we get excited when it snows in portland

(an alternative title for this post is "yes, elyssa, you will need to bring your long underwear")


Corey and I went for a little walk around our neighborhood Sunday afternoon to explore our new snow world. I was surprised by how rural and out-of-the-way it looks with snow everywhere.


The titular duck pond, frozen over.


I'm glad I don't live in Minnesota.


The 'burbs.


Some brave souls sledding.


Attention, all the funemployed: the Christmas tree farm is now hiring.


I can't decide if the giant cut-out Asian Santa at the Christmas tree farm is amazing or just a tiny bit terrifying.


Lots of snow-covered groves of trees and forest in the neighborhood.


What were these? Deer prints? Paw prints of a weird-footed dog? Shoe prints of a little kid wearing a really weird shoe? A disoriented peccary?


A picturesque holly from the Aquifoliaceae family.


You are not supposed to eat the snow.


I thought the sky looked really pretty when I took this photo. It's of the onion field near our house.


Walking home on the Narnia-like pathway.


Duck pond minus the likely very surprised and perturbed ducks.


Duck pond estates.


View from the living room window.

fankstiving

View from Black Hill, mistakenly called Black Mountain by the family all these years. Note: if you can climb it in 20 minutes, it is not a mountain.


La pareja feliz


When the tide is out, it's good for fishing. We did not catch any fish. We did, however, find and eat some delicious mussels and crab claws (don't worry, Corey researched the Internet for hours to make sure that our chances of getting hauled away to jail after hauling our bounty away from the beach would be virtually nil). We boiled them in hot water with salt, pepper, and cayenne, and then dipped in hot butter. Delish. I hope this isn't turning into a food blog, but I daresay we consistently find ourselves eating some pretty amazing meals.

Although they did not catch any fish, Corey and my younger brother did however successfully have long conversations with what J might call "the shaggy man" (more on J and his conspiracy theories later, hopefully, perhaps) and what Corey not-so-affectionately called "weird Californian hippies." Despite the shagginess, Corey gave away all his remaining stinky squid bait to them.


20 pounds of non free-range, non organic, Food-4-Less love.


The famous turkey in this infamous, eponymous portrait of my sister and I:



Corey and electric carving knife vs. 20-pounds Food-4-Less steroids


Corey: 1


Seconds before I mushed it all together and greedily slurped it down, smacking my lips eagerly and wiping my fingers off on my pants.


The happy family: near centennials, Generation X, Generation Whatever-a-Mid-80's-Birth-Is-Called, and Generation World of Warcraft (behind lens) Reprezentz.



Can you spot the monarchs of Pismo beach. Hint: those brown things that look like leaves? They're not.


Damn you global warming, and your 1-2 degree changes of temperature in a specific region.


Cindy McCain's birthplace. McCain is not nearly so old as the Ancient Ones; his outer shell has not yet even calcified.



Walking among the trees and on the pier of Pismo beach.


Local wildlife.


At the IHOP, the gourmet experience of lunch with my grandparents was complete.


Classy eating is free refills.


We watched the sky this weekend and saw lots of good stuff.


Man, look at this fat seal! This guy was so fat he just kind of rolled around in the water while the restaurant workers tossed him scraps! When he didn't like what they served him, like fish skins, he would just spit it lazily out and the seagulls and pelicans would squawk over it! (The subsequent 3-way tug-of-war that ensued between 2 seagulls and a pelican was equally entertaining to watch) He was so fat he could barely open his eyes, just had them in little slits! Ladies and gentlemen, this is the piniped version of the Dude!


Man, don't you just want to be an otter and lie on your back in the water with your little feet peeking out while your little kid white-faced otters roll around and splash and play behind you? What a life.


Or how about these rock squirrels? Man, I'd like a fat belly from granola bars (from a box that say best before 2005) and peanuts.


The surf was crazy on the jetty. I'm glad we didn't go fishing there. Even if the jetty is distinctively lacking in shaggy men.


More local wildlife (blue heron).


