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corviThis is zhelana 's December year in review meme.
December 06 → talk about food this year
The Forest
juli and I have often collected wild mushrooms, put them nervously in the kitchen, and tossed them out once they got too dry to eat. This year, we resolved to actually eat more of them. Success! We tried six new species:
We also had two repeat mushrooms: the Shaggy Manes that grow at the base of the driveway (nice flavour, but not enough of it) and a single chanterelle, that elder mushroom, which tastes like autumn you can eat. We also found a nice Sparassis radicata, which looks like a brain made out of floppy noodly bits, but decided we'd rather see if it could spread than eat it this year. The Best Coworker Ever, who wears paisley shirts and shares his mushroom hauls, shared morels once and chanterelles twice. I made a cut-paper chanterelle card as a thank-you card for the Best Coworker Ever, and his wife, Adventure Oceanographer, who spends a quarter of the year in the Arctic observing sea ice.
We didn't make any more arbutus bark syrup this year - the timing was not good for collecting the bark after it had peeled but before the rain got it. We do still have a little syrup from last year, and it is incredibly good. The bark has a sort of slightly metallic tea-cinnamon flavour by itself, and we add a little extra cinnamon to round it out. We're being careful with the syrup, but we did use it on baked goods and in booze for special ocaissions.
Been living here a couple years, but there's still some strange wonderful feeling I get whenever I look at an arbutus. Weird crooked trees, no two alike, growing in the understory of the forest, bending their branches to seek out any unclaimed puddles of light. Every arbutus is a living map of where the light was, and where the wind was. A story that cannot be told until it has changed the shape of the teller.
This year we noticed the less-fragile and generally less-interesting European arbutus ("strawberry tree"), which is commonly used for landscaping here. Specifically the berries, which are spiky yellow-red things one could hypothetically pick from various municipal landscaping and make booze out of. Hypothetically, one might mash the berries and soak them in cachaça, then mix with ginger ale to drink at Thanksgiving. Nobody would do such a thing, of course.
(The native arbutus berries are hard and not very sweet. I want to make booze from them so I can toast with the tree of stories, but it's really not clear how.)
Other forest things:
The Fields
This year we did the first generation for a pumpkin landrace, which involved getting pumpkin seeds from a whole bunch of different sources - various seed companies, plus particularly tasty grocery store pumpkins - and planting them all in one place. You let the bees mix all those genes together, and each generation, you keep seeds from whichever plants produce best. Over time, from an initially broad gene pool, you evolve a strain closely adapted for your specific locale. Our biggest pumpkin by far this year was the blue one in the photo, so it will have an outsized influence on our gene pool next year - most of our seeds for next year are half blue pumpkin, half some random other pumpkin. Next year we want to introduce more kabocha genes; it’s the tastiest squash!
The pumpkins were the delicious success story; the deer got a lot of the rest of the garden. Interesting plants the deer ate: an "engraved" red pepper with fine yellow stripes, lots of chard, various hot peppers, asparagus lettuce, cucumbers. Peas and chickpeas both did well.
We planted asparagus this year, and should be able to harvest next spring. We found an accidental female asparagus plant at a nursery (commercial asparagus breeds are all-male) and bought it, because asparagus berries are cute and red and poisonous.
This year I learned about pink-fleshed apples and immediately wanted to grow one. Nobody is officially selling them, butjuli tracked down a breeder and convinced him to part with one of his trees. The deer got some of it, but it'll be fine.
We did other orchard setup too; mulberry, lime, sudachi, apricot, akane apple, pawpaw, yuzu, quince, loquat, and sichuan peppercorn trees. No fruit for at least couple years on most of those. The limes are grown right up against the house to keep them warm; winters are a little cold for citrus here, but in clear sunlight against the house, they should be okay. We can put old-fashioned incandescent christmas lights on them if they get cold.
Thenjuli went off the deep end and started growing 300 trifoliate orange trees from seed. These are an unpleasant citrus fruit that grows well in our climate; the long term goal is to use these trees, by breeding them with tastier citrus, or grafting tastier citrus onto them, to create actually edible citrus here. The 300 baby citrus trees have taken over the deck. The bedroom, on the other hand, is the domain of the baby loquat trees. Carob’s in the dining room. Pawpaw in the washroom. The house is full of hundreds of baby fruit trees, it’s excellent lunacy.
One thing we weren’t able to track down this year: the Nanaimo peach, a peach tree bred for our climate. Nobody in commercial production sells them.
