I cook with wine. Sometimes I even add it to the food. -WC Fields
We have issues with road food: one of us is vegan, another veg, but prefers vegan if possible. But that's in the future...after some research?
Food has been on my mind, as Sunday, after a cool-ish weekend in MI, including frost a couple of nights; Sunday turned sunny, and started to warm back up. Warm enough to wonder: are raspberry u-pick places still open? Mom and I had been talking about going all week, but then the weather was rainy &/or too cool.
So, after consulting the web, and the phone book, and the newspaper, we ascertained that we would have about a half hour of picking when we got there at 3:30, if everything hadn't been frozen out. Which it wasn't! (and the place actually was growing them in about 20 half-mile long hoophouses!)
Yay, Michigan, the foodie's cornucopia...I'll miss ya! Pricey raspberries, though we ate our fill, being you-pick, but then in our ambles we stopped by Vorachek's Farm, run by an old farmer who's ancestors were from Czechoslovakia. He had apples, but we were really interested in his grapes and pears....
Turns out the pears aren't popular! Strange.
The only ones he wanted us to pay for was the brownish Bosc pears still on the trees. There were bunches on the ground, of other varieties, in various states of wholeness and decay, and mom was like oh, such a waste, and Farmer Vorachek stated any we got off the ground were free. The picking was pretty quick, as was the foraging of (riper) pears from the ground. Some were eaten by animals, but there were lots, so I grabbed about a half bushel, and because they were riper, I have spent the last 2 nights cleaning and processing. Pears chopped, with a squirt of lemon juice, and a splash of alcohol like triple sec, or almond liqueur, and large dustings of cinnamon, nutmeg and cardamom. Nuke for a while, and they'll be nice and smushy-cooked, giving off some lovely pear juice. Lovely alone, or with ice cream or cottage cheese. These pears would be excellent for hard pear cider, but that is just too much time to invest, considering I'll be gone soon, and the folks aren't fans, even of the store-bought "fall" hard apple cider I bought at the store recently. I keep wondering if one of the bros.-in-law, how is a home-brewer, might be interested. ?
The other thing we paid for was Concord grapes:
Rather pretty fruits, and very fun, gnarly wood and curlicues on the vines (and the leaves are good for cooking, used in dishes such as middle eastern stuffed grape leaves). Grapes are very quick picking...one just cuts or breaks off the stem of the bunch, cleaning up any little dried or bad grapes, but each picking is a handful and these quickly add up to a bushel or a peck. Unfortunately, one can't make wine from these grapes, nor even cook with them, easily. Today, I was making a clafouti, to use up fruit, but then I didn't want to use the 3 cups of raspberries (since they were so pricey), that the recipe I found called for, so I tried to substitute concord grapes, but they were just too hard to seed. Mom did cook some down tonight, though I didn't taste 'em, as they are one of my less fave fruits, and I was chowin' down on my spiced nuked pears! ;D Anyway, apparently either the economy &/or supply are way off, because Welch's (grape juice and jelly) has recently laid off a 'bunch'* of people in MI. Too bad...mom and I were rather shocked at the waste of food...many of these fields were CHOCK full of fruits! That morning, mom had just gone to Ukrainian Orthodox Church wherein they memorialized the Holodomor, the enforced starvation genocide 'famine' enacted by Stalin. Such contrasts. People in Kzoo, MI, USA, world, going hungry, and food left to rot in the field.
Mom thinks it looks like France (but I remind her that only the fields with wine grapes are truly similar).
Also, while in the fields of grapes, I found, right there, at the foot of a Concord grapevine,
a giant puffball mushroom, which I picked. My folks are mushroom foragers, as are many Slavic families, and they love to go mushrooming, especially for Michigan morels, in the spring, and, in both spring and fall, for boletes, or Boletus species, also known as porcini from Italian, (but my folk call them in Ukrainian 'real' (правдиві, meaning 'real' or 'true', kind of like правда, ('truth', ha!) which was the name of the ol' commie paper in times past)). They never took a shine to the puffballs, even though they are rather easy to ID: cut through and it should be smooth and white, with no axials or growing parts, and I usually only pick the large ones, which are rather unmistakable anyway. I've also read puffballs are "choice", and especially good with eggs. I cooked mine in the pan where we had already sauteed store-bought button mushrooms in the evening, after dinner. The puffball was smallish, about like an extra-large softball. I caramelized 2 small red onions, added some garlic and parsley and olive oil, and sliced the puffball. It was a lovely white, with very little scent, until it started cooking. Then it became a creamy golden, and shrunk significantly, becoming more like a smooth cheese or poultry or shelf-stable/asceptic tofu in texture, and had a more pungent mushroom smell. However, I became paranoid about eating it; mom had the mushroom books out, and I was online reading about it. I finally packaged it up, and refrigerated it.
I decided that I would wait to eat it with eggs in the morning, considering that I would be going for my free "Pink (ribbon) Saturday" appointment, today, and, if I was ill...at least I would be in a building with a bunch of doctors. So this morning: scrambled eggs with carmelized red onions and puffballs; result: very tasty, mushroom-y, but I was a bit nauseous, partly with mushroom foraging concern, which is so not me, plus, my Sam was chewing on the chipmunk the folks had seen this AM, so that wasn't completely appetizing.
Anyway, thanks Gaia, pour les fraises, les poires, les raisins ;O et les champignons Puffball!
And thanks to all the supporters of pink ribbons for the free mammogram! As an uninsured woman, it's one less stress as I leave in 20 +/- days....
All images listed as public domain (no attribution necessary; searched google specifically: 'public domain raspberries/pears/puffball/pink ribbon' on 10-3-11); if this is in error please comment and the image will be correctly attributed.
Vegan Road Food coming!
