seasonal eating – Page 3

Mushrooms

I absolutely love mushrooms! And mushroom hunting. Self-picked mushrooms and self-prepared food with them are something totally different from the canned mushrooms that we meet on pizzas, for example… – No wonder many people believe that they don’t like mushrooms at all… 🙂

And probably we all know how dangerous mushrooms can be – that is a fact indeed! We, me and my boyfriend, got our first facts on mushroom hunting, and bolete mushrooms or porcini mushrooms in particular, when we were mushroom hunting for the first time, with my boyfriend’s father in Eastern Finland. After that we have used a mushroom guide book and the internet, both. 🙂

This blog post of mine is not a proper guide to these two types of mushrooms that I have in the pics below, so don’t eat mushrooms based only on knowledge you get from here! – I’m just having a bit of fun with mushrooms here in this blog post, with a little bit of information! 🙂

The first five pics I took on our front yard on Friday.

We have numerous shaggy ink caps on our front yard every year. They have their own special place there. 🙂 Shaggy ink caps are quite charming and funny mushrooms; they have many phases when it comes to their appearance.

First they are just white, short and chubby ‘trunks’. Then they grow to be tall and thin mushrooms with a proper cap, which then starts to melt away, to dissolve, to drip down, as black liquid or ‘ink’.

These mushrooms are edible when they are very young and white, that mushroom in the pic above is already too old. We have never eaten these, but they say, these are quite good edible mushrooms when they are young.

This ‘ink’ of shaggy ink caps actually was used as ink in days of old. 🙂

Ink dried up?

The rest of the pics I took on Saturday night, after a walk in the forest. – We came out of the forest with our hands full of woolly milkcaps.

Fluffy mushrooms! Cute and delightful! 🙂

Woolly milkcaps are fully edible, but they must be boiled, and they must be boiled longer than some other mushrooms. Woolly milkcaps must be boiled about 20-30 minutes. The taste of raw woolly milkcaps is strongly bitter and raw woolly milkcaps don’t agree with one’s stomach, at all. Cooking, boiling and rinsing the mushrooms removes the poison from them. The taste of woolly milkcaps after boiling them is very delicious! We cooked a creamy sauce with these.

Mushrooms always have funny and cunning names. In Finnish, for example, this woolly milkcap has two names – other one of them is karvalaukku – fur bag, literally. 🙂

-Leena

A plum fruit in the garden, autumn thoughts coming, too

One delightful plum fruit in our garden! Our plum tree really has grown and ripened one fruit this year. Well done, wonderfully happened, as this is the first whole year of the tree in our garden. It did have more than hundred flowers in spring, but I was hoping to get only two fruits, because that’s how it goes in the early years of the fruit tree’s life… Yeah well, I was actually hoping to get “any fruit”, so one purple fruit in the tree is a marvel. It looks quite amazing! 😀

My previous blog posts about the tree here and here.

This is even more amazing, because we already thought, at one point, that also this fruit had gone – one day I just couldn’t find it in the tree. I said that to my boyfriend, and he also searched the tree, and said that he couldn’t find the fruit either. What are we? A couple of morons? 😀

All of a sudden then, the fruit was there again, on another day… And it still grew bigger. Then suddenly it started to change colour from green to purple, and once it had started to do it, the colour change happened very quickly.

Wow, oh dear oh dear, I’m grateful! 🙂

So hey! It’s already September! But I’m actually quite content with the fact – the autumn may begin. 🙂 And in Owlnature, too. I was away from here for a while, because I had the moving in and out project, or an ordeal, as it turned out to be, a bit. 😀 – Too big closets to store your rubbish there, years of dirt in some spots in one’s student apartment, and so on, but it’s all over now. 🙂 But I do feel that I should have started, everything, that I’ve been doing now, and that I’m about to, hopefully, do next, already a year ago… Buuut enough of this right now, maybe a bit of reminiscing the old things later, again, and we have to rearrange this whole country home of ours here, too, every room, now. Aaand I still have some flower pics and some other pics, too, from August, that I’ll reminisce here in my blog a bit. And for this autumn I indeed have some plans, other than cleaning the house and everything, too, but let’s see what happens – just taking things easy… but very, very, seriously… ;D – And I can say that it all comes down to the fact that I want to grow mentally and I want to learn to do new things, too. And no matter how diminutive the new things are, it’s always an adventure. – Let us not destroy our inner child!

-Leena

Harvesting here, harvesting there…

Hello from Turku! It’s this moving in and out project again that I’ve been at… and now I’m saying hello from here, with a couple of pics.