Still, a good field year. Pumpkin project is going well, we have the beginnings of an orchard, and we can do all kinds of crazy citrus breeding experiments. Mm.
Fermentation
We did not make any cider, mead, or cheese this year, as we had neither an orchard, nor a beehive, nor goats. *sad sigh*
yam brought us quinces, and Lola gave us crabapples, so we did excellently in the all-important Delicious Jam Made From Weird Apples Nobody Can Eat category.
juli made several batches of experimental miso, using a traditional koji culture, but fermenting lentils, pumpkin, or chickpeas instead of rice. They're pretty good! Sweeter than traditional miso, with a sort of springy new-leaf smell.
We pickled many things: I made a couple batches of excellent cucumber kimchi follows David Cheng's recipe. I also made two completely inedible batches of cucumber pickle - once with too much sichuan peppercorn, once with too much hot pepper. The chickens looooooved kimchi and dug around in it and got their faces all red with peppers and left bright red bloody-looking footprints all over everything. It looked like they'd had a cagematch with a small cow and won.
Pickled pumpkin was definitely not worth the effort. Didn't taste pumpkin-y at all, just tasted vaguely green, with cinnamon and cloves.
juli pickled some cabbage with fennel seed, which was good. And some fennel stem with ... I forget what, it was nice.
Feasts and Festivals
Pillowmas is the annual anniversary of whenjuli and I first met, at a dosa restaurant with tim , where the delicious half-meter crispy rice crepes filled with potatoes and hot peppers blew my mind. I thought I knew Indian food, but I didn’t, in the best possible way. This year we bought a sad boxed dosa mix, since you certainly could not get dosa on the Salt Spring Island or the Big Island, and it would not do to have Pillowmas without dosa! But juli is basically the fixer the hero of a cyberpunk novel calls to get access to all the latest forbidden technology and obscure information, and she somehow charmed the floatplane company into bringing us dosa from Vancouver on a deadhead flight.
For Lunar New Year, I heard that somewhere was selling a Chinese version of mojie apples (that’s the Japanese name, I don’t know the Chinese one). The apples are carefully covered with a mask that shields part of the apple from the sun while they are growing. The parts of the apple the sun can reach turn red or green, but the parts blocked by the mask stay pale. So you can make apples that naturally have various designs printed on their skins. I am going to try to make mojie apples myself when our orchard is old enough, but I’ve never seen one in person, so I went to a bunch of stores trying to track them down. No luck.
We were able to celebrate the New Year in proper Mongolian style, though.juli had used her cyberpunk fixer powers to find someone in Mongolia who sent us a spice mix for хуушууp, which she cooked to perfection.
In June, the Big Island got its own dosa shop! Now if only we could get a Mexican restaurant that doesn’t think "root beer asada" and "maple carnitas" are reasonable things to have on the menu. (It’s fine for there to be a weird hipster Mexican restaurant like that, but not fine that it might actually be the most authentic one here.)
We did not make to the Night Market on the mainland this year, so my consumption of Glowing Food With LEDs In It is way down this year.
We went to the Fall Harvest Festival, where I beheld an absurd squash; several dozen entrants in the Funniest Vegetable Shape competition, all of which resembled butts; a tiny white duck sleeping in an empty vanilla ice cream container, and a bunch of humans betting on where a cow would poop. I entered one of Moustache the Chicken's weird cigar-shaped eggs in the Weirdest Egg competition, but did not place.
We actually made it to the always inconveniently-scheduled Apple Harvest Festival this year. I admired these Long Apples and various pink-fleshed apples, but the long boys were already gone from the tasting, and the pink-fleshed trees ripen pretty late and weren’t ready for sharing. Of the varieties we tried, we were especially impressed with the Kogetsu;juli has already tracked down some Kogetsu budwood to add to our orchard. The educational apple disease display was great; it included "pesky neighbour children" and "escaped goats" as apple diseases.
Someone on the island was offering Chinese Tea Ceremony classes, which we wanted to take, but they did not respond to my emails. We prefer the Japanese tea aesthetic, but any tea ritual is good.
Thanksgiving we were visited byyam, who brought an entire giant lumpy rolling suitcase of quince across the ocean, securing her place in the epic legendarium of the Best Thanksgiving Guest Ever. yam - it turns out - hates mushrooms, so we had to improvise, as we’d planned to put various wild mushrooms in absolutely everything. What’s Thanksgiving without a bit of panic? We saved all the legendary pelagic quince seeds for planting; yam’s family has a really nice breed that smells like pineapples and roses.
