Mush Room Seas ‘n

After an abnormally hot and dry June came an abnormally wet and cold end of July and the beginning of August. The weather was more akin to an average October around here than to the middle of summer. At least one good thing came out of it – the mushrooms are growing. A lot. I went on a hunt today and I picked about 8 kg of mushrooms. If you happen to live in west Bohemia or northern Bavaria, now is the time to go out mushroom hunting.

I found some ceps, pretty big ones. And although they look battered, they were actually pretty healthy, with very little maggot damage.

The main bulk were bay boletes. Those were not as healthy and we ended up throwing almost half of them away. Still we filled the whole food dehydrator and some.

There were also some larch boletes. No maggots in those, but they were watery like sponges. There was more than we could immediately eat so we do try to dry them in the oven.

And there were also enough blushers for a tasty lunch for me.

I have made over 13.000 steps today, many of those accompanied by squats. Then it took about six hours to clean and cut it all (my mom helped with that, otherwise I would still be at it). It was quite a workout. I am glad to note that I was not as tired as from a similar mushroom hunt two years ago. It appears that I was at that time suffering from the long-term effects of the flu I had at the beginning of 2020. This year I am finally feeling again fit-ish, I do appear to be able to work harder and longer than I was the previous two years.

I do plan to go to the forest again in a few days, there should be again enough boletes to fill some jars. I would like to fill the pantry with dried mushrooms as much as I can since they do not grow every year.

If the weather gets warm and some insects start buzzing around, I will try to take my camera with me and make some pretty pictures. I haven’t done that for a loooong time.

Strawberry Chips

It is the Time of Strawberries again and I am spending several hours daily picking, sorting, and processing strawberries.

However, since we still did not eat half! of the various strawberry, figs, and other jams and marmalades that we made last year, I have decided to try and use the fruit dehumidifier on them.

I was worried a bit they will lose aroma and/or color, but neither happened. They are still bright red (that might still change over time) and very aromatic. Enclosed in jars they should hold for years in our cool dark cellar. And unlike marmalade – which is way too sweet for me to eat regularly – I can add them to my breakfast yogurt together with other dried fruits from our garden (prunes and apples) almost daily without adverse effects, so they should disappear over time hopefully quicker than the marmalade (which we cannot manage to give away, let alone eat). Even running 24/7 at 60°C, the dehumidifier cannot manage to dry all strawberries that I gather daily and the smaller and unseemly fruits still have to go into marmalade, which thus will continue to accumulate. Next year I will plow over some of the strawberry patches, this is simply too much.

Blast it. I wish that more useful and edible foodstuffs grew here as well as strawberries and walnuts. I had no luck with sweet corn or red beets this year, most seeds did not even germinate. With garlic and onions, I had zero luck for several years too. And this year’s pole beans were partially destroyed by voles and partly by the too-harsh sun (although I still have enough plants to hope for a reasonable harvest), and my only apple tree appears to be dying from water vole damage. And those little fuckers ate all of my tulips as well, so I did not even have pretty flowers in the spring. I still had no luck in finding a remedy that works on these pests.

I Made Some Shroomce

I have read about mushroom-based ketchup a while ago and I wanted to try to make some kind of condiment out of mushrooms ever since. So yesterday when shopping I bought two handfuls of button mushrooms to try out the idea. I pressed the mushrooms through a garlic press to get them into a really fine mince, but chopping them or just crushing them by hand would probably work too. I added some leftovers of dried peppery bolete (Chalciporus piperatus), a lot of salt (about two spoons), some basil, oregano, and marjoram and I mixed it all thoroughly together. I left it in the pot overnight in the fridge and today I added two crushed garlic cloves that I interspersed with two lovage leaves so those got crushed too in the process.