A post-Thanksgiving family portrait.

clamming quest

Corey and I went clamming this weekend with some friends in Seaside and had (to put it quite simply) a blast. We stayed in a little duplex right by the shore. The place is owned by one of J's (Corey's co-partner in the Mushroom Guys Milwaukie Farmer's Market enterprise) friends. From the doorstep, could walk straight out and head down to the beach. Much fun was had by all.


Little clam butts. We cut these off and used them as fish bait.


Slicing and peeling.


OK, so admittedly they look pretty gross. Kinda squishy, while simultaneously vaginal and phallic. But I promise you they were scrumpdiddlyumptious.


As picturesque as they come: the razor clam, soon to be in my belly (after 3+ hours of cleaning and preparing, minus cooking and hunting time)


The sea is good to us, as exemplified by her exquisite bounty.


Egging and breading.


The final product, fried to perfection and eaten with tartar sauce. So, so worth it.


Lacterius deliciosus, or a milkcap. The Russians dry it with salt and eat it like potato chips. Contrary to the scientific name, this mushroom is actually not that delicious, and was picked more out of novelty and curiosity rather than for a culinary purpose.


We walked by the seaside. I mean, we were in a town called Seaside. So, yeah.


For fishermen, maybe? In South America you see crosses on the sides of the road everywhere, which I kind of miss in the U.S.




Both of these are Amanita mascaria. These were everywhere! The Oregon coast is really pretty ridiculous. It must be in the top 10 most fertile mushroom habitats on the planet, if not #1.


We walked down to the jetty to go fishing.


Unfortunately the waves were a little crazy and wild. The sea is a harsh mistress.


The landscape felt straight out of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" for me.


The J-dar




I was excited we could see our shadows. The weather was beautiful and sunny all weekend; we really lucked out.


The terrible trio, representing three respective generations of mushroomery.


That white-capped dome is Mt. St. Helens!


Hygrocybe conica, or witches' hat.


The sun sets around 5pm now. We went clamming at night because of the low tide, setting out between 6-7pm. The tide won't be as low for another three months.


Getting our clamming equiptment ready. Basically, you stick that tube in the sand, wiggle your hips and huff and puff while you try to push it down as far as possible, press your thumb over the little hole at the top and then use all your strength (while trying not to strain your puny back and shoulder muscles) to pull it out of the ground. The tube sucks up the sand with suction, hopefully pulling the clam up with it. It usually took two to three times to get the little buggers. They like to burrow away quickly from you in the sand. It took me a while to catch one, but I got the hang of it once I learned what to look for in the sand: to me, it looked like a small indented volcano poking out, sometimes with water spurting out.


I wore my hiking boots because I was stupid and didn't bring any other shoes with me. They got very wet and sandy and smelly.


The moon was crazy that night. Huge and yellow and cheesy.


We sucked ourselves up a dungeness crab as well, much to our surprise. We were initially terrified to see this huge lump moving under the sand after we pulled the clam out. Much to our relief, it wasn't Cthulu.


Man-on-horseback, one of the few edible mushrooms around on the coast during this time of year.


We dined like kings all weekend, climaxing with this meal: halibut wrapped in prosciutto with spinach salad with blue cheese and pear. ........... words fail me ..........


Suzy Q, chief chef. My taste buds applaud her and bow down in eternal servitude.


Did I mention that there also was fresh crab, dipped in hot butter?

And to wrap this entry up, here are the mushroom guys themselves, with J balancing a mushroom on his nose while Corey attempts to push a mushroom into J's ear. Even on a clamming quest, mushrooms still have the spotlight with this crowd.

Mushroom hunting photos

Mushroom hunting at the coast with the Guidry boys, aka Corey and his father, whom he affectionately refers to as "Pops," among other things.


This shrew died shortly after this photograph. It was pretty traumatizing. It just lay down in the middle of the road and stopped breathing. Corey and I were like, "...did that just DIE?" We witnessed (and perhaps were the cause of) the passage of its soul into the Shrew Netherworld.


There are crazy trees in Oregon too.