For Diwali,juli used her cyberpunk fixer powers to turn up a desi family selling sweets out of their home in downtown Victoria, including definitely non-traditional Oreo burfee, which were the best. It was the height of the Russula brevipes season, so we also celebrated Diwali with the Feast Of A Thousand Russulas.
Fantasies
Hey, you know what's even less interesting than a list of foods someone has eaten? A list of someone's dreams about food!
I recorded 152 dreams this year. January at the left to December at the right. Green bars represent dreams about planting or harvesting; orange bars are dreams about pumpkins specifically; purple bars are dreams about mushrooms. I like how seasonal it is. Winter was quiet; in spring and summer I dreamt of the gardens; in autumn I dreamt of the pumpkins, and in winter of the forest and mushrooms.
This year I had a dream where someone told me, "Every food has three origin stories: the story of the ingredients, the history of its people, and the secret history," which sounds pretty cool, even though it sort of falls apart when you think about it, the way dream "wisdom" does.
Here are all the foods I dreamed about cooking this year (that I remembered, anyway):
Next year, I hope.
zhelana 's December year in review meme.December 06 → talk about food this year
The Forest
juli and I have often collected wild mushrooms, put them nervously in the kitchen, and tossed them out once they got too dry to eat. This year, we resolved to actually eat more of them. Success! We tried six new species:Pseudohydnum’s textured gel
Serves as candy very well;
Xerampelina tastes like crab
In case you found the shelling drab;
R. Brevipes hides neath moss
Tastes of nothing, bring hot sauce;
Prove leucothites in their vast array:
Quality beats quantity every day.
Lycoperdon tastes like bacon
The "wolf fart" name quite mistaken;
And I find it strains what’s credible
Suillus is considered edible!
Serves as candy very well;
Xerampelina tastes like crab
In case you found the shelling drab;
R. Brevipes hides neath moss
Tastes of nothing, bring hot sauce;
Prove leucothites in their vast array:
Quality beats quantity every day.
Lycoperdon tastes like bacon
The "wolf fart" name quite mistaken;
And I find it strains what’s credible
Suillus is considered edible!
We also had two repeat mushrooms: the Shaggy Manes that grow at the base of the driveway (nice flavour, but not enough of it) and a single chanterelle, that elder mushroom, which tastes like autumn you can eat. We also found a nice Sparassis radicata, which looks like a brain made out of floppy noodly bits, but decided we'd rather see if it could spread than eat it this year. The Best Coworker Ever, who wears paisley shirts and shares his mushroom hauls, shared morels once and chanterelles twice. I made a cut-paper chanterelle card as a thank-you card for the Best Coworker Ever, and his wife, Adventure Oceanographer, who spends a quarter of the year in the Arctic observing sea ice.
We didn't make any more arbutus bark syrup this year - the timing was not good for collecting the bark after it had peeled but before the rain got it. We do still have a little syrup from last year, and it is incredibly good. The bark has a sort of slightly metallic tea-cinnamon flavour by itself, and we add a little extra cinnamon to round it out. We're being careful with the syrup, but we did use it on baked goods and in booze for special ocaissions.
Been living here a couple years, but there's still some strange wonderful feeling I get whenever I look at an arbutus. Weird crooked trees, no two alike, growing in the understory of the forest, bending their branches to seek out any unclaimed puddles of light. Every arbutus is a living map of where the light was, and where the wind was. A story that cannot be told until it has changed the shape of the teller.
This year we noticed the less-fragile and generally less-interesting European arbutus ("strawberry tree"), which is commonly used for landscaping here. Specifically the berries, which are spiky yellow-red things one could hypothetically pick from various municipal landscaping and make booze out of. Hypothetically, one might mash the berries and soak them in cachaça, then mix with ginger ale to drink at Thanksgiving. Nobody would do such a thing, of course.
(The native arbutus berries are hard and not very sweet. I want to make booze from them so I can toast with the tree of stories, but it's really not clear how.)
Other forest things:
- we each ate a single red huckleberry from a small twisted bush growing atop an old black stump surround by a fairy ring of white mushrooms, in the depths of the ravine behind the house. You have to do things like that from time to time.
