I’ve been really grateful for the abundance around me lately. I feel a little like I’ve won the lottery [I don’t buy tickets]. This soup kind of summed up my happiness of late. It’s a purée of winter squashes from my former lawned front yard, with celery and leek from my backyard garden + a whack of chevre from Holly. … Read More
Highbush Cranberry Wine – 2010
Last Wednesday evening, upon light prompting [read: suggestion] from friend Valerie, I headed back into the bush to pick another round of the abundant crop of highbush cranberries. I’d picked 20 lbs already. I really didn’t need more. But only a few days prior, I’d been out to En Sante Organic Winery and Meadery [who are going to be undergoing … Read More
Highbush Cranberry-fest
I’d had enough of reading about Karlynn‘s foraging successes, especially having spent far too much time harvesting far too few berries of the low-bush variety. Rather than a sheet pan one layer deep of low-bush, roughly the same amount of time spent picking highbush yielded 21 lbs of fruit. As you can see in the photo, highbush cranberry grows rather … Read More
Low-bush Cranberries
At a recent farm stay over the weekend, the smell was everywhere – that pungent, somewhat stinky odor…not of manure, but of fall cranberries. I looked, and looked, and looked – nothing. Until I looked down instead of up. I’m good and used to harvesting high-bush cranberries, and even have some planted in my yard, but have never come across … Read More
Shaggy Parasols – September 2010
I recently reviewed my posts to check the time of year these guys had appear in my back yard in the past, and it turns out they tend to make an appearance once in July, then again in September. Well. It’s September, and here they are. The big cap in the photo weighs a half-pound. The entirety weighed in at … Read More
Shaggy Mane Hunt – 2010
This photo is an epic one illustrating the dark side of the force relative to shaggy manes. These things get goopy, black, inky, drippy, disgusting, and look like the dude at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark melting to their doom. And it happens shockingly fast. So the trick to foraging this mushroom is not just knowing where … Read More
Drying Herbs
Kevin TV – Episode 3: Drying Culinary Herbs from Kevin Kossowan on Vimeo. A quick, shotty peek at my herbs and my drying set up this year. I’ve dried vastly more than previous years already, and it’s time to start jarring up the ones that are good to go.
Saskatoons
This is one underrated fruit. It has pretty blooms in the spring, vibrant red foliage in the fall, produces fruit that in my opinion is tastier than blueberries, requires no special attention, and is super hardy to our climate. Let’s face it, it grows wild here. It requires no green thumb. If you like blue fruits in general, it makes … Read More
Shaggy Parasol Spore Print Verdict
About 5 hrs into the wait for my ‘supposed’ shaggy parasol mushroom to leave a spore print, I hopped online to check what I might be looking for. If you trust Wikipedia, their info on these mushrooms says “The gills and spore print are both white in colour.” Perhaps more importantly, it goes on to explain the print of the … Read More
Return of the Shaggy Parasols, 2010
I’ve posted about these fantastic wild mushrooms before. They are, quite possibly, my favorite mushroom, period – and somehow I’m lucky enough that they grow in my backyard completely by chance. My mom ID’d them as shaggy parasols a few years ago when they first appeared in our back yard – she used to pick them every year out of … Read More