Voyage a Portland
Dec. 1st, 2009 03:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaStacey and I set off for Portland at ~2AM Wednesday morning. Made for a nice drive light on traffic and gave us time to make a few stops and let me do some mushroom hunting.
My findings this year were quite a bit different from last year. Saw hardly any waxy caps, fewer boletus, and far fewer russalas. Seemed that both fruited a little earlier this year.
Found a few boletus zelleri that were in good enough shape to collect. More sullius than I could care to shake a stick at. (I picked up one for no real reason. I've been meaning to toss it)
But I also got lucky and stumbled upon several clumps of honey mushrooms. One cluster had not yet opened any of the caps and were young and tender so I picked them up.
I also found several small patches of giant blewits. They were like 5 to 6 inches in diameter. But most of them were old. I found enough buttons to make a few meals but nothing really exciting. These were all growing under fir so their color was a lot less pronounced. Not nearly as pretty.
When we got to Portland, we stopped at Powells for a little bit and picked up a couple of books, then headed to Stacey's mom's house.
Most of Thursday was spent at Stacey's aunt's house. Stacey made squash pie and I made rice pilaf using some of the chicken of the woods mushrooms I'd dried a few weeks ago. I had wanted to use the honey mushrooms but Stacey was feeling cautious and I agreed that it probably was wiser. The chicken of the woods were okay. Not quite as flavorful or nicely textured as fresh but still pretty good. I think on the whole, freezing them works better than drying them. Though I did dry the drier parts so perhaps they were just less flavored to start with. More experimentation will be required.
Friday I worked about half the day and then went and ran errands with Stacey and her mom and finished off the evening with The Fantastic Mr. Fox ... I think I enjoyed this film. It was rather bizarre and disjointed (more so than I recall Roland Dahl stories being when I read them as a child) On the whole, it was definitely interesting to see it done as stop-motion particularly with furry models (Because as you might expect, the fur moved a lot from pose to pose) Felt more like an experimental student film more than a feature production. Definitely not very polished but kind of nice because it wasn't. I get tired of homogenized perfection.
Saturday, Stacey and I went to the Saturday market where I found a bamboo flute of the sort I've been wanting for a while and an ocarina to replace my old one which is getting worn out after 20-odd years of playing. I still like the sound and overall shape and style of my old one better but the new one has a nice enough sound and plays well.
Afterwards, we went back to Stacey's mom's house where Stacey helped her set up Christmas lights and I went off for a hike and (naturally) took a few wrong turns and ended up walking several miles further than I'd originally intended. Doh. Ohwell. I got some good photos and, I found some Lactarius Deliciousus (Which sounds like a spell in a Harry Potter slashfic I never want to see)
Lactarius Deliciousus is one of those things that just seems entirely improbable. It's a large BRIGHT ORANGE mushroom that oozes milky red liquid when cut and then it has the nerve to turn bright blue-green and to top it off it's EDIBLE! You can just pop that weird alien puppy right in your mouth. o_O Speaking of which, I think I'll eat some tonight. Mmmmm.
I dehydrated the honey mushrooms and a few of the blewits (not sure blewits will rehydrate well but they're common enough that I don't mind risking it), and all the boletus because zelleri are better rehydrated than fresh. :)
Sunday we packed up and headed back to San Jose. All in all, given the driving and work time, it wasn't nearly as long a weekend as I'd have liked, but I did find some good mushrooms and I got a fair bit of reading in. Not bad. :)
My findings this year were quite a bit different from last year. Saw hardly any waxy caps, fewer boletus, and far fewer russalas. Seemed that both fruited a little earlier this year.
Found a few boletus zelleri that were in good enough shape to collect. More sullius than I could care to shake a stick at. (I picked up one for no real reason. I've been meaning to toss it)
But I also got lucky and stumbled upon several clumps of honey mushrooms. One cluster had not yet opened any of the caps and were young and tender so I picked them up.
I also found several small patches of giant blewits. They were like 5 to 6 inches in diameter. But most of them were old. I found enough buttons to make a few meals but nothing really exciting. These were all growing under fir so their color was a lot less pronounced. Not nearly as pretty.
When we got to Portland, we stopped at Powells for a little bit and picked up a couple of books, then headed to Stacey's mom's house.
Most of Thursday was spent at Stacey's aunt's house. Stacey made squash pie and I made rice pilaf using some of the chicken of the woods mushrooms I'd dried a few weeks ago. I had wanted to use the honey mushrooms but Stacey was feeling cautious and I agreed that it probably was wiser. The chicken of the woods were okay. Not quite as flavorful or nicely textured as fresh but still pretty good. I think on the whole, freezing them works better than drying them. Though I did dry the drier parts so perhaps they were just less flavored to start with. More experimentation will be required.
