Chantrelles and the Potatoes of the Gods

Long time no DreamCrisp. Sorry about that.

But to make up for lost time, check out this pic of chantrelles we picked that are as big as your head:



I just picked some more today, not so big as these, but firm and meaty. There's a lot of ways to cook chantrelles, but my favorite so far is chantrelle-infused scalloped potatoes. Here's how to make:

Scalloped Potatoes of the Gods

basic ingredients:
chantrelles, cleaned and chopped
a couple cloves of garlic
1 cup of chicken or vegetable broth
potatoes: 5 to 8 medium red or yellow ones.
1 cup of heavy cream (can substitute goats milk or half and half but you may need to add some flour to thicken).
about a tablespoon of salt and pepper.
olive oil.
butter optional for the heart-lover's special

directions:
Dry-saute the mushrooms for a few minutes, so the juices are running. add some olive oil near the end when you add the garlic and saute more.
Meanwhile, in a bowl mix the broth and the cream and the salt and pepper.
Drizzle olive oil into a shallow glass baking dish.
Add the potatoes to the skillet and get em covered with the mushroom goodness.
Transfer potatoes, mushrooms, and all the juices to the baking dish.
Add the cream mixture and stir it up.
You might want to top the mixture with some pats of butter.
Bake in the oven at 350 for about an hour, or until the tops of the potatoes are browning.

Wait at least 10 minutes for the Scalloped Potatoes of the Gods to cool before attempting to eat.

How to Make Wild Elderflower Fritters

All the elder just finished blooming in these parts. To celebrate, we picked some elderflowers and made some delicious elderflower fritters.

They were divine, and I'm not just saying that because I was raised in Georgia and love fried food. The flowers effuse the batter and make a fragrant and sweet treat.

Okay, to be honest, it reminded me of those amazing/obscenely decadent funnel cakes I used to get at Six Flags over Georgia. So maybe it all about the south.

This is what elderflowers look like before you dip them in the love:

And here's how to make elderflower fritters in ten easy steps:

1. Pick elder flowers, fresh white ones, not green ones. Be careful with your ID, of course, they sort of resemble blooming hemlock which is poisonous. Also, elder is a tree!

2. Clip the flowers down so there's just a bit of stem to dip with.

3. In a large mixing bowl, proceed to make a batter mix. We used one egg, a cup of flour, a teaspoon of baking soda, a teaspoon of sugar, and a pinch of salt. But you could also just use pancake mix if you want to make it really, really easy.

4. For best results, let the batter sit a minute or two to thicken.

5. Meanwhile, heat up your pan with an inch of cooking oil. We actually used olive oil, but something lighter is probably better.

6. Dip the flowers into the batter.

7. Plunk those mugs in the hot oil and fry to a golden brown.

8. Optional: Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

9. Serve piping hot a la Six Flags over Georgia circa 1986.

10. Bask in the afterglow and rest assured that whatever health benefits offered up by fresh elderflower are effectively zeroed out by all the hot grease.

Clean Coal is Good Clean Fun

This made me laugh, even though I am pretty much resigned to the fact that the next 50 years will see more coal burning in the first world than ever before. Doesn't matter how clean it is if coal emissions rise by 500% after oil peaks.

On the up side, black top hats are gonna be in style again.

Amanita Muscaria and other Finds

Mushroom season is upon us! I've been on several forays in the last month, so I'm just gonna splash up some of the best pics. Mushroom identification is like dream interpretation sometimes.... only you can decide about what to do next with the information revealed.

Disclaimer for Kids: don't eat wild mushrooms. Bad idea.

So below is a red bolete, poking out of the duff. I like how they hide.


And these are candy caps (lactarius rubidus) - which are amazing in cookies and even homemade ice cream.


And a tiny shrimp russela - considered "choice" but we just took photos.


But the real winner last week was amanita muscaria.

Yes, this is the smurf mushroom, the original Christmas present under the pine tree, the friend of many Siberian shamans. They were all over the place the week before Christmas!

Here's another amazing one:

Little hider. For more background into the psycho-mythic past of amanita muscaria, check out this post by Feral Kevin.

How to Prepare Amanita Muscaria to Eat

We ate them. Yes, they're poisonous/visionary as is, but we didn't want to go that road so here's how we safely ate the amanita muscarias without any ill effects:

1. Brush loose dirt off freshly picked mushrooms
2. cut them into slices like chicken strivulets
3. boil them for 15-20 minutes in a pot. The muscimol and related toxins are water-soluble so this renders the flesh edible.
4. Pour out the water and do what you will with that. Siberian shaman used to drink reindeer piss to get at these psychotropic compounds - just sayin'.
5. Sauté the mushroom flesh like you treat meat or tofu. We used butter.
6. Eat! The taste is amazing - I kept saying "this tastes like delicious chicken strivulets." A little salt helps too. Eat over rice, as a side, or in a salad.

I usually don't recommend the eating of wild mushrooms so glibly, but this is about the one mushroom in the world that is easily recognizable and has no deadly look-a-likes. After all, amanita muscaria is technically poisonous, so you've been warned. Do your homework and have a mushroom expert on hand whenever cooking wild mushrooms.

Picking Feral Pears

They make you feel like a very bad person for picking the fruit out of an orchard that hasn't been managed properly for thirty years or more. (I originally typed out "like a terrorist" but then the Feral Princess says, "A terrorist? They do say Please.")

Motionless in pear trees when the cars go by, filling up a backpack each. Evading a Ranger in a white truck. The action resonates back into the Middle Ages, or anytime in the past and the future that we climb uninvited into the King's private gardens.

Suburban forage is my responsibility to this land, and that trumps my responsibility to the King.

Eco Dreaming

I just wrote a long post about archetypal dreams and ecopsychology over at my dream studies site. Check it out; this is an important meeting grounds of ecology and dreams.

In the past, most communities listened to the dreams that bubbled up, especially during hard times. One of the interesting elements of human leadership is the dream-vision that speaks for the community at large. For better or worse, charistmatic leaders often used these emotionally powerful visions to stir up action, or face something that they could no longer afford to ignore.

That's where archetypal dreams come into play, socialized and legitimized by their authenticity.

Acorn Harvest 2008

So every time I think about updating my ecopsychology blog, I am presented the choice: I can blog about being outside, or I can.... go outside. So that's been Dreamcrisp's fatal flaw for the last few months.

The rain's have started in Northern California, not in earnest, but at least enough to knock the pollen down and enough to start greening some of those fabled California over-grazed hillsides.

Here's an image on the abundant food source outside Mickey D's. It's not a mast year for acorns, but this red oak variety has made sure many a squirrel has got its snack on.



We processed some too, thanks to FeralKevin's acorn workshop. Acorns were a big part of the diet for the indigenous folks, the Saclan, who used to live in the hills around Mt. Diablo.

We shelled the acorns the old-fashioned way,


but used a more modern leeching technique:

Gotta leech out those bitter tannins. Three or four rounds in the coffeemaker made the mash bland and but still hearty.

We eventually ended up with some delicious acorn muffins.


Our recipe was pretty tame; we just substituted acorn flour for cornmeal in the typical cornbread recipe (unless you come from the South, in which case cut out most of the sugar and the lard too). Delicious! But next time we'll experiment with more acorns and less wheat flour.