My morning coffee here today. This is the last coffee pic that I post from here… so, that is why I’m so eager to say hello to the world, from here, now. 🙂

I just say that it’s truly interesting, enlightening and… educational to go through your belongings and your… rubbish, when you have lived in the same apartment for years, and if the place has been your student apartment… whoa! 😀

This was yesterday afternoon in our country home before heading for Turku. Strawberry ice cream and berries – raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries fresh from our garden, and blueberries fresh from the woods next to our garden.

And we’ve started digging up, harvesting, our potatoes. Home-grown potatoes look always so sweet and hilarious. 🙂 And they taste so delicious! Oh, and that lovely soil, too, like in this pic that I took here in my apartment in Turku today, before I started washing the potatoes a bit.

-Leena

Blueberry gold, the next peony poppy, the very last peony flower

We’ve been doing quite a lot of Nordic walking, but I don’t always take pics of it… On Thursday I took a pic – I tried to demonstrate what we’ve been doing quite a lot lately; Nordic walking and during that activity picking and eating blueberries, too (isn’t that a healthy and pleasant combination 😉 ) in the forest where one of our favourite walking trails goes.

The starting and ending point of the trail is by the lake Pyhäjärvi, I took this pic after our walk – trying to get some of my blueberry fingers, too, in the pic. 😀 This previous blog post about Nordic walking was from the same forest, our raven forest near our home. We just love it! – There’s always a raven or many ravens croaking. Once we heard, and saw, many many ravens. We tried to count them; there was at least 15 if not over 20 ravens dashing, flying and croaking. Amazing it was. Ravens are both funny and noble birds. 🙂

A muffin again yesterday evening… We’re lucky enough to have a lot of wild blueberries in our back garden, too. Yesterday evening we made some blueberry muffins. Muffins of gluten free flour; whole grain oat flour. Oat is the best! 🙂 So delicious and healthy. And traditionally Finnish!

Two pics of the next peony poppy flower today. This, too, is one of my ‘wild poppies’. This was hit with rain – yesterday, heavily…

And the very last peony flower – just had to take pics today… Yesterday I was hoping that this would survive the rain and grow bigger…

…so that I could cut it for drying today. And that was what I already did, because I thought the flower is big enough to cut, to save, now. The other peonies that I cut for drying earlier, are still doing (drying) just fine. 🙂

-Leena

Coffee along with some strawberries, raspberries… and peony poppies

Today’s morning coffee pic with some strawberries and raspberries.

Wonderful time of the year is this… We get lots of berries (hmmm, or them fruits… but let’s not get into that berry-fruit terminology right now… :p ), enough for two people to enjoy many berries every day – raw from the bushes – we’re not preserving them, just eating them when they are fresh, sweet and juicy and healthiest. And oh, the scent! And yes, I’m still dreaming of planting more strawberries – their season goes too fast in Finland every summer…

The next five pics I took between Saturday and today. Peony poppies. These are my ‘wild’ poppies that are already blooming, completely unattended – they have grown from the seeds of the poppies I had last summer – we threw them around randomly in our garden. And some of the poppies now blooming have also grown as a surprise to us – beside the flower bed in which I planted poppies last summer. The poppies are growing through stones and thick soil, I didn’t expect that…

I love peony poppies, too. 😉 They also have a charming and distinctive scent.

Someone else, too, was enjoying themselves. 🙂

I also, of course, planted peony poppy seeds this summer, but the plants of those are still growing…

You can feel that you are in Hawaii, if you just put your mind to it:

Headstrong. Focus.

Well, you just can! – You can lie on a Hawaii textile… like our furry princess in the pics I took yesterday… Or you can plant your own garden, your dreams and reality, outdoors and indoors, and you’ll have the world around you all the time… 🙂

-Leena

Some sun internally and a few delights in the garden right now

Today it was again time to get some sun… internally. 😉

Egypt meets Finland… Navel Oranges are so juicy and delicious, and cheap at this time of the year, even in Finland. 😀 After some heavy rain today I was sitting on the wet garden bench again, devouring my orange and after that I took a short tour with my camera around our garden.

Leopard’s Bane or doronicum has started to grow. Waiting for the yellow flowers, last spring there were so many…

Yesterday I noticed that one part of our chives has started to grow, too. I tasted a bit of one of them – the taste was so good and fresh!

The first yellow bud of the narcissus that was in my previous blog post.

This I’ve been watching the whole winter and even now; the blackberry bush in our garden has a few very strong leaves – they have endured there on the twigs the whole time. All the other bushes and trees have lost all their leaves many months ago. 🙂

-Leena