King boletes, chanterelles, and grand friends

We spent a wonderful, sunny, and warm weekend in Oregon hitting up the mossy forests for some serious mushrooming. For some reason the traffic gods were with us and for the first time ever (?) we drove straight through Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia without stopping. This is rare people. Very rare. Our first stop was Corvallis. We met up with Erik and his good friend Dan and headed straight out to dinner for some tasty Indian food. Corvallis also has a few damn good bars that Erik wanted to expose us to, including the local brewpub called Block 15 and another tasty bar (I forgot the name) with an amazing espresso stout on tap.

The next day was Friday and all our friends in OR had to work, so Jay and I headed to a nearby local hiking spot to try and find some mushrooms (after all, this was the goal of the weekend). We found mushrooms everywhere without even covering much ground including the scaly pholiota in the bottom photo above (you can't eat these but they are are gorgeous). Once Erik was finished with working we all piled in his car and drove west to Newport, OR where our friends Mike and Jennifer live.

Julie and her perfect little king bolete

Our first stop was Jennifer's place - right on the freakin' beach! It was gorgeous! Her parents were visiting and it had been a few years since we had seen them, which leads to long and lovely conversations. Plus, Jennifer had scored on a bunch of boletes for dinner! Once we had gorged on mushroom burgers and wine, Jennifer's parents headed off to bed and we hit the beach for a late night walk. The walk turned into tossing a glowing frisbee back and forth which took a short break when Jay, while chasing the disc, tripped over a log he couldn't see in the dark. After we confirmed he was O.K. we mostly laughed at him and continued playing. Fun stuff.

The next day we woke up to a stormy coast and misty weather. Our breakfast was incredible - duck eggs mixed with boletes and rustic homemade bread.  Jennifer headed out after breakie to chill with her parents and we took off to visit our friend Mike. It is great having so many friends in close proximity to each other in OR! Aside from the obvious fun of chillin' with friends we don't see very often, we still had the mushroom goal. We all decided that we wanted to find boletes for our daytime activity and Mike knew exactly where to take us.  Hee hee hee.

You can see that Mike knows where to go to get the king boletes! We spent hours walking slowly through the forest and meadows, looking for the elusive bolete. I performed so many squats to look under trees that my legs were a tiny bit sore the next day. Awesome! But the time and patience paid off and we left with a ton of boletes for dinner. Before we headed back to Mike's place though we stopped at the Newport bridge to have a beer and watch some loons chillin' out in the water.

Loons in winter plumage

Here is the product of a tough day with friends in the forest. You can tell we were pretty stoked about our catch. Mike, on the right, is demonstrating what a perfect king bolete stem looks like. One thing I have not mentioned about these mushrooms yet is that humans are not the only animals that enjoy mushrooms. Flies like them too.....and boletes seem to be their favorite. So if it is warm out and the boletes are poking up, special treats are commonly found in the boletes that humans typically don't like to see in their food. If you cut open a bolete and see lots of holes in it, well, someone else is probably living in there as well. So Mike has this grading system that made us laugh, but it does help him figure out if he wants to eat the schroom in a damn tasty and fancy meal or if it should be pureed in a soup or used as stock. In this goofy photo he is showing off the "grade A" schroom. I should note, in case some of you never want to eat a wild mushroom again, that we toss the badly infested schrooms. I'm not so interested in them.

We stayed up until 2am processing mushrooms and having a bit of non-mushroom related fun too. It is easy to see how happy Jay was this weekend!

For dinner Mike had prepared some gourmet pizza dough and we processed pounds and pounds of boletes. The pizza was thick in boletes....and very tasty.

The next day we had to drive home, but we were addicted to mushrooms and decided to try and get some chanterelles. Can you see how many we found in this photo above? You can practice your mushroom skills - there are a ton in this photo..... at least nine. Yummy.

Without putting much effort into it - we all filled our bags and baskets. Mike was lounging in the forest while I, the slowest hunter of all, tried to finish filling my bag. He is showing off the best chanterelle I found - we called it the "goblet" for obvious reasons.

Forty-five pounds and way later in the afternoon than we expected to leave, we were happy mushroom hunters. Erik served up his fantastic homebrewed porter and we celebrated wild mushroom heaven.

Jay and I came home with just under 20 lbs. of chanterelles that needed to be processed. But we went straight to bed! So the next day we were up until 1am (or 2am??) dealing with all the chanterelles. I made a cream of chanterelle soup and a rustic bread with spent grain from brewing. We topped it off with an oaky chardonnay, although I'm thinking a red wine like a pinot noir might have been a better pairing. Feel free to tell us what you think!

Since the big hunt, I've been in Vancouver, B.C. at the Salish Sea Ecosystems Conference. I just got back to some very happy kitties and Lester is currently occupying my lap. I was glad to see all of my men!

If you want to see a ton of photos of mushrooms, go here: https://picasaweb.google.com/111221596171793333099/October2011 and scroll toward the bottom of the month.

Mountain Loop Road and the lack of mushrooms

 Before I describe our mushrooming (or lack of) trip this past weekend I thought I would reflect on attempting to grow tomatoes in Washington. Tomatoes hate Washington. It is just too freakin' cold in the summer for tomato love. So I had this tomato plant... It grew into a giant and produced nothing. Until mid-August when Jay's mother noticed, during her visit, tiny little tomatoes growing. Just this week, I picked them because it was dropping into the 30s at night. So I ended up with a bowlful of almost ripe or fully green tomatoes. But lucky us! They like the gorgeous glass bowl (wedding present!) and are ripening in our house. The moral of the story - I only buy cherry tomatoes for next year.