- most foragers seem to have very nuanced opinions about greens, but they all taste like leaves to me. We had some miner's lettuce and some nettles this year. They tasted like leaves. They're good curried.
- we soaked some young fir tips in vinegar. The vinegar did not pick up any fir flavour
The Fields
This year we did the first generation for a pumpkin landrace, which involved getting pumpkin seeds from a whole bunch of different sources - various seed companies, plus particularly tasty grocery store pumpkins - and planting them all in one place. You let the bees mix all those genes together, and each generation, you keep seeds from whichever plants produce best. Over time, from an initially broad gene pool, you evolve a strain closely adapted for your specific locale. Our biggest pumpkin by far this year was the blue one in the photo, so it will have an outsized influence on our gene pool next year - most of our seeds for next year are half blue pumpkin, half some random other pumpkin. Next year we want to introduce more kabocha genes; it’s the tastiest squash!
The pumpkins were the delicious success story; the deer got a lot of the rest of the garden. Interesting plants the deer ate: an "engraved" red pepper with fine yellow stripes, lots of chard, various hot peppers, asparagus lettuce, cucumbers. Peas and chickpeas both did well.
We planted asparagus this year, and should be able to harvest next spring. We found an accidental female asparagus plant at a nursery (commercial asparagus breeds are all-male) and bought it, because asparagus berries are cute and red and poisonous.
This year I learned about pink-fleshed apples and immediately wanted to grow one. Nobody is officially selling them, but
juli tracked down a breeder and convinced him to part with one of his trees. The deer got some of it, but it'll be fine. We did other orchard setup too; mulberry, lime, sudachi, apricot, akane apple, pawpaw, yuzu, quince, loquat, and sichuan peppercorn trees. No fruit for at least couple years on most of those. The limes are grown right up against the house to keep them warm; winters are a little cold for citrus here, but in clear sunlight against the house, they should be okay. We can put old-fashioned incandescent christmas lights on them if they get cold.
Then
juli went off the deep end and started growing 300 trifoliate orange trees from seed. These are an unpleasant citrus fruit that grows well in our climate; the long term goal is to use these trees, by breeding them with tastier citrus, or grafting tastier citrus onto them, to create actually edible citrus here. The 300 baby citrus trees have taken over the deck. The bedroom, on the other hand, is the domain of the baby loquat trees. Carob’s in the dining room. Pawpaw in the washroom. The house is full of hundreds of baby fruit trees, it’s excellent lunacy.One thing we weren’t able to track down this year: the Nanaimo peach, a peach tree bred for our climate. Nobody in commercial production sells them.
Still, a good field year. Pumpkin project is going well, we have the beginnings of an orchard, and we can do all kinds of crazy citrus breeding experiments. Mm.
Fermentation
We did not make any cider, mead, or cheese this year, as we had neither an orchard, nor a beehive, nor goats. *sad sigh*
yam brought us quinces, and Lola gave us crabapples, so we did excellently in the all-important Delicious Jam Made From Weird Apples Nobody Can Eat category.juli made several batches of experimental miso, using a traditional koji culture, but fermenting lentils, pumpkin, or chickpeas instead of rice. They're pretty good! Sweeter than traditional miso, with a sort of springy new-leaf smell.We pickled many things: I made a couple batches of excellent cucumber kimchi follows David Cheng's recipe. I also made two completely inedible batches of cucumber pickle - once with too much sichuan peppercorn, once with too much hot pepper. The chickens looooooved kimchi and dug around in it and got their faces all red with peppers and left bright red bloody-looking footprints all over everything. It looked like they'd had a cagematch with a small cow and won.
Pickled pumpkin was definitely not worth the effort. Didn't taste pumpkin-y at all, just tasted vaguely green, with cinnamon and cloves.
juli pickled some cabbage with fennel seed, which was good. And some fennel stem with ... I forget what, it was nice.Feasts and Festivals
Pillowmas is the annual anniversary of when
juli and I first met, at a dosa restaurant with tim , where the delicious half-meter crispy rice crepes filled with potatoes and hot peppers blew my mind. I thought I knew Indian food, but I didn’t, in the best possible way. This year we bought a sad boxed dosa mix, since you certainly could not get dosa on the Salt Spring Island or the Big Island, and it would not do to have Pillowmas without dosa! But juli is basically the fixer the hero of a cyberpunk novel calls to get access to all the latest forbidden technology and obscure information, and she somehow charmed the floatplane company into bringing us dosa from Vancouver on a deadhead flight.For Lunar New Year, I heard that somewhere was selling a Chinese version of mojie apples (that’s the Japanese name, I don’t know the Chinese one). The apples are carefully covered with a mask that shields part of the apple from the sun while they are growing. The parts of the apple the sun can reach turn red or green, but the parts blocked by the mask stay pale. So you can make apples that naturally have various designs printed on their skins. I am going to try to make mojie apples myself when our orchard is old enough, but I’ve never seen one in person, so I went to a bunch of stores trying to track them down. No luck.
