Seasonal festive holiday Nature eco gifts

The fall garden still has some bounty left, like all the flowers and herbs. There are some cherry tomatoes and peppers I'm still harvesting. Actually I harvested peppers then pickled them yesterday before I had to go to my work's gala event.

When I got home, I cut up these squashes in the pic below and cooked them with rice, ginger, garlic, salt, carrots, and apple cider.

Flowers pressed

 With the pressed flowers, I'm using them to make holiday gift ornaments, as you can see below. Many of the flowers were wild and others I picked were some I planted from seed or bought from Lowes.

I'm cleaning the garden beds

I don't think I'll be planting any winter crops, though 

I did consider sowing seeds but it would probably be futile

 I have been doing this, in addition to cleaning my garden shed and the porch greenhouse. I put up new plastic sheeting for the porch so the plants stay covered. I'm debating about bringing them indoors...

I had a gala last night for a fundraiser for work, and the higjlight of my evening was eating the morel mushrooms! The chef said my plate was worth over 100 dollars! Fancy gourmet!

Already pickung chanterelle mushrooms in the woods

We foraged these today from the woods

Chanterelle mushrooms are found in july, but this rain and abnormal heat has brought them on a couple weeks ahead of usual picking times. I always found these on the edge of woods and property lines behind people's houses. Here is a reference if you want to mushroom hunt for these delicacies.

For more reference photos to find your own, use the search tool on this blog by typing in chanterelle mushrooms, or use the tags "wild edibles", "foraging", "chanterelles" and "mushroom identification" where I've shown these in video too.

I fried them with a little oil, salt and pepper over rice 

Garden food dinner with asparagus & herbs

Today I harvested from the garden for the first time this year, picking asparagus, herbs, greens, carrots, and onion. Asparagus is tough so you have to cook it thoroughly. First I let the bow tie pasta boil in water whole I chopped the wild onion and put it in a pan to fry with oil. Then I chopped the asparagus and added it with the onion, in addition to soy margarine and the 1 cup of boiling water from the boiling pasta.

I let that boil down then added salt, pepper, garlic, then added my herbs at the very end of cooking. I picked rosemary, oregano, and thyme in the garden and chopped them. Don't let them cook longer than 5 minutes so they still have a lot of flavor.

Then I drained the pasta, mixed the asparagus and herbs with the pasta, and added a little (vegan) Just Mayo brand to get it creamy. I garnished with raw chopped lettuce from the garden.

Wild Spring onion soup & spring rolls recipe

I haven't done a recipe post in a long time, but these are two healthy and hearty recipes that are low cost and fast to make.

It's Spring time, and there are wild green onions all over the yard and garden. I carefully choose the onions that are safe from traces of animal, then with a spoon I dig up the whole onion including the roots. Then I soak the onions in water for 5 minutes to thoroughly clean them. Afterwards, I cut the roots and skin the onions, then finely chop.

I use the bulb and most of the green stem in the soup and the green tops as a garnish. Then while the water is boiling, add wheat or rice noodles with the onions, salt, garlic powder, and nutritional yeast. If you're using udon, ramen, rice, or korean wheat noodles, then the soup will only take 5 minutes. Here I'm using Sempio brand wheat noodles that cook within 5 minutes. Ramen noodles are not healthy so I don't recommend using them.

Wild spring onion soup (vegan)

Handful of noodles
2 cups of water, boiled
3 wild green onions, chopped
1 tbsp nutritional yeast
1/4 tsp garlic powder and salt
Garnish with the chopped green onions tops and spring roll filling

Spring roll filling (vegan)

Spring roll wraps
Spiralized zucchini
Spiralized carrot
Soy sauce
Lettuce

First boil water to dip the wrappers one by one. Then dip each in cold water before adding the filling. For the filling, spiralize zucchini and carrots and fry them in a skillet with a little oil and soy sauce. You can add any other veggies here or greens like kale, and chop the veggies any way you prefer. Dip each wrapper in the hot then cold water and lay flat. Add the filling then lettuce and roll. The soy sauce I used is the healthy alternative, and the dipping sauce I used was spicy peanut.

Old chicken of the woods mushrooms + paw paw grove + tomato harvest

Much of the chicken of the woods mushrooms I see are always growing at the bottom of an oak tree, usually at the base or around the roots among the leaves.

These mushrooms were growing all over the woods after the heavy rainfall

paw paw grove behind my house

pasta dinner with dehydrated & fresh garden tomatoes 

The snail is so cute...

tomato harvest 

How To Identify Chanterelle & Chicken of the Woods Mushrooms video

Found chanterelle & chicken of the woods mushrooms but didn't pick them

I found many chanterelle mushrooms and Chicken of the woods mushrooms in the woods today. Judging by the state of the mushrooms, they may have been worth picking yesterday but considering it rained hard yesterday, the mushrooms were water logged.