 Now onto the mushrooms - I'm sure that is what you really want to hear about anyway! Well, there isn't much to say! We found tons of mushrooms that were new to us and we were not willing to eat any of them without some expert around to tell us we wouldn't end up on the toilet all night. But I think a bunch of them were edible! Like this lovely purple mushroom to the left. We think this is a blewit and they are supposed to be good to eat, but we were not brave enough. It was fun to see them though! I also found tons of milk caps and russulas. Many of these are supposed to be tasty as well, but some can make you sick. Again, we left these behind too. *Sigh* Finally, we did find some edibles! The Pig's Ear below is a gorgeous mushroom that is good when it is young except for one problem. Our guidebook says "often riddled with maggots".....so we left those alone too because these were not "young" looking specimens.

So we stuck to what we knew!  Our friends Ralph and Jackie had joined us for the day - which made finding nothing even more fun. At the end of the day we had chanterelles, hedgehogs, and oyster mushrooms. The best part? There was enough for each couple to go home with for one meal. We got skunked, but not totally skunked!

Pig's ear!

Scaly pholiotas, I think, on this big old tree.

Jackie, Jay, and Ralph pretend that we got a ton of mushrooms! Yup.

Old friends, new friends....and pesto bread

What a weekend! Our dear kitty, Darwin, had to have his massive canine tooth pulled on Friday. So we were in the house on Friday evening, kitty-sitting a toothless fluff. On Saturday we chilled with the fluff again in the morning and then headed to the Anacortes Oktoberfest to sample brews from many local and far away breweries (within WA and OR). My grand scheme for next year is to volunteer for the event and get in free! Hee heeee.

On another totally random note.....
Thanks to Jay's family reunion back over Labor Day and a cousin's informative partner, I have finally found a bread recipe that seems to work for me! Ahhhh.....the only bummer is that it doesn't use sourdough starter. But at this point, I don't care. We will use our sourdough starter for our yummy pizza crusts and the bread dough recipe for artisan breads. I used the dough the other day to make a pesto bread. We ate tomatoes from our tomato plant on the bread (yes, the tomatoes are just starting to ripen and die here all at the same time....too damn cold for tomatoes).

Cool eh?? I suck at making artisan bread, but I'm not feeling so crappy anymore.

Jay, Kat, Jenni, and Finn

On Sunday we drove to Seattle and scooped up Jenni and her tiny son Finn. Jenni was down from Alaska visiting family in the area and we were able to sneak in a visit too! At this point you could also start singing "it's a small world after all" because that kept happening to us today! A friend of mine from Antarctica, Jordan, had introduced me to his friend Kat who lives in Seattle. Jordan understood that I was searching for more friends in WA and thought Kat shared a lot of similar interests with us.  He was right! Kat and I emailed back and forth a few times, but had not actually managed to meet yet. Next thing I know, I find out that many years ago, Kat and Jenni did research together at Shannon Point Marine Center - where Jay now works. So we ended up all getting together for Thai food and a walk in Seattle. What fun! But it gets better! Just as we pulled into the small parking lot at the Thai place, I looked into the little outdoor seating area at the coffee joint next to the Thai place. I stared a bit at the dude in the hoody and realized that it was our friend Ralph and his girlfriend Jackie! So random! Jackie and Ralph had been in Vietnam over the entire summer (as part of Ralph's MS work). Long story short, after lunch and a walk with Jenni and Kat, we headed over to UW's campus and scooped up Ralph. A few beers were consumed as we caught up on life, Vietnam, and such.

Another lovely weekend. We have a good life.

Sucia Island

Harlequin ducks (note the lucky girl to the right)

We have been waiting for the right weekend to paddle over to Sucia Island from Orcas Island (in the San Juans). The crossing is supposed to be sketchy if the weather is not good. This is easy to deal with when the San Juans are in your backyard - we just waited until the forecast was on our side. The 2-mile crossing to the island was like paddling over mercury. It was flat calm, overcast with funky light, and just plain gorgeous. The harbor porpoises around our kayaks were an obvious thrill too! When it is as quiet of a day as it was when we crossed, you can even hear the little marine mammals taking a "poooof" of a breath. Sweet.

The sandstone rock formations on Sucia Island were an unexpected treat. It was so cool to paddle right up under the lips of these walls. Jay, as you can see below, even caught a sandstone wave.  In a skirt! A spray skirt that is.

This is our campsite in Snoring Bay (Sucia Island); you can see our little tent on the right of the photo. We camped on a spit of land that connected two little islands to one another. Despite the rain that day, we even managed to have a fire and play a game of chess on our travel set. I won. I never win and that produced many interesting tidbits of thoughts from Jay. =)

Our sunset that night was out of this world. 

We woke up in the morning to a ton of fog - not good for a 2-mile crossing in open water. So we waited for the fog to burn off while hiking around part of the island. We found this awesome area of sandstone cliffs with these odd head-like balls coming out of the walls. It was fascinating and it really reminded me of the Moraki Boulders we saw in New Zealand a few years ago.

We don't plan on going too far this upcoming weekend - there is a beer festival right here in Anacortes. Obviously, we must attend.

All the photos can be seen here: https://picasaweb.google.com/julie.barber1/October2011?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCLrPvL7T2JrR8gE&feat=directlink