart.  I wonder how farmers deal with the emotional effects of crop loss on a large scale?

New High Fashion Log For Girls

I was never much for dolls growing up.  The only doll I remember having was when I was maybe 3.  It was an ethnically ambiguous Afro-Inuit doll with dreadlocks named Mukluk.  My maternal instinct was…how do I put this delicately: underdeveloped.  Mukluk’s disappearance still remains a mystery to me.  There were no other dolls after her aside from a short-lived and unexplained Barbie fetish in my tween years.  Maybe there were some paper dolls at some point.  I had this bucket of small wooden blocks that I’d build houses and stuff with, and sometimes I’d draw a person onto a block with magic marker.  Does that count? 

Husband would say that my lack of dolls explains a lot about my nurturing side.  Husband would do well to fuck off.  But it’s become clear I could use a female alliance around the house, even if it is mostly symbolic.  I’m hideously outnumbered by males and my remaining cat, a female, hates me because, in her minuscule cat brain, I’m the one who came between her and Husband in their very one-sided, cross-species love affair.  Don’t ask.  But I’m not kidding. 

This is where the logs come in.  I know.  Finally.  The best way to grow shiitakes is in logs.  My preferred doll medium seems to be log-derived.  Why not cross-purpose my shiitake logs and relive my lost youth?  Ren and Stimpy know how much fun logs can be.

First I had to find some logs.  Not dead, rotting logs you find in the woods, as I had planned, because they’re already inhabited by competing fungi.  No, you need recently cut logs.  Except I didn’t want to cut down any trees.  So, I asked myself, what would Barbie do?  Barbie was useless.  She was too busy admiring her boobs in the mirror, as usual, so I asked Ken.  Ken suggested trolling the neighborhood for wood in his convertible.  Ken always got a bad rap.  He’s actually very smart for plastic. 

Sure enough, there was a big pile of logs on the curb down the street.  Turns out everyone cuts down trees in the spring.  Yay, deforestation!  But, boy, those logs are heavier than they look.  I cradled them lovingly in my arms one by one and deposited them in the trunk.  And that’s where they stayed for about two weeks to let the wood’s anti-fungal compounds wear off and to protect them from rogue spores.  (Or because I forgot about them.)  Then I got my drill and punched holes two inches deep about four inches apart, staggered all around the four logs. 

This took much longer than expected because, apparently, I have Black & Decker’s Strawberry Shortcake Purple Pie Man edition of a cordless drill, which has no power even when I recharge the spare battery pack and swap it out and put my full weight on top of it, and then have to wait around for an hour while the other one recharges, and repeat six times.  (Stupid piece of shit.)  (But it smells like strawberries!!)

Anyway, with the 100 or so holes drilled, I banged in the plug spawn with a hammer. 

See?  My doll has implants, too.  Then I brushed the holes with melted beeswax to protect them from insects (messy and a pain to clean up, but at least I made use of all those beeswax sheets I meant to turn into candles for wedding favors but then never did).  With the logs inoculated, you water them once in a while and store them in the shade.  After enough time has passed (about a year, I hear) and the right conditions present themselves (whatever those might be), fungus will start to emerge in ruffles all around the log like an ill-conceived, earth-tone flamenco dress.  If you’re lucky, you can strip down the logs and dress them up again for a good seven years!  My logs are going to be sooooooo pretty.  I can’t wait to have a tea party!

So, if you see me talking to my logs, that’s why.

Fungus Among Us

It has begun.  My mushroom-growing experiment, that is.  Do you have any idea how fascinating fungus is?  Do you?  I don’t think you do.  Sometime, I’ll have to devote an entire post to the wonder that is the earth’s natural recycling process, as it will just about blow your mind, but right now I have to unburden myself of the pile of neglected posts accumulating on my desktop before they start self-composting.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a sucky gardener.  However, growing mushrooms is the opposite of gardening, and so I’m optimistic that I’ll have tremendous success.  If I’ve learned anything from my past failures, it’s this: diversify.  That way, you can have double (even triple!) the fun, while containing your losses somewhat.  So I’m trying three different strategies in the hopes that one of these will actually grow:

1.  Oyster mushrooms in used coffee grounds;

2.  Shiitakes out of felled logs; and

3.  Morels in my former garden spot with plenty of fireplace and BBQ ash.

Of the three, the third one is absolutely doomed to fail.  Everyone (apparently) knows that morels are impossible to grow and, yet, you can always count on someone like me plopping down a hard-earned twenty to test the odds.  But somebody eventually wins the lottery, right?  You just have to be foolish enough to play.

