foraging

Six on Saturday | 23rd September 2023

It’s been a gentle September, a couple of chilly nights aside. With the mellow temperatures and increased rainfall has come an amazing mushroom foraging season. The late autumn mushrooms are appearing earlier and the late summer mushrooms are still out in droves, so that I can’t walk from the house to the garage without coming across an edible mushroom. After only wandering within a 500-meter radius of the house for a couple of hours, I had 4 full baskets totaling 6.26kg of mushrooms. Guess who is spending the weekend preserving all that?

1. The golden chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius) is plentiful in Finnish woodlands and easy to spot once you know what you’re looking for. This year, they have gone completely nuts. Clumps are growing on the neighbor’s lawn. I took out the garbage and came back with a handful of chanterelles. Luckily, they are also our favorite and can be used in countless different ways. Mushroom pasta and risotto are especially popular in our household.

2. Funnel chanterelles (Craterellus tubaeformis) have been growing very large this year, many as big as the yellows. They can pretty much be substituted for each other in just about any recipe. The funnels usually don’t start sprouting until next month, but I’m not complaining.

3. Another chanterelle relative, the hedgehog mushroom is also plentiful in our woods. The one in the picture is the more common Hydnum repandum but we also have a clump of Hydnum rufescens growing under our clothes drying rack. These first three are all pretty much interchangeable in recipes and have very similar flavors, though I like the firm texture of the hydnums the best.

4. A group picture of all the different species sorted into their own baskets. Also included so I can show the two porcinis (Boletus edulis) I found next to the swing set in the top left basket.

5. These are not the yellow and red ‘Jackpot’ gladiolus I expected when planting these bulbs, but I prefer whatever it is I ended up with. They fit in better with the color scheme of the rest of my plants, honestly. Don’t tell that to my son, though — he chose the bulbs because he likes orange.

6. The double red begonias finally decided to show themselves, right when I’d given them up as a lost cause. I admit that they are pretty, though perhaps they might just stay on the terrace in a pot next year.

Thanks for visiting and please do check out what the other SoSers are doing over at Jim’s page!

Dandelion Jelly Time

For the past few years, I have been looking forward to the end of May because it means… jelly-making time! We’ve always observed an unofficial sort of No-Mow May, if only because things don’t really dry out and start growing until June anyway. Even the weeds take a while to get going this far north, so there doesn’t seem to be any point in fueling up the mower. Meanwhile, our lawn got a lot of impatient glares as I kept peeking out to see if there were enough fluffy yellow blooms yet to warrant getting out of my jam jars.

And finally, at the end of last week, there they were! Which was good, because our supply from last year was just about depleted. Out of all the flower jellies I have experimented with, dandelion was the only one that leaped to “be sure to make enough to last for the year” status. It tastes like honey, but in a scoopable jiggly format, which makes it especially kid-friendly.

There are tons of recipes online for making floral jelly, so I’m not going to format one here. My food blog days are far behind me and this is mostly a diary to share with family and friends. Also, I use a mishmash of US and EU measurements that I’m sure will annoy people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Right! I make my infusions in 1.8L IKEA jars because we have so many of them around for storing dry goods. Each one gets 4-4.5 cups of dandelion petals. I think one of the best parts of making this jelly is sitting in a patch of flowers on a sunny day, lazily plucking petals and listening to audiobooks.

Once the jar is full, it’s filled with boiling water and steeped for 24 hours. It gets moved to the fridge after it cools down a bit. Actual cooking process, speed run: 8 cups infusion, 1.5 teaspoons citric acid, 35g pectin powder, and 7 cups sugar. With bulk pectin powder, I find it easier to mix half the sugar and all the pectin in a shaker, then slowly stir it into the warm infusion. Everything dissolves so much easier that way. When the liquid is looking smooth, turn the heat up and stir in the rest of the sugar, then let it boil for one minute. Meanwhile, the hot water canner is warming up the jars and the lids, which are then pulled out just in time to be filled with jelly. They are processed for 10 minutes, then tucked away in the root cellar to set and store.

What do we use all that jelly for? Sandwiches, mostly. I also like it in porridge and yogurt. The picture above is of homemade peanut butter and dandelion jelly sandwiches from a couple of summers ago. Which reminds me, I really should be make more bread this summer…