Amanita phalloides, aka the death cap. DON'T EAT THIS MUSHROOM! IT WILL KILL YOU IF YOU EAT IT. This is one of the three deadly poisonous mushrooms in Oregon.


Foxgloves contain atropine, a tropane alkoloid. It has a similar chemical in it that's similar to the deadly amanita. It's a stimulant... when people die of drug overdoses, they inject a chemical similar to this into their hearts, and it gets their hearts beating again. Think Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction."


Amanita mascaria! The eponymous mushroom from popular culture and likely the most familiar mushroom in the world. It is thought of as being the soma of the Rigveda (an ancient Indian collection of Sanskrit hymns). There's a substance that people use call the "soma," which brings dreams. That's this mushroom right here. They were EVERYWHERE on the coast this week... never seen anything like it. They're mycorhizal, so they grow with the roots of trees. People would dry them and use them as Christmas tree decorations because they grow with pine trees. Let's hope Little Billy in the suburbs never got his fat Game Boy playing lips around any. Then again, let's hope he did.


The oyster, our hero from Ecuador, dwells here in Oregon as well.


Reishi (ganaderma lucidum)... I remember the first time I went mushroom hunting with the Brian and the Jess they found oodles of these... you can make a disgusting tasting but very healthy tea out of them... Corey taught the recipe to Don Delio (our shaman friend... god, that sounds weird! I can definitely say I never thought I would have a "shaman friend"). It's used for cancer treatment, immune disorders and for cleaning the blood and has been used in Asian medicine since ancient times. I love that phrase, "ancient times." It makes me think of the phase he is not nearly so old as the ancient ones.


A pristine chanterelle. God, we found so many this year! It was a bumper crop, as they say. Corey and Jay were gathering 40-50 pounds in ONE TRIP and selling them all on Sundays at the market. On Friday and Saturday nights our refrigerator would be full of giant paper bags, with stray pieces of dirty and grass all over the floor and kitchen counters.


A cauliflower mushroom. I'd never seen one of these before. Damn, they look weird. But they're also really good. Corey's friend and fellow mushroom partner in crime Matt gave us this one after finding four or five.


He fried some up for us and it was delicious, sweet and wonderful. Corey said that some people cook them in the style of pasta too... peeling them off and then boiling them in a big old pot.




Corey and Jay at the Milwaukie farmer's market. See that ghetto ass sign? Yeah, I made that, with tape from the Dollar Store.


Our latest bounty. Corey picked so many of them he was carrying them in his shirt and they were falling out. We had porcini burger for dinner last night. It made it all worth it, even the falling down the mountain 40 feet and landing in a blackberry patch.

if it's one thing I know, said El Bo, it's where the chanterelles do grow

Selling last Sunday at the Milwaukie Farmer's Market was really fun. Unfortunately it was absolutely freezing cold and raining. We made about a $90 profit, but everyone else who was working there said that it was by far the worst and slowest day the market had ever had. I could definitely understand that: there's no way I would have been there if I hadn't been selling.

Nevertheless, it was a great way to meet interesting people, despite the icy cold rain and my dazed slow chuchaki head from the dinner-wine-and-hottub party last night (such parties are seemingly slowly but surely becoming a Saturday-night tradition at the Duck Pond house, a good way of hanging out with friends and eating delicious fresh mushrooms collected that same day). I love being part of a new community. The farmer in the stall next to ours gave us a little tin of pesto, which was amazingly delicious and consumed by me that evening in 0.9 seconds. Another guy gave us an ... I can't remember the name of the fruit, you peel it and eat the tips of the leaves, and then the flower in the middle is the best part? I'm not on the top of my game today, apparently. But whatever it's called, we ate it last night with olive oil and butter and DA-HAYM it was good. It's a pretty sweet deal: whatever we don't sell, we trade with others and get amazing farmers' market food. I love sharing with other people and giving them the chance to try amazing new mushrooms, to see the nervous or heisitant expressions on their faces fade away when we tell them all the different things you can do with a chanterelle, a lobster, a matsutake. As I've said before, we always find more mushrooms we can possibly eat ourselves, anyway.