The oyster mushrooms have the best chance of working.  Why?  Because the patch I bought, which is basically a block of established oyster mushroom spawn in packed sawdust, was already producing mushrooms right inside the package it came in.  I ordered it from Fungi Perfecti, the company run by mushroom guru Paul Stamets who wrote that book I mentioned.  Basically, I just went to the children’s section of his site and bought whatever mushrooms were deemed easy enough for kids to grow.  Because that’s about the level of expertise I bring to the table.  I also got a Mushrooms of the World coloring book.  For myself.  

Here’s what I did to prepare the growing medium for my oyster mushrooms.  Dug a 5-gallon bucket out of the basement and washed it out.  Drilled five or six holes in the bottom.  Ripped up some old pizza boxes and soaked the cardboard in a sink full of water.  Placed the soggy cardboard in the bottom of the bucket.  Dumped Husband’s accumulated coffee grounds on top.  Realized I would need a LOT more than that.  Begged my neighbors for their coffee grounds.  Got a little bit more.  Realized I would have to take drastic action if I hoped to fill up the bucket by spring’s end.  Went to a local coffee shop and asked if they would dump their coffee grounds into my bucket.  They agreed.  (Thanks to Café on the Common on the corner of Main St. and Moody St. in Waltham).  It took about two days to get enough.

Worried that the coffee filters would degrade at a different rate than the grounds, I pulled them out and composted them separately.  I poured water onto the grounds and drained off the excess.  Then, I opened the oyster mushroom spawn.

See?  Mushrooms already.  They look leggy because they had no access to light in the box they came in.  The instructions said to cut off these mushrooms before proceeding.  Then, I broke up the spawn with my hands and mixed it into the coffee grounds, like so.

Now the mushrooms have all kinds of new material to decompose.  Then you compress the whole thing, mist it twice a day with a water sprayer, cover with the humidity tent it came with, and store it outside somewhere with indirect light. 

And now we wait.  It should take about two or three weeks for mushrooms to appear.  Let the betting pool begin.

Next up, shiitakes.  The logs should be ready for action in just a few weeks.

My First Tomato

I picked the first tomato from my own plants today, and it was a beauty (in its own ugly way).  I admit, I have no idea when you’re supposed to pick tomatoes.  This one turned red about a week ago, or, rather, a strange shade of pink (it’s a Caspian pink, after all).  Still, I kept arguing with myself.  Maybe it would get redder?  Would another day make it even more delicious?  Are the woodland creatures closing in?  How high can a woodchuck jump, anyway?

But, nothing ends my internal debates quite so abruptly as a faint twinge of hunger.  So, off it came.  I sliced it up with fresh mozzarella and ribbons of local basil and drizzled it with the usual non-local stuff (olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper).  There really wasn’t any need to reinvent the wheel. 

Is there anything better than this?

Well, maybe the corn.  Oh Lordy…the corn.  Drumlin Farm, I hereby declare your cobs to be worth every worm.

Fee Fie Foe Fum

My tomato plants are out of control.  They have long since dwarfed me (not saying much), and are now towering over my husband (saying much, much more).  At this rate, I’ll be able to climb my tomato stalks and bribe my way into heaven by August.  Or is God cracking down on illegals, too?

See my little tomatoes?  They’re Caspian pinks, a Russian heirloom.  Look how cute and misshapen one of them is.  It’s all I can do not to eat it up this second.

