mother nearly poisons family…AGAIN.

Since waking this morning, I’ve performed 3 puppet shows, watched another two, filled a dustpan, participated in a “dance party”, washed a sink full of crusty dishes, read 3 books out loud to a very small and curious audience, made cheese omelets, flipped and served butterfly molasses pancakes, read the NY times headlines, and rolled out play dough pizzas. It is now 7:50 am, Standard Parent Time.

The middle of the day progressed into a typical swirl of disparate activities… more puppet shows, a few smoothies, a cascade of books read, phone calls to undecided voters, futile cleaning, intermittent interviewing of subjects for an upcoming story, a slow run in the fragrant rain, family band practice, laundry management, and dining on wooden food at my daughters’ “cafe”. I love Saturdays. Today is that day…we are afforded the luxury of two parents on deck instead of the usual tag-team of one.

Our friend Chris arrived today from Seattle to embark on mild renovations to the new house that just became ours last week. We loaded up and whisked him immediately over to tour our lovely triple-wide on 18 acres. The ample garden at the new house is laden with bursting tomatoes, dangling eggplants, and zesty, ready peppers. The girls and I exuberantly harvested and sampled our way down the aisles of beds until we reached the corn patch where Juicy dark berries peppered a familiar looking dark and leafy plant. Into my giddy mouth a luscious berry went. It was so sweet and good. Pie dreams filled my head as I picked another. “I wonder what these yummy berries are? Blase, do you know?” I asked in his general direction. “Um, if you don’t know, I wouldn’t eat it,” was his obvious answer. We both looked at the kids and non-verbally agreed that I should not feed them the juicy berries cupped in my hand.

I emerged from that moment shocked by my own capacity to experience a complete separation from reason and common sense and realized that this separation had led me to an embarrassingly odd and stupidly dangerous act.

Whoops… no pies tonight. Some of you might remember that this was not the first time I’ve nearly poisoned my own little family as a result of my recklessly blinding appetite for something delicious….

The seductive berry was Deadly Nightshade, a relative of the tomato, potato, and wolfberry. It also bears the deceptively romantic sounding alias of “Belladonna.” I learned that the Belladonna was believed to be one of the ingredients used by witches to make their flying ointment so they could fly around and hang out with other witches.

Quick to research my prognosis, Chris found an online recommendation that I drink a cup of warm vinegar and mustard. I rustled one up and started gulping it down. The challenging flavor forced me to pause momentarily and ask, “what will this do for me?” “It will make you vomit,” he replied. I defiantly spit it out and explained that vomiting was not one of my goals

“What other ideas do you have?” I pressed. Another website recommended coffee to counteract the narcotic effects of the non-lethal dose I had naively ingested. Jumping at straws, I filled the teakettle and pulled a cold bag of ground coffee from the freezer. 4 cups of espresso later, my nightshade-induced pseudo-trippy mental viscosity morphed into caffeinated weirdness.

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your opinion of “housework”, my poisoned afternoon did not impair my ability to make messy glittered collages, assemble lasagnas, wash more sinkfuls of dishes, have another dance party, and bathe my earth-covered children.

Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca

Our water stopped coming again so blase hiked up the line to search for a leak and came back with a heap of huge chantrelles. We put them aside and spent the rest of the day fantasizing about the dinner they would become in just nine hours. Mushroom barley soup with pecorino and carmelized onions OR sauteed chants with garlic, wine, and butter OR enmeshed in sun dried tomatoes and ziti tubes… the fantasies were endless and titillating. It crossed my mind as I perversely peeped at the mushrooms throughout the day that their caps were excessively bumpy and their gills didn’t fade away at their bases as much as I thought they should….but several people assured us that false chantrelles don’t grow out here and my snowballing dinner fantasies drowned out my lingering doubts.

Our friend Jamie came by just before mushroom cleaning time to get a little enraged with me by watching the republican presidential candidate debates. We would then head to dance class to plie and releve our angst away. (Did you know there is a pose in ballet called “attitude“? It’s my favorite) Sometime in the midst of Mitt Romney’s immigrant bashing and Ossian’s strawberry smoothie demands, Jamie glanced at our clutch of wild mushrooms and asked, “are those your chantrelles?”. “Yes”, I replied, mouth wet with anticipation. “Yeah.. those are false chantrelles”, she said. I looked at them more closely… with their textured funnel caps and unfading gills… of course they weren’t chantrelles! And that was it. Thanks to the republican party, Jamie came and saved our lives with a simple string of words. Blase and I nearly killed ourselves – because we were blinded by our rampant addiction to that sexy little wild orange mushroom.