Corey and his mushroom-hunting partner-in-crime Jay went to the coast yesterday and only found a couple of porcini. It's still just a little too early, but it's good to see that a few are popping up! We had porcini on toast with red peppers for dinner last night. Corey also found some meadow mushrooms, which he's saving to cook for my mum tonight, because she once said that she and my grandad used to find and eat them when she was a little girl in England.

Porcini is Corey's favorite mushroom. It is pretty good. I have wonderful memories of my first time eating a porcini, in an omelette in Corey's apartment. Mmm. It was a porcini I had walked right by but that Matt had scooped up immediately afterwards, recognizing it's true, treasured identity. Then because Matt is a great guy he ended up giving it to me and Corey anyway. Anyway, believe it or not, I still haven't decided what my favorite mushroom is yet... I sure like that fried lobster Corey cooked that one time (MMM! better than potato chips!), and the grilled matsutake (so thick and indescribably cinnamony and faintly spicy). And, of course, you can never go wrong with the infallible chanterelle.

Corey an Jay went mushroom hunting today too, in one of their best spots, and found over 40 pounds of chanterelles, and 10-20 pounds of lobsters. Hopefully tomorrow we'll go get some more matsutake, and maybe even take my little brother along, to baptize him in the ways of the Hardcore Mushroom Hunting (wear boots, rain pants, and be ready to get soaking wet and freezing cold anyway). Crazy! Get ready, Milwaukie! I sure hope it's sunny on Sunday!

Some relevant updates, here from the PDX mycorenewal front:

- Went mushroom hunting with Corey and his dad on the coast. We experienced a moment of horror when we thought the porcini were infected with this terrifying white-powdery mold, but then much to our relief Corey deduced that they were another species, Old Man something, which is good because first of all it is far too early for the porcini to be out and second of all they are so delicious, a mold that killed them all would be tragic beyond words.

- We went to the Milwaukie Farmer's market last Sunday. Surprisingly, there was no culinary mushroom stand in sight! So we talked to the market managers, and it turned out they had a space they were more than eager enough to rent for us. The idea of going into the mushroom-selling business still feels a little hard for my brain to wrap around: very self-made man, little-house-on-the-prairie. But very appealing for my increasingly hippie-like brain. We found about 20 pounds of chanterelles and lobsters last Friday alone, so we have more than enough booty to share. We’re thinking of selling five-dollar units in little baskets. Most prices we’ve seen (at other markets and in Whole Foods and the like) seem outrageously expensive, like ten dollars for a pound of chanterelles (!). I guess that price can be considered a reflection of the labor that goes into retrieving those “golden treasures,” what with all the gas price drama. But such a price can really turn off people from ever trying wild-grown mushrooms.

- Don Delio (our shaman friend from Cuyabeno) called us at 1:30AM this morning, after we'd nodding off in the middle of an episode of "The Wire" (rented from the local public library). This would make it about 4:30AM Ecuadorean time. From what I could understand in my blurry, fuzzy head sleep-state, he was in Lago Agrio just calling to say hello. I hope everything's all right with him and his family, regardless... I can definitely say that I never thought I'd be awakened in the night from a phone call from a shaman. The experience was unhappily reminiscent of all those terrible "who will take the 3AM call???" advertisements airing on the idiot box.

Some more links-happy-go-clicky fun:
- In this current political climate, Chevron doesn’t want to be left out of the fun!

