Many new projects.
I harvested one of the camas bulbs, which I had written about in my last blog entry, a million years ago. The plant didn't seem to have multiplied, so I let the rest stay put, and hopefully will be able to divide them later.
I wasn't going to dig the traditional pit-fire for my one lonely little camas bulb, but I wanted to steam it for a long time as indigenous peoples did (and do), to make the starches more digestible. I may have destroyed a pot in the process-- I burned the bottom terribly by letting all the water evaporate when I wasn't paying attention-- but the results were tasty.
I've been doing some gardening/landscaping work across town, and one of the perks is bringing home edible weeds I find on the job. The most strange and exciting of these has been mallow root, which I transformed into something you could, with a bit of imagination, call marshmallows. It was a pan of sticky sweet, slightly dirty marshmallow goo. But it was a bit runny and a bit too marshmallowy -- I think it needed a higher eggwhite:mallow root ratio. After thorough sampling I ended up using it in fudge. Which was awesome.
We inherited three new chickens, and slaughtered one -- Swinkles. She was quarrelling with the other hens; perhaps we shouldn't have named her after an argumentative former roommate. Also, we had deduced that she was the only one pecking the eggs, and we didn't want the others to pick up the habit. Chris wasn't down to join in the carnage, so Jess and I rolled up our sleeves and did the deed. It was intense but went smoothly, and in the end we had a bunch of egg yolks (weird, right?!), a ton of chicken stock, a chicken pot pie, and a lot of chicken fat to cook with. Thank you Swinkles.
Chris and I went on an adventure with Cascadia Wild's ethnobotany club, and harvested mussels and seaweed. The coast is such a bountiful wild food garden that we left scratching our heads as to why we had never harvested there before. Although maybe I should speak for myself . . . Chris wasn't a huge fan of either the seaweeds or the mussels. The seaweeds, to be sure, will be better as condiments and in miso than just eaten on the shore; and the mussels require a little bravery before you can enjoy their incredibly vagina-looking deliciousness. I loved them though, with butter, garlic and camas.
A wild northwest luncheon.
