Forest Gold

With commercial pickers behind every tree, it's becoming harder and harder for a simple lover of wild mushrooms to harvest enough for "a bowl of soup and a fry-up" (as I like to term the amount I try to gather every fall). I set out before noon, and before I'd gone half a mile up a trail which has served me well the last several years, I was saying, "It's still too green. I'm too early by a week or two." At the same time, I was having an internal argument, with one voice saying, "Turn around, go home," and another saying, "When have I ever been one to turn around on a hike?" For me, that's almost unthinkable, but there I was, thinking it. "I'm getting old," I reproached myself, forcing my feet forward. Just then, I spotted a button-sized chanterelle, one of only half a dozen mushrooms of any type I'd seen so far. I scanned the surrounding area and...what?! There, on a mound of moss, were half a dozen decent-sized chanterelles which someone had cut and left behind! From their condition, I guessed they'd been cut yesterday, and having been out in the cold night air, they were still fresh and succulent. I dug my perhaps-bag out of my pack and loaded them in. Then I spotted a couple more a little deeper into the grove. All thoughts of turning around disappeared. I had enough already for either a bowl of soup or a fry-up, but not both. I collected a few more before reaching my turn-around point (where, incidentally, I did my daily tai chi routine on the bridge in the company of a woolly caterpillar of some sort). I arranged my collection on a mossy log for the photo, and then on the way back, added another 6-7 which I could then spot by being in a different angle of the light. As it turned out, I had a very large bowl of soup and a whopping fry-up from this, my first (and possibly only) mushroom hunt of the year. Stripping the forest of its gold is not my way.

Return to Ring Cycles

It has taken me this long a) to decide how I wanted to finish the edges of the Ring Cycles quilt, and b) to push my principles aside because buying fabric meant having to shop at Cult Central (otherwise known as Hobby Lobby). The store gives me the creeps. The religious atmosphere is stifling, to say nothing of the air of intolerance the employees project as they "profile" me from my short hair and less-than-feminine mode of dress. But I was desperate. I will not buy fabric sight unseen, and since Ben Franklin announced closure of their Bonney Lake store, their selections have dwindled substantially. Likewise, the options at Michael's are limited. Thus, I found myself forced to go to Hobby Lobby, where I suppressed the urge to lace my conversations with profanity for reaction's sake as I requested a 5 1/2 yard cut of lavender cotton broadcloth. That was enough for a border and the backing.

Laying it out meant clearing the floor in the back bedroom, and even then, I couldn't spread out the full width/length. With Merry locked out, I first basted the quilt top to a piece of white muslin to keep the edges of the lavender border from showing through, and then I basted a second time to attach the border strips. I am now in the process of appliquéing the quilt top to the border by hand. It's going fairly quickly. I'll be spending the winter months quilting in the hopes of putting this one in at least one fair next autumn.

Jellied Beef

Since I first made a post regarding jellied beef in February 2025, I have made some tweaks to the recipe which reproduce almost exactly the sandwich meat I preferred when growing up. The product had completely disappeared from grocery store shelves by the mid-70s, nor could it be found in butcher shops. I finally found a recipe for "Jellied Melange" in the Encyclopedic Cookbook, but it used chicken rather than beef. Even my first try at recreating my childhood favourite was "close enough for gov'mint work," but I decided to give it another go with some beef stew meat I've been archiving in my freezer as "too expensive to use." Given the rapidly rising cost and the potential introduction of "mystery meat" courtesy of the current administration, this may well be the last beef I eat. I'm going to enjoy every last bite!

It's a fairly simple recipe, and this is my adaptation of it:
1 lb. beef stew chunks
1 16 ounce can beef broth
1 cup water
2 envelopes Knox unflavoured gelatin
1/4 cup water
1/2 tsp. onion powder
salt and pepper

Combine the beef broth and water. Add the beef and simmer it for an hour and a half, or until it can be easily shredded with a fork. Remove the meat from the broth. Add salt, pepper and onion powder to the broth and reduce it to roughly 2 cups. Meanwhile, soften the gelatin in 1/4 cup water for five minutes, during which time shred the beef as finely as possible. Put the shredded meat in the refrigerator. Add the softened gelatin to the hot broth and stir until well dissolved. Put the broth in the fridge, and once it begins to set, stir in the cooled shredded meat (just like you'd do if you were adding fruit to Jello). Pour the mix into a lightly greased mold (I use a loaf pan) and chill until firmly set. You can easily increase the recipe if you'd like. Just use 1 envelope of Knox gelatin per each 1 cup of water.

Cinebar School Bell

Sometimes, geocaching puzzles and multi-caches can be solved using the internet. It's always worth a try, anyway, but in this case, not only couldn't I find any images of the plaque, Google couldn't even find a reference to the bell! Since I was going out for Chinese in honour of September Morn, I decided to pick up a few geocaches en route to the restaurant, and thought I'd try to get a leg up on this one. I got a little...miffed? annoyed? frustrated? that Google was so stupid it couldn't find a historical marker. I'm feeling rather rebellious at the moment (September brings out the pirate in my soul), so for future reference, here is the object in question, plaque and all. Another bit of information I'd like to impart to Google, yellow-bellied cowards that they are, is that Lake Ontario is owned by two countries. There's a boundary line running smack through the middle of the lake, so if you (Google) plan to call the US' half "Lake America," you can bloody well put "Lake Ontario" on the Canadian side of the line. And keep in mind that the US is the only country insisting on "Lake America" and "Gulf of America." The rest of the world understands that these renamings are nothing more than the conceits of a dog determined to lift his leg on every telephone pole in the neighbourhood.

September Morn

My customary greeting for this day hardly seems appropriate, given the fires raging in close proximity to where the best days of my life have been spent as part of my celebration of the Beautiful Month, but although my heart aches, I give you "A glad, good September Morn."

Onion-dyed Skein

The weather wasn't optimal for this solar-dyeing experiment, but I am pleased with the results. Ideally, it would have stayed hot for the full period, however, we moved into a cooling trend after just a few days. In all, the dye bath temperature was quite warm (I could still stick my hand in it) for the first 3-4 days of the 11 I left the yarn to steep, cooling to ambient (45-90 degrees) for the remaining time. I left the jar outside overnight, meaning it cooled down substantially and then had to re-warm during daylight hours, a slow process at best. This was 32 grams of handspun wool (Corriedale) with an equivalent amount of onion skins. I remembered to agitate it occasionally (maybe five times at most). Even so, the wool dyed very evenly.

Bike Caching

It's been a long time since I did any serious geocaching, but since they introduced "Treasures," I've started participating again, at least as a cache hunter. Collecting "Treasures" is kinda like collecting Pokemon, except you have to find a cache to earn one (and the requirements vary). Since I had business in Yelm this morning, I threw my bike in the car and, with twelve caches on my list, set off on a ride south from Rainier (town of). I found 11 of them. The last one was strongly defended by bees (I'm allergic), so I prudently retreated without giving it much effort. My ride wound up being about 7 miles in all, proving that the old Crow still has life in her yet.