We were able to celebrate the New Year in proper Mongolian style, though.
juli had used her cyberpunk fixer powers to find someone in Mongolia who sent us a spice mix for хуушууp, which she cooked to perfection.In June, the Big Island got its own dosa shop! Now if only we could get a Mexican restaurant that doesn’t think "root beer asada" and "maple carnitas" are reasonable things to have on the menu. (It’s fine for there to be a weird hipster Mexican restaurant like that, but not fine that it might actually be the most authentic one here.)
We did not make to the Night Market on the mainland this year, so my consumption of Glowing Food With LEDs In It is way down this year.
We went to the Fall Harvest Festival, where I beheld an absurd squash; several dozen entrants in the Funniest Vegetable Shape competition, all of which resembled butts; a tiny white duck sleeping in an empty vanilla ice cream container, and a bunch of humans betting on where a cow would poop. I entered one of Moustache the Chicken's weird cigar-shaped eggs in the Weirdest Egg competition, but did not place.
We actually made it to the always inconveniently-scheduled Apple Harvest Festival this year. I admired these Long Apples and various pink-fleshed apples, but the long boys were already gone from the tasting, and the pink-fleshed trees ripen pretty late and weren’t ready for sharing. Of the varieties we tried, we were especially impressed with the Kogetsu;
juli has already tracked down some Kogetsu budwood to add to our orchard. The educational apple disease display was great; it included "pesky neighbour children" and "escaped goats" as apple diseases.Someone on the island was offering Chinese Tea Ceremony classes, which we wanted to take, but they did not respond to my emails. We prefer the Japanese tea aesthetic, but any tea ritual is good.
Thanksgiving we were visited by
yam, who brought an entire giant lumpy rolling suitcase of quince across the ocean, securing her place in the epic legendarium of the Best Thanksgiving Guest Ever. yam - it turns out - hates mushrooms, so we had to improvise, as we’d planned to put various wild mushrooms in absolutely everything. What’s Thanksgiving without a bit of panic? We saved all the legendary pelagic quince seeds for planting; yam’s family has a really nice breed that smells like pineapples and roses.For Diwali,
juli used her cyberpunk fixer powers to turn up a desi family selling sweets out of their home in downtown Victoria, including definitely non-traditional Oreo burfee, which were the best. It was the height of the Russula brevipes season, so we also celebrated Diwali with the Feast Of A Thousand Russulas.Fantasies
Hey, you know what's even less interesting than a list of foods someone has eaten? A list of someone's dreams about food!
I recorded 152 dreams this year. January at the left to December at the right. Green bars represent dreams about planting or harvesting; orange bars are dreams about pumpkins specifically; purple bars are dreams about mushrooms. I like how seasonal it is. Winter was quiet; in spring and summer I dreamt of the gardens; in autumn I dreamt of the pumpkins, and in winter of the forest and mushrooms.
This year I had a dream where someone told me, "Every food has three origin stories: the story of the ingredients, the history of its people, and the secret history," which sounds pretty cool, even though it sort of falls apart when you think about it, the way dream "wisdom" does.
Here are all the foods I dreamed about cooking this year (that I remembered, anyway):
- a wine-coloured grain, served in grey slate bowls on a candlelit table piled with evergreen branches
- an arbutus wine (?) juli and I poured into glasses for a ceremony of remembrance of the dead
- a rice dish made with fermented conch
- paella made to be shared with a departed friend
- a dark red condiment paste in a giant grey stone urn, which we pounded with giant stone pestles, assisted by mask-wearing bees
- an apple lasagna (?!)
- making pasta with a sentient pasta machine that had chosen juli and I as its acolytes
- pancakes
- breakfast cereal with tamarind chutney, hot sauce, and yogurt
- unspecified (nonexistant) traditional Cambodian mushroom dish made with small blue mycena mushrooms (also nonexistant)
Next year, I hope.