It was an unappetizing-looking wet mass with the consistency of minced meat. The mushrooms did release a lot of liquid due to the salt but it was not enough so I added some water and heated it all to ~80 °C. I left it to simmer under a lid for about half an hour and after that, I strained it through a cloth. I got about half a liter of brown liquid, looking like a weak coffee or very strong tea. I left it to simmer at ~80 °C for about half an hour more until approx half of it evaporated and I bottled the now significantly darker brown liquid into old (washed and boiled for disinfection) bottles from soy sauce and Worcester sauce. Here they are.

Houbáčka – a portmoneau of houba (mushroom) and omáčka (sauce). It tastes great and I think it will make a good addition to soups and sauces. I think it could even be sprinkled directly onto chips or potatoes or shrimp and similar. I will definitely use it a lot, it really tastes nice. I hope it won’t spoil, maybe it needs more salt to last – thus one bottle went downstairs into the fridge and my mother will use it in her cooking, and one bottle remained with me upstairs at room temperature and I will use it in my cooking. We shall see whether my bottle spoils before it runs out.

The pressed remains could be thrown away but they still had some flavor left so I dried them. It is interesting to see how little has remained from what looked like a lot of mushrooms.

After it thoroughly dried out in the fruit dehumidifier, I crushed it and put it into a glass with screw-on lid. I will sprinkle it on pasta or fryup when I am making them.

Now I am hoping that my other mushroom based experiment works out well.

I had this old barrel lying around and being useless – it has no bottom and the lid was lost some time ago. So I have drilled holes into the sides, filled it with stamped-down willow and poplar woodchips and I bought Agrocybe aegarita mycelium to inoculate it. It is near the house, north side so it stays in shade and I can water it occasionaly when I am watering my bonsai. If it fails, I can empty it in the fall, dry out the chips and burn them as was their original fate. But now I really hope it works out and I get some fresh mushrooms to cook from. Not that I mind going into the forest to gather wild mushrooms, but that depends a lot on the weather. We shall see.

Happy New Year, have some Ma’amoul

First of all, let me wish all of you a happy new year. We’re all smart enough to know that things won’t magically get better, so I’m wishing us the strength to hold on and fight the good fight, since there’s no alternative anyway.

Last year I promised a post about cookies, so here we are, with a bit of a story. At the start of the school year, we did a project for grades 5-7 in order to welcome the new kids. The motto was “welcoming new things” with a focus on our diverse student body. I offered a cooking/baking workshop where we made things as “catering” for the party at the end of the project. It was positively exhausting. Come Friday afternoon I was completely done, but for the first time in ages in a good way. Obviously, having only one stove/oven and very limited funds (i.e. what I was willing to spend), our selection was easy stuff like Russian pancakes and American cookies, so some of the kids decided to spend the weekend baking treats from their home countries. I was particularly in love with the Ma’amoul and asked the kid for the recipe. Well, her mum didn’t just write me the recipe, she also gifted me one of her forms, which absolutely tore me up.

I expressed my thanks by making her a batch of traditional cinnamon wafers (without the rum) and the kid an I set to making ma’amoul. Though I didn’t ace the dough (it went too puffy, I think I didn’t get the instructions right), they were absolutely delicious and lasted maybe a week. Enjoy!

https://amiraspantry.com/maamoul/

Runner Beans Riches

Our south wall used to be shaded by a rabbit shed, later converted to a chicken hoop. Ever since I demolished that, the sun was directly blazing at it. It does not heat the house much because it is well insulated, but I felt somehow that the space is wasted. After some thinking, I have decided that it would be an ideal space for growing runner beans, one row, close to the wall. Runner beans do not mind the low-quality soil, so they do not need to be fertilized and thus there is no risk of polluting our well which is down the slope exactly on the opposite side of the house.

Last year was somewhat poor, the beans did not grow that much. There was enough rain, but not enough sun for them to really prosper. Even so, the harvest was big enough that we still did not eat it all.

This year the weather was extremely hot and dry again. However, we managed to collect enough rainwater in the spring to be able to water the beans the whole time sufficiently, so they prospered enormously and covered the whole wall.

