every day is a good day
Too many roosters, so some have to go. Sad rooster, happy cat. I can’t finish butchering a rooster without our cat coming into the kitchen and meowing until I give him fresh liver. How does he even know I am doing a rooster? He sleeps during the day, a long ways from the kitchen. He gets drawn into the kitchen like my husband does when I’m baking bread.
Hmm, so this is what a shiitake feels like when you cut it up after just picking it. I highly recommend starting a day by making an omelette using mushrooms plucked at the time you break the eggs. It really ups the flavor a notch.
Getting a New Years card from a dear friend on the other side of the ocean ups the day a notch too. It’s like the old days. The card took a month to get here even though it was sent air mail. It makes you wonder where all that plane went. Guam? The Marianas? Hop-scotched through Micronesia? Each of the Aleutian Islands?
What is the proper etiquette when your cat has made itself comfortable on your chest and you would like to get up and do something? Are you supposed to wait five minutes before moving? Pick it up and find an equally comfortable place for it? After living so many decades, why don’t I know all these rules?
Fortunately the cat moved while I was still deciding what the polite thing to do was. I had branches to chip. Lots of branches. Freshly chipped branches make soft, beautiful forest paths. Even dogs like walking on them.
The winter skies are stormy. Look up and clouds swirl about like drunken sailors. Lie on the ground for an hour and watch as grand opera unfolds above the trees. Giants battling. Swords clashing. You can feel their breath on your ears. The epic tales of Homer performed by dancing clouds on a stage that spans the heavens. La Scala has nothing on this. No pesky crowds to deal with either. Every seat a private box. Over there are the Sirens, singing from the rocky shores, luring sailors to their doom. Here comes Orpheus and the Argonauts, doomed to die like countless other hapless sailors … or are they? You see them, don’t you?
Enough with the winter sky. Too much drama for me. Instead, I’m lured by whispering mushroom, shiitake 椎茸 to be exact. Just bumps on a lump of sawdust a week ago, today some are too big to resist plucking. We’ll have a feast tonight. It boggles the mind how fungi turn sawdust into delicacy. Beat this freshness Wholefoods.
A week ago I started a shiitake mushroom growing kit by soaking it in water overnight. A few days later bumps appeared on the surface of the block, a pressed block of hardwood sawdust. Seven days on, the bumps have transformed into baby mushrooms over an inch across. A few more days, maybe a week and it looks like we’ll be eating fresh shiitake mushrooms.
It’s always fun watching my food grow. Seeing all the stages it goes through enhances the flavor. I can bite into the food, close my eyes, and appreciate all the work the food went through so I could eat it.