- The case continues to move forward (this article has an especially good summary of the extent of the contamination in the community, as well as of Chevron’s tricky-dicky dealings with the trial up to this point)

- This is interesting too, although I have to admit I had to look up “indict” just to be sure that I understood what the article was about (hey, don’t I seem refreshingly open and candid compared to most other “blog” “writers” with such an admission?). I like the plaintiff’s summary of Chevron’s supposed clean-up attempt as “merely dumping dirt on pits of oil and water rather than removing the pollutants.”

a list of things that are ecuatorianamente refrescante

- the little town between Quito and Ambato that seems to consist of nothing but ice cream shops, with brightly painted popsicles flaunting on every other concrete wall
- the salsa remix of ¨Billie Jean¨
- garbage cans shaped like clowns or cartoon characters´heads (the Bart Simpson one is particularly grotesque)
- Drinkable Kiosko yoghurt. WHY is there no drinkable yoghurt in the EEUU WHY WHY WHY it is beyond delicious.
- plastic bags of mandarinas sold by children on the street, 10 for $1
- handing over a $1 bill and holding your breath while you wait for the inevitable question from the storekeeper: tienes cambio? (do you have change?)
- uncoooked french fries, squishy white in the middle
- juices with the consistency of marmalade
- rows of houses with open roofs, piles of gravel and sand in the yard, in a seemingly frozen limbo of construction and rennovation
- mean dogs barking at you and snapping at your heels. Brian, who is proficent at a Phillipino form of martial arts, commented that he had to refine his technique to fight the dogs rather than the humans here, since they were a bigger threat.
- old women in braids leading cows or donkeys around on frayed rope
- gasoline at $1.48
- the ¨camaron camaron camaron camaron¨ song and the ¨creo en Jesus Cristo, quien me va llevar al cielo¨ accordion ditty, easily heard on any bus sound system
- foreigners in sandals, shorts, and those olive green knee-high drawstring pants
- political graffiti: Colombia Hermano, Uribe Terrorista, Armas de Destruccion Masiva: Television, Radio, Media, Mucho Mineria, Poco Amazonia.
- hairy fuzzy pigs on the side of the road
- brown toilet paper; in Corey´s words, ¨Bible paper.¨
- yoghurt-flavored Bon Ice. I´m going to miss Bon Ice so much. They´re these folks dressed up in bright blue suits with a polar bear logo, selling these tube-filled frozen ice creams and yoghurts, with yummy tropical fruit flavors.
- the sweet thick smell of Palo Santo, a kind of incense: it looks like a thick piece of wood, and it´s burned to drive the evil spirits away, which more often than not consist of the evil poo-smelling spirits hovering over the single toilet in a house which has up to nine people living in it, all of whom have their bowels affected in one way or another by the lovely grease-rich diet.
- dead roasted pigs in wheelbarrows
- The guts market at La Floresta, a lively outdoor barbecue venue that sells all the intestines and stomach lining you can eat, right by our house. If guts aren´t your thing, they´re are always the deliciously amazingly bad for you yucca fries, which we successfully made ourselves the other day (note: frying yucca takes a LOT of grease, and it´s a good idea to cut it with a machete, and also to boil it first before frying).

I´ll try to think of more to add here................

As written earlier, our time in Ecuador is coming to an end! A new adventure in Portland is about to begin! (or more specifically, in Milwaukie, at the infamous duck pond house). Our plans for it include chickens and a huge garden. For the time being, we have a ticket to return to Quito on January17th 2009. I´m not sure what will happen between now and then, but anyway, we have a ticket, and there´s a group for Mexico that may be coming in January for Amazon Mycotour Version 2.0, so there´s that too. Until their return to ´keets in November, Jess and Brian will be running around California-Montana-Oregon-Illinois attending speaking events, so hopefully that will result in some useful promotion and outreach. I´m not sure what will happen to this blog during our time in Oregon; I´m thinking we´ll maybe use it for mushroom-hunting related posts and so on (without giving away our location secrets, of course!). And we´ll keep posting stuff about the Amazon Mycorenewal Project, the Amazon Defense Front and the Cuyabeno reserve, naturally.

On that note, the Chevron case is moving forward(this is an audio file sent to me by a Reedie alumni freelance journalist, also living in Quito).

Also, here are Danny´s awesome flickr photos of the first (and hopefully not the last!) official Amazon Mycotour. Danny´s an awesome photographer with a kickass camera; I really recommend checking them out... I especially like this one of Corey-- it really captures the whole Mad-Scientist-Geek side of his personality).