They are still blooming and they will continue to grow until the first frost. I will probably wait for two more weeks, then I will harvest all green immature pods and clip the plants so they do not waste energy on growing and instead mature the remaining pods quicker. But maybe I won’t bother. The harvest looks extremely promising even so, I will have to convince my mother to cook beans more often. I like them better than chicken anyway.

I am thinking about buying seeds of other vine beans and planting them next year en masse on the vegetable patch where this year grew potatoes. But I like runner beans the best because they are big and thus they require the least work per weight when shelling. We used to have white runner beans too, but I haven’t seen them in shops for a long time. I could not put seeds consistently aside, because the white and red beans hybridized and after two-three years I had neither white nor purple beans but a mish-mash.

Tummy Thursday: Around the World in 5 Courses

On New Year’s Eve we held our traditional dinner where we all draw our courses and continents. With only three families left, two families had to do two courses each while one (we as the hosts) had to do one. You never know how much you can miss somebody’s bad cooking until they’re gone.

The first course takes us to Africa, to Ghana in specific:

It’s a leek and peanut soup and damn delicious. I think this will become part of our culinary repertoire

The second course jumps across the Atlantic to México:

Pimientos con queso y beicon. Bell peppers filled with garlic cream cheese and wrapped in bacon. They were delicious.

Back across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, straight to Italy:

Classic lasagna and never a bad choice.

Now we travel east and south to Oceania for the fourth course:

Chicken Fa Fa, a popular dish from Polynesia. This was my course and I didn’t want to do something from Australia or New Zealand, since those are very European cuisines. Of course I didn’t get taro leaves to make an authentic chicken fa fa, but several recipes said to substitute with spinach. You fry the chicken, then simmer in tock until mostly done, add spinach and coconut and thicken with a bit of starch and it’s so damn delicious. the chicken was tender as butter, the spinach creamy, and I had a lot of trouble not eating the whole thing before the guests arrived.

For the final course we didn’t have to travel quite that far, our dessert from Japan:

Macha petit fours: Small coconut cakes with red bean paste and a macha frosting, served with green tea. Those were delicious. The “cake” itself is made from “Butterkeks” a not overly sweet biscuit, coconut and butter with no added sugar, while the frosting is basically just sugar and macha. This makes for the perfect amount of sweetness with the bitter macha notes.

All in all we had a delicious and nice evening, right before the crying started at midnight. You see, January the first is Uli’s birthday. For almost 20 years we celebrated together. She’d spend Christmas with her family, but New Year’s Eve with us. I remember celebrating with her back when I was still living at home, bringing out a cake at midnight with the whole neighbourhood bursting out in “happy birthday”. Or partying in way too small student flats, sleeping on a floor so cramped it was difficult to go to the loo. We said that she would host this year. Damn, Uli, why didn’t you just say that you weren’t comfortable with hosting so many people right after moving in? Don’t you think that dying on us is a bit extreme?

Gingerbread Houses

These are the more “traditional”

gingerbread houses my mother made this year.

Gingerbread Bird Feeder

My mother has tried her hand on something a bit different this year. She has made “ordinary” gingerbread houses too (I will post them later), but she also made this.

Have some cake

I’m sorry, here I am again apologising for being a bad host, but what can I say, meatspace is demanding right now. But we got to celebrate the little one’s birthday this year, with cake and her first Covid shot.

The filling is one of my favourite fillings right now: a cream cheese and cream filling stabilized and favoured with jello, in this case lemon jello. It makes for a light filling and you can add fruit to taste.

Next step: frosting with vanilla buttercream. Thankfully it doesn’t have to be too even. This is after the cake spent some time in the freezer, because on top you get mirror glaze.

When working with mirror glaze, you always have leftovers. I decided to refrigerate them and use them for Halloween. Here’s two things I learned:

Purple mirror glaze resists all efforts to be died black. It will just become deep purple (haha)
My cellar wasn’t cool enough to let the frozen and glazed cakes thaw slowly. They decided to spontaneously disintegrate.

