Hello and Welcome!

How are you all today? I hope very well.

Today we went across the lake to replenish our vegetable supplies, and to gather, well, anything that we could find in the wilds.

And by wilds, I mean hedgerows and woods and fields.

We do this every year, with each season.

So we packed up some coffee into a mason jar- it was iced coffee with almond milk and cinnamon and chocolate dusting. It smelled like a café.  There aren’t any cafés here, so we make our own iced or frothy drinks. It is good to have these special things. Almost like going out for a drink, except far cheaper.

This autumn, so far, we’ve found juniper berries.

In the past, we put them in venison sausages, made ourselves from off-cut parts. We don’t hunt. But we do take in parts from others that do. Why waste the meat?

We found sumac. No, silly, not poison sumac. This is staghorn sumac and it grows in fields that are overgrown, in the same places that you would find brambles. They are red fuzzy cones that taste citrusy. They are loaded with vitamin C and we use it for tea sometimes, but mostly for kombucha flavours.

We found crab apples. And apples from old homesteads that were run down and bespeckled. Those are the apples you would want for cider. If you had a press. I made two kinds of apple butter. One of which I added dried figs and let slowly simmer for hours. These would be good when dressing up some cinnamon rolls, but I did use them to make the best scones. We are conquering gluten-free baking now, and I must say- we are doing better at it. There have been so many flops. Stodgy cakes and weird cookies.

Finding elderberries to make wintertime syrup was a win. And finding grapes to make a sought after ingredient in good cooking called Verjuice... I have never made Verjuice before, but I understand it is a tart ingredient made from unripe grapes. It is used as a condiment, and to deglaze a sauce. We gathered a handful of those and I aim to find more. Apparently, this was also popular in the middle ages.

We haven’t happened upon any mushrooms, but still have some reishi from last year that we tinctured. Next week, we will be heading to different mountains, and will certainly be on the lookout for more. That trip will surely result in getting a bunch of squash and pumpkins from one of our favorite farmstands.

My dog looooves butternut squash, and no matter how many I buy and try to store, by February, she has no more squash left and is a sad pup. Healthy, but, no squash mixed in with her dog food.

I’ll be off now, thanks for reading. Tell your dog we said hello.