I didn't take photos of the chanterelles--I have taken plenty photos of them for anyone that wants to identify them. I took pictures of the chicken of the woods mushroom, though, for anyone that wants to know what they look like and how to identify them even if they're water logged mushrooms.

Notice the way the Chicken of the woods grow in a large cluster around the base of an oak tree. That's how you will find other mushrooms of this variety. I always find them growing on this specific tree around this time of the year in late July. The Chicken of the woods mushrooms and Chanterelles grow at this time of year on the south facing side of the hill, not far into the woods.

Chicken of the woods mushroom have a distinct look as you can see in the photo here. The mushrooms look like a fan. Because I took a picture of the mushrooms after they were water-logged, the color is different. Chicken of the woods are usually colored orange and pink with white on the underside and along the edge.

As mentioned, the chicken of the woods mushrooms are white on the underside. The underside is  sponge-like, but don't let that weird you out because they are delicious. Similar to how I cook chanterelle mushrooms, with chicken of the woods I use my fingers to pull "strips" of the mushroom apart and then fry them with a little oil on low heat. Before cooking, I clean the mushrooms thoroughly and cook them thoroughly.

I guess I'm the queen of mushrooms (more Chanterelles from the woods)

My grandpa always says the blackberries are ripe and ready to pick around the 4th of July. So around that time every year I go blackberry picking around my yard and forage for them in the woods. Every year since I have been foraging for blackberries, I have noticed that the Chanterelle and Chicken of the woods mushrooms grow around this time as well. From my experience with foraging for Chanterelle mushrooms, is that they grow scattered in patches together. In my neck of the woods, the Chanterelles are growing in the shade along the ground, and I have been finding them behind my house (which is a south facing hill.) I particularly have found Chanterelle mushrooms growing behind people's houses that are up against the woods, or at least not far into the woods.

This year I have picked blackberries alongside the chanterelle mushrooms, and today I foraged for more. I may cook these mushrooms on low heat and eat with noodles--which is usually how I eat the mushrooms. I also eat these with rice.

Pumpkins getting Huge + Sexy Melon/Vining trellis garden beauty & Chanterelle mushroom forage

Garden tour video + Foraging for Chanterelle mushrooms + HUGE mushrooms & buttercup squash growing

Yesterday I picked some Chanterelle mushrooms that were growing behind my house. With the mushrooms, I put them on the garden pizza I made yesterday. Knowing that the Chanterelles are growing, I'm going to explore the woods behind my house in the next couple of days to forage for these mushrooms.

Foraging for Chanterelle mushrooms

 There are other mushrooms growing in the woods. The picture below is of a Bolete mushroom. Some people eat these, but the only mushrooms I eat from the woods is Chanterelles, Chicken of the Woods, and Morels because they are the most easily identifiable and delicious mushroom.

I'm not sure what the mushroom is in the picture here, but I assumed it was an edible mushroom at first. Observing it more closely, the mushrooms didn't look like the Chicken of the woods or Chanterelles that are growing in the woods now. Because I wasn't sure what the mushrooms were and considering they were old, I decided not to cut them to study them closer at my house.

Along with the mushrooms growing in the woods, there are also blackberries and dewberries growing in the woods and around my yard, so I have been foraging for these berries as well, and collected some today. I'm freezing the berries in the glass bowl for an hour (depending on how many berries you have), then put the berries in a plastic bag in the freezer. This method is so that the berries can freeze individually without getting mushy and freezing into a hard clump.

The pictures below are of the Buttercup Squashes that are growing very quickly and becoming huge.I also show them in the garden tour video below.

Garden pizza recipe of zucchini, Crookneck squash, pepper harvest + foraged chanterelle mushrooms

With the zucchini and crookneck squash, I'm slicing and cooking them on a pizza. The pizza is a homemade dough, tomato based sauce, and some onion on top.

The dough was a very simple recipe. I let a packet of active dry yeast and 1 cup of water with a pinch of sugar sit for 10 minutes and mixed well. Then adding and mixing 1 1/2 Tbsp of olive oil and 1/2 tsp of salt. To the mixture, I then added 2 1/2 cup of all purpose flour. As I mixed the flour in the liquid mixture, I made sure to form the mix into a ball and then proceeded to knead the dough as it started to take shape. I let the dough sit for an hour with plastic covering the bowl of dough. After an hour, I oiled a pizza pan and rolled out the dough while letting the oven preheat to 450 degrees F. I put tomato sauce on the pizza dough and put the slices of zucchini, crookneck, green peppers from the garden on the pizza. I also foraged for Chanterelle mushrooms and added those to the pizza. I cooked the pizza for 20 minutes. It was delicious.