Well, on Halloween things are supposed to look horrible, aren’t they?

Tummy Thursday: It’s Pokémon Birthday Cake Time

The kid’s birthday was already at the start of the month, but of course with my body being an asshole again I couldn’t make a cake for her actual party. Thank goodness teenagers mostly require insane amounts of food and not attention, so she could have her friends over for a small party.

Last weekend we celebrated with our friends and she got her cake for that day. She went for her favourite Eevilution, Leafeon.

The inside of the cake is a standard vanilla cake with a cream cheese and cream filling. The filling was really easy and tasty: I used a packet of lemon flavour jello to mix with the cheese and the whipped cream, added some lime zest and cut canned peaches. The only problem that I had was cooling it down quickly enough for the jello to work so it wouldn’t run all out on me. I then covered the whole thing in a thin layer of buttercream before adding the fondant.

Because a German buttercream (butter with custard) has too much liquid for fondant and an Italian meringue buttercream (my usual go to buttercream) was too much work for the state of my recovery, I made an American buttercream. I usually consider American buttercream the symbol of everything that is wrong with American cake making: It’s just butter and sugar, too heavy and too sweet. I love watching cake videos, but quite often the American ones leave me a bit puzzled: Yes, this looks amazing, but all you have in there is cake and buttercream. Where’s the flavour? Do Americans really spend 200 bucks on a cake that looks great but doesn’t taste of anything but butter and sugar? Please do tell me.

It did work well here, btw, because it was only a small layer to get the surfaces even and it contrasted nicely with the tart lemony filling.

Garden Update: The Big Growing

The heavy rains with nice temperatures basically made the garden explode.

What I thought was squash were actually the two courgette seeds I had planted. Turns out they are more resistant to frost. We’ll, have a lot of them over summer…

One of the three sisters beds with the monster squash/pumpkin/whatever. I bought a small, withering plant for cheap and gave it soil and water and it is a very grateful plant.

I planted two different breeds of corn and it’s very noticeable.

Look at my tomatoes! By now I have to put in multiple sticks to support the whole plant. The first fruit are visible and they made it through both storm and rain alike.

Tummy Thursday: Making Saitan

I think I mentioned before that I’ve reduced our meat consumption drastically over the last year or so. I’m not trying to become vegan or vegetarian (and no, I don’t want to hear why I should or how I should. This is not your post. Go somewhere else), but I think that meat should be a special treat.This is also possible since meat replacements have become so good that the family will eat them, when a few years ago they still tasted like underseasoned cardboard. One problem remains, though, and that is that many alternatives are based on soy and I’m allergic to soy. But I can totally eat gluten, so I tried making saitan.

You can just buy gluten by the pound, but you can also make saitan from scratch. add one part water to two parts flour and knead for 5 minutes. Let it rest for 30 minutes and then wash out the starch, This is messy and will lose you most of your mass. There are apparently people who then try to recover the starch from the washwater but not me.

This is the gluten left from 2 kgs of flour and yes, it looks like a pig’s stomach used for wrapping roasts. At this point you can add seasoning and some salt and then you have to cook it. It can be baked or steamed, but I like to cook it in a mason jar with spices in a salty brine.

Each jar contains about 500 ml in total, so you see that it’s not much, but one is also a good size serving for us. It needs to cool completely to get to the meat like consistency. This time I made pinchos. They were nice, I just used a little too much salt.

It is pretty neutral in taste, which is why it’s often compared to chicken, so you can season it to your heart’s desire. Enjoy your meal.

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Mush Room Seas ‘n

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Strawberry Chips

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I Made Some Shroomce

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Happy New Year, have some Ma’amoul

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Runner Beans Riches

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More Summer Content

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Gingerbread Houses

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Gingerbread Bird Feeder

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Have some cake

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Tummy Thursday: It’s Pokémon Birthday Cake Time

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Garden Update: The Big Growing

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Tummy Thursday: Making Saitan

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