Jenadonasaurus go for a walk

Monday, April 8, 2013

and all I got was this log...

On a snowy day in February, I drove up the Mississippi River to learn about inoculating logs with mushroom spores. This is my log.

This is the beautiful bright day that makes me so happy to be living with four seasons again.

The log pictured above I inoculated with shitake spores by drilling holes, knocking spore soaked wooden pegs into the holes and covering the holes with food wax. The shitake log will take about a year to bear fruit so we also had the opportunity to make a toilet paper mushroom kit. First the tp was boiled, next in went a cup full of spore soaked wheat kernals. When I arrived home the bag went into the closet for two weeks and then into the refrigerator for 48 hours to stimulate fruiting.

A beautiful clear day with shimmering trees coated in ice.

Two days after taking the bag out of the fridge, this little guy appeared and started growing his pants off!

Four days later, we had one giant oyster mushroom. Seared it with some butter and salt and ate it for breakfast on home made bread. Now we're just waiting for more mushrooms to pop up.

This is NOT my picture below, however, eventually I think it's supposed to look something like this:

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Passover

Now that we've settled, we're hoping that we keep adventuring, but not too far. That said, Jennifer just returned from Portland where she was busy nuzzling our friend Teri's newborn baby girl. "Oh, Portland is like a moss covered fairy land." Cooed Jennifer upon her return. Unfortunately she did not bring her camera so she didn't get any pictures of the grass growing over the sidewalk and roads nor the throngs of mustaches. Nor the baby. She did bring back some chocolate mint from Teri's garden, which is thriving.

Since we now have our own little space for the first time in over two years we thought it only right to celebrate Passover. We invited our lovely neighbor over and she was thrilled to take part in her first Pasach. While Jennifer was trying to document the process of making dinner, she quickly realized the trick to all of those kitchen bloggers' beautiful food pictures: sunlight and a good camera. We've got neither of those in our kitchen. So to get the nicely lighted shots Jennifer was running back and forth between the kitchen and the living room window. I guess food bloggers only cook during the day.