All of the gardening books I skimmed said that the best plants for novice gardeners to start with are radishes.  Even children can grow radishes, they assured me.  Based on my experience, however, they were talking about expensively preschooled, genius children.  My radishes have no radish attached to them.  Just a skinny, radish-colored root.  They suck. 

Better candidates, I think, would be tomato plants.  From the looks of it, even a stem cell can grow them.  Or, at least, a stem cell that stumbled upon the perfect tomato-growing conditions completely by accident.  (Take that, stem cells.  You think you’re so smart.)

Are tomato plants supposed to be this gigantic?

Also, check out the roses (middle front row, and middle back row).  They totally rebounded, no thanks to me.  The brown leaves all fell off and by the time I got back from vacation, they had all new green leaves and some buds.  I guess the only one the roses had a problem with was me.

Garden Update: Companion Planting

Look at my tomato plants!  The one in the pot is even bigger.  I planted most of them in with the roses because I heard they had some sort of mutually beneficial relationship.  Judging by this picture, it appears that tomatoes really, really like roses.  But, the roses?  They’re not full of love for the tomatoes.  Here’s the before picture.  The tomato plants are now towering over the roses, which have completely deteriorated.  I hereby declare their relationship to be dysfunctional.

But, maybe it’s not the tomatoes that are to blame for the roses’ dismal performance.  I know the roses don’t like the powdery mildew that plagues their leaves every spring.  Usually, I just spray them with whatever chemicals the garden people tell me to, but I’m not so much with the chemicals this year.  It’s going to have to be survival of the fittest.  So far, the tomatoes are winning.

In other news, here’s the most pathetic garden ever. 

And these are the best performers in the bed, aside from the weeds along the border that appear to be really enjoying the water drainage.  Apparently, the plants don’t like the shady spot I picked out for them.  What a bunch of crybabies.  Also, groundhogs really, really like radishes, but the feeling isn’t mutual.  I wouldn’t plant your radishes and your groundhogs too close together.

Now, let’s take a look at the stuff that grows all by itself, and doesn’t give a rat’s ass what’s around it or whether or not I’m going to water it.  I wonder how these would taste in a salad?

Garden Update: Tomatoes

The tomato plants went in last week.  They’re growing at a ridiculous rate with little corresponding effort on my part.  Granted, I didn’t start them from seed, but I swear the plants doubled in size since I took that picture.  Now, they need cages and everything.  This is very good for the ego of a novice gardener. 

This is what I planted: one Brandywine, one Cherokee Purple, and one San Marzano, which I mixed in with the roses that were here when we moved in.  They say roses and tomatoes get along real nice.  We’ll see about that.  I also have a Caspian Pink, which I put in a pot by itself just in case things get ugly.

I focused mainly on heirloom tomatoes because I might have mentioned that I have a tomato seed problem.  And a raw tomato flavor problem.  So, if I’m going to eat any of these tomatoes raw (and I want to eat all of them raw except for the San Marzanos that are destined for sauce), they need to be beyond delicious.  Luckily, I’ve learned that the best-tasting tomatoes are the ugliest ones.  Misshapen, cracked, in weird shades of red with tinges of green – that’s my ideal tomato. 

(Oh, and once I had a big, cream-colored tomato that knocked my socks off, but I have no idea what it was called.  It was big.  And cream-colored.  Anyone?)

As for the vegetable garden, the radishes look the best, followed by the arugula.  Not bad considering the spot I so lovingly chose for the garden only gets two hours of direct sunlight per day.  Good one.  The carrots look pretty pathetic, but they’re carrots so who cares.  I think one zucchini seed out of 16 germinated.  Also, the squirrels have taken it upon themselves to rearrange the seed rows while digging for buried treasure, so it’s going to be a mystery what things are until I pull them up. 

I love this whole thinning deal, though.  I had no idea what a perk it would be.  We had arugula sprouts on tuna salad sandwiches last week, courtesy of Husband who has a way with a can of tuna.  Today, I had a little salad of baby lettuce and Swiss chard sprouts.  Why are they so good? 

