Tag Archives: food

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Mmmmm

We hiked yesterday on the Olympic Peninsula and these are oyster mushrooms. My friend  knows about 16 edible mushrooms now. We found six edible kinds with the oysters in the lead. They are year round. I lost track of how many mushroom species we saw: black ones, lavender ones, coral mushrooms in orange and white and cream and yellow. Slimy looking mushrooms, hen of the woods that are past and falling, tiny orange ones the size of my fifth fingernail. Beautiful.

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Panoply

I took this for Photrablogger’s Mundane Monday #79 and then am delighted with Jithin’s post. I love the row of pans, a panoply of pans. Also the breakfast was fabulous. We were the second table occupied on Sunday morning, and many of the pans were in use by the time we finished!

I was in Bellingham just Saturday and Sunday to wish my daughter happy birthday. Who can identify the restaurant?

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Katy B’s Fruit Torte

Katherine White Burling was my maternal grandmother, and this recipe is attributed to her. I still have the small three ring binder that my mother gave me when I was in high school, explaining that my sister and I had to do some of the cooking. We told her what we wanted to make and she would write the recipe in our book and help us. I wrote this recipe out in the 1970s.

preheat the oven to 350 F

cream: 1 C sugar
1/2 C butter

while the butter is softening enough to cream, cut up fruit: apples, pears, peaches, rhubarb, or use berries…

Add: 1 C flour
1 tsp baking powder
salt
2 eggs

Spread in in a buttered, floured pan. Cover with chopped fruit: apples, pears, peaches. Today I am using rhubarb and a peach. I particularly like the tartness of rhubarb.

Sprinkle with sugar and lemon juice
Dot with butter on top.
Bake for 30-40 minutes, depending on your oven.
Cook until browned a little in the part that rises around the fruit, and when a toothpick comes out clean.

mmmmmm

For a while I lived at 7500 feet and had to alter recipes:
subtract 3 tablespoons sugar
use 3/4 tsp baking powder

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V is for vegan

V is for vegan, in my alphabet of feelings.

Wait, you say, I am not vegan.

Yes, but have you ever felt vegan? Have you ever felt vegetarian? Have you felt voracious?

We are very protective of our diets. When people make a big diet change, some become food fascists for a while. They can be very vocal about the change and about how their diet is endorsed by an on line doctor or naturopath or dietician and how everyone else should try it. Not everyone. Some people are very quiet.

Vegan isn’t in Webster 1913, though everything2.com has a number of writeups under the word vegan.  The definition at Dictionary.com:

noun
1. a vegetarian who omits all animal products from the diet.
2. a person who does not use any animal products, as leather or wool.
adjective

3. of or relating to vegans or their practices:  vegan shoes made of synthetic leather.

Have you ever tried being vegetarian? Vegan? Or are you firmly ensconced as an omnivore and sometimes even wish you were a carnivore…. Just for a moment, try being one that you’ve never tried. I have never tried being a vegan. What associations come up with the word and do they annoy you? Are they accurate or are they just assumptions attached to that word and that “group” of people. Maybe some vegans have no choice and not enough to eat.
My daughter is off to college soon and she plans to try being vegetarian. She says that it is partly that she just doesn’t like meat much and partly because meat is costly to raise and partly that she disapproves of eating meat… but she still likes fish and shellfish. “I will be a pescatarian,” she says, “except I may eat meat sometimes if I go to someone’s house, so that they don’t have to cook especially for me.”
My daughter got home from a three day orchestra trip and made breakfast: not vegan.
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DIY cat fud II

This is for Photrablogger’s Mundane Monday #50.

I crack the door in the early am and this is Boa Cat’s first spring mouse. She has a particular muffled call to tell me when she has a mouse. I love this picture because of the shadows and it’s not quite straight on and the light and silhouettes… This mouse was no longer cooperatively playful….

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Don’t panic, prepare

We need to help people with ebola in other countries: or else we won’t deserve and won’t get help when the United States is the center of an epidemic.

I am a member of a doctor website called Sermo. I rarely write there, especially after I found advertisements to medical equipment and drug companies saying that they could pay to put announcements and articles on the site and “reach doctors”. Also, apparently some doctors on the site think that it is “safe” to write things. Ha. It’s the internet, silly, the opposite of safe. Your words could get back to your patient, ok?

Anyhow, there was a survey and 75% of the doctors on the site who took the survey (I didn’t)  said we should stop flights from Liberia. I think they are wrong, are not compassionate, and I would cross them off my referral list as discriminatory “I’ve got mine, everyone else can go to hell.” selfish gits. I disagreed and said that the United States could be the center of an epidemic, easily. Could be. Will, some day. We need to treat our international neighbors as we want to be treated.

That being said, I am pleased to see the CDC and United States hospitals now stepping up and getting their hazmat suits on. The rest of us need to NOT PANIC.

If you want to do something, think about your communities emergency preparedness. Are you prepared?

1. Do you have a weeks worth of food, water, medicines, supplies? Do you update the supplies (ok, I have food from 2009. Time to update.)

2.Do you have a weather radio? (http://www.emd.wa.gov/publications/pubed/where_to_get_weather_radios.shtml)

3. Do you have a family meeting point? Do you have an out of state person that the family is to call to check in? That everyone knows about?

4. Have you subscribed to emergency notifications? (http://www.emd.wa.gov/publications/pubed/noaa_weather_radio.shtml)

5. Consider buying your community a shelter box. Or teaming with friends to buy one for the community and another for a disaster area. Our Rotary group buys at least one a year for international disaster relief. (http://www.shelterbox.org/   and http://www.shelterboxusa.org/)

6. Do you have skills? Can you set up a tent, cook food, do medical care, start a fire, build shelter? What skills could stand brushing up? Have you taken a first aid class recently? Have you taught your children these skills? Do you have neighbors that would need help? You would want someone to help your grandmother, who lives four states away. Adopt a local elderly person or couple that you would help……

The picture is my daughter and niece in 2009 in a 19 pound canoe that is very tippy. They only tipped it over on purpose. They both have a lot of skills, some learned at cabins in Ontario, Canada. The cabins are one room and could also be described as shacks: but the kids get to use tools, paddle canoes, start fires, sleep in a tent……

My parents taught care of the tent so well that I have a kelty tent that my sister and I set up, took down and used, and it still does not leak. It is more than 40 years old! Aluminum poles, no shock cords and a fly. Excellent.