Friday I worked about half the day and then went and ran errands with Stacey and her mom and finished off the evening with The Fantastic Mr. Fox ... I think I enjoyed this film. It was rather bizarre and disjointed (more so than I recall Roland Dahl stories being when I read them as a child) On the whole, it was definitely interesting to see it done as stop-motion particularly with furry models (Because as you might expect, the fur moved a lot from pose to pose) Felt more like an experimental student film more than a feature production. Definitely not very polished but kind of nice because it wasn't. I get tired of homogenized perfection.
Saturday, Stacey and I went to the Saturday market where I found a bamboo flute of the sort I've been wanting for a while and an ocarina to replace my old one which is getting worn out after 20-odd years of playing. I still like the sound and overall shape and style of my old one better but the new one has a nice enough sound and plays well.
Afterwards, we went back to Stacey's mom's house where Stacey helped her set up Christmas lights and I went off for a hike and (naturally) took a few wrong turns and ended up walking several miles further than I'd originally intended. Doh. Ohwell. I got some good photos and, I found some Lactarius Deliciousus (Which sounds like a spell in a Harry Potter slashfic I never want to see)
Lactarius Deliciousus is one of those things that just seems entirely improbable. It's a large BRIGHT ORANGE mushroom that oozes milky red liquid when cut and then it has the nerve to turn bright blue-green and to top it off it's EDIBLE! You can just pop that weird alien puppy right in your mouth. o_O Speaking of which, I think I'll eat some tonight. Mmmmm.
I dehydrated the honey mushrooms and a few of the blewits (not sure blewits will rehydrate well but they're common enough that I don't mind risking it), and all the boletus because zelleri are better rehydrated than fresh. :)
Sunday we packed up and headed back to San Jose. All in all, given the driving and work time, it wasn't nearly as long a weekend as I'd have liked, but I did find some good mushrooms and I got a fair bit of reading in. Not bad. :)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-02 12:50 am (UTC)Draco and his goons stared wide eyed at the bookish frizzy haired girl. The spell was one they'd never heard before, and half expected her robes to catch fire, or her skin to melt off, so cruely had they been provoking Nevil.
Nevil rushed to the witches side apologizing profusely before any effect became apparent. The boring tagalong of the noble house of Godwin, however, knew just what he had done. He'd pulled the spell directly from the text he'd been reading "The magician's guide to animal husbandry." "I'm so sorry Hermione, I was aiming for those Slytherin thugs, I swear!" he pleaded.
Hermione peeked curiously from around her tall stack of books at the apologetic Nevil. She hadn't even felt the spell touch her, but quite abruptly she felt her carefully balanced stack of books seeming to lurch out of her hands of their own accord. She shrieked in surprise as the lot of them tumbled to the floor, pages crumpling as several landed with their covers wide open. "Oh no, you made me drop Crowley's discourses on the pre-war Thule-Gesellschaft dialectic!" Hermione snapped! She hastily bent over to collect the dropped books, but found herself tumbling forward, as if she'd been pushed from behind. As she hoisted herself back up she caught the faces of Draco and his hangers on. They seemed amazed at first, but quickly followed Draco as he began his typical unctuous laughter.
Hermione rolled her eyes, there was no sort of misery or accident those fools wouldn't try to use to prove their own superiority to themselves. That's when she noticed that her knees felt a bit of a draft. In fact her thighs did as well. Hermione could no longer see the books she had dropped, because a horizontal shelf, clad in her own student's robes seemed to be in the way. She took a stumbling step backward, and found her balance entirely off, the shelf in front of her face moved with it's own weighty inertia.
Touching the obstruction through her robes she discovered two great firm round swells springing up from her chest. They were so massive they caused her robe to hike up like a miniskirt! And worst of all, an extra peak seemed to cap each one, at least two inches long, a wet spot soaking through the robe around each one. "Nevil!" she shrieked as only Hermione could.
Finally responding to all the ruckus the librarian had made her way to the reading room with all the commotion, but she stopped dead in her tracks when she saw the young witch with enormous udders. It wasn't difficult to figure out that Nevil, the only student in an age to be so concerned with agrarian applications of magic must have re-discovered a long disused spell in one of these neglected tomes. Clearly the intent of the spell was to safely enhance dairy production, not meant to be cast on brilliant young witches.
Draco and crew fell silent at once, looking the part of perfect angels, rather than agents provocateur. Experimenting with unproven magic on ones classmates was strictly forbidden, they were sure to witness an epic punishment. Their faces fell slack, however, when the librarian announced "Oh Nevil, you brilliant thing! Two points for Gryffindor!
Guiltily Nevil stared at Hermionie's chest, where the bumps of another long nipple on each breast were becoming apparent beneath her robe. "Actually, I think it's going to be eight points before the spell's run it's course."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-02 01:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-02 01:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-02 01:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-02 01:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-02 02:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-02 03:31 am (UTC)