It seems we aren’t the only ones risking life for the taste of a savory fungus. In fact, “the wild mushroom business has also spawned violence. Some wild mushrooms sell for $100 or more a pound, Gecan says, and armed robberies are occurring in the Pacific Northwest, where the combination of heavy-covered forests and moist environment yields a plentiful crop…”(Wild Mushroom Safety). Who knew?!

But would it have been our last supper?? Likely not..but I’ve yet to find definitive information on what does happen to humans who eat Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca. Some say it is just terrible tasting and others insist that it is a highly toxic species. Either way, it’s pasta senza funghi for us.

eating away the pain

we are drowning our grief in good food over here… not a bad coping technique when you live in the land of plenty.

Turns out we have luscious chantrelle mushrooms that have snuck up in the moist and mossy coves of our back yard. After much anxious research with web sources and real live expert humans to confirm that these little treats will thrill us rather than kill us, we sliced them up and licked our chops. First we had them sliced and sauteed in butter, garlic, salt, and pepper and then just tickled them with finely grated pecorino romano. The drool that is escaping my lips as I write this might endanger this computer so I will move on…. but then we had them chopped and sauteed in oil with some chilies and then hugged in a warm corn tortilla topped with oaxaca mama salsa, avocado, and goat cheese… gheez. SO GOOD.

Then, with the 5 gallons of apple juice we recently pressed, I began brewing hard cider. It doesn’t look to pretty now ( as you can see in the photo), but hopefully it will blossom into a delicious, grown-up drink. I say hopefully, because after rampaging into the brewing project with zero understanding of the process, I realize that I’ve made some significant errors. I’ve consulted with the experts, our friends Josie Brown and Justin Horner – both of whom have confirmed that I have, in fact, made some errors. Justin did inform this kuntrywife that what the mixture is doing now is fermenting. Seems like a no brainer, right? It was news to me. So, “if it smells terrible“, said Dr. Horner, “like sulfur or something, don’t drink it.” This is the kind of practical information I need since I seem incapable of finding time to actually read beyond the ingredient list. I recognize that brewing is a science and an art and that what I’m doing is a bit spazzy and fisher-price. But what if it does work????

Did you know that making pasta noodles is super easy and a really fun thing to do with squirmy toddler? Just found that out myself. Trust me, it’s really easy, and just do it:

2 cups flour

2 eggs

2 teaspoons olive oil or water

1/4 teaspoon salt

Before you read further or toss in the towel, just know that all these bullet points say is: mix ingredients together, knead the dough, roll it, cut it, cook it. I swear it only took Osh and I about 35 minutes from beginning to end – this was 16 minutes longer than it could have taken if she’d been willing to stop kneading the dough a little sooner.

• just make a heap with the flour and scoot a little crater our of the top

• put the eggs, oil, and salt in the crater then break the yolks with a fork

• begin pulling in the flour from the sides of the mound

• bring in as much as you can and then knead the dough.

• get it “silky but not sticky… 3-4 minutes” ( if your toddler insists on kneading for 20 minutes, don’t sweat it, turns out that it still works)

• put the dough in a plastic bag for a 10 ish minutes to rest and soften – meanwhile, you can get out a clean pillow case and a rolling pin and any cookie cutters your toddler desires

• break the dough into a few or four pieces, roll into a ball and then flatten

• begin rolling – roll until thin

• cut into noodley strips with a knife or let your toddler go wild with shapes – Ossian chose the star cutter

• then lay the cut pieces on a clean pillow case to dry – takes just a few minutes

• boil up some water and toss your new noodle friends in

• they cook fast so maybe in 4 ish minutes, check them

they are so good, you can just eat them with olive oil and shredded cheese – or if you must, add some frozen peas during the last minute of noodle boiling and squeeze a clove or two of garlic over the whole mess (this is yet another recipe taken from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and debased by me)

Want to liven them up? Add some chopped rosemary, chili flakes, or pepper to the dough

Then, there was last night’s instant, homemade, irresistible chocolate loaf cake…. should I talk about it or hold off for another post? It is dangerously fast and easy…I’m not kidding.