Right now, I’m stationed by the window on red alert for the terrorist threat posed by one or more scheming groundhogs.  No matter what happens, at least I had the sprouts.

Sophie’s Radish-Related Choice

I did some thinning of my sprouts over the weekend.  For those of you who don’t garden and/or participate in genocides, thinning means you remove some sprouts in favor of others so that the stronger (and presumably tastier) plants might have more room to grow. 

I hadn’t really planned on killing my newborn radish children so soon (on Mother’s Day, no less), but it turns out that I was overzealous in my planting.  There were septuplets crowded together all over the place, elbowing each other in the ribs and competing for precious water and cow poop.  It was clear that some of them had to go.  Plus, that’s what the seed packets said to do, and what the hell do I know? 

In some cases, it was easy to choose.  I mercilessly plucked out the gnarly-looking ones and the pale ones.  But, then, I started to feel guilty.  After all, some pale, gnarly-looking babies turn out to be perfectly functional and happy citizens (as well as avid bloggers), and shouldn’t they be allowed to carry on? 

I continued this ethical conversation with myself while I went inside to wash off a few sprouts and see if they might be at all tasty.  Indeed, they were.  Very, very tasty.  (I think I might have finally figured out what “micro-greens” are).  I rushed back outside and just started yanking out sprouts indiscriminately. 

I hope there are still some left.

Well, I’ll Be Damned

There’s something growing in my garden.

Arugula, if I’m remembering things right.  Either that or the squirrels buried their nuts in neat little rows.

Garden Update: Planting

We finally got our seeds planted this week, only a month or two behind everyone else.  I didn’t take a picture of the garden because it looks just like this, but with dirt in it.  The seeds are under the dirt.  At least, that’s where they were before the squirrels started digging around in there.  They can outsmart the most cunning squirrel-proof bird feeders, even gnaw their way through sheets of metal to get into our walls, but they can’t remember if they buried nuts in the dirt pile that’s only been around for a week. 

Here’s what we planted: carrots, lettuce, radishes, Swiss chard, and arugula (we’re waiting on the zucchini because I’m trying my mom’s seed germination trick).  As you can see, I picked the easiest things to grow to ensure a high probability of success.  If I’m lucky, I’ll end up with a bountiful supply of the most boring vegetables in the supermarket.  Then, I suppose, my salad intake will have to increase by 3,000 percent.  I really didn’t think this through.

Anyway, it’s been two days since the seeds went in.  What the hell is taking so long?

Garden Update

Some of you probably assume that I gave up on this gardening project before I even started.  But, I didn’t.  And here’s the proof.

One raised garden bed constructed by yours truly.  Okay, fine, I had to ask my neighbor to saw the boards.  But, the rest of it was all me.  Well, except that the four-year-old feels he should be recognized for diligently carrying each screw over to me, one at a time, without dropping most of them.  Also, Husband thinks that the sandbox he later constructed to the left of the bed deserves a shout out.  What is this?  The Oscars?

The raised bed is now nearly filled with a 2-2-1-1 mixture of sand, topsoil, peat moss, and composted cow manure.  This recipe courtesy of the 20-Minute Vegetable Gardener by Tom Christopher and Marty Asher, which I dubbed my gardening bible after reading the title.  I was disappointed to discover that they meant 20 minutes of work per day, not 20 minutes total for the season.  And that, sometimes, you have to do a week’s worth of work all in one day.  So, I think, in all fairness, the title should be revised to read, 20-Minute Vegetable Gardening for Suckers, or, more accurately, the $200 Vegetable Gardener.

As expected, four-year-olds are really intrigued by the concept of “cow poop” in a garden, and like to say it over and over again while digging in the dirt.  This gave him tremendous focus.  I highly recommend renting one or two small children instead of a rototiller.  They are remarkably efficient and usually much cheaper. 

Seeds are supposedly on the way.  Hurry up, little seeds.  The novelty started to wear off after I hoisted the 15th bag of cow poop up the 20 stairs to my yard.