The post-turkey-day report.

Lewisburg.

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I'm pleased to note that I'm not inundated in leftovers for the first time in years. To be honest, aside from the year I was in the UK, I can't recall the last time that I didn't have a week's worth of turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberries to contend with. My grandmother, you see, is rather adamant about having enough food on the table to send everyone home with loads of it. It was simply luck that Sharon and I weren't spending the rest of the holiday weekend at home, and thus couldn't take any with us. Other than a pair of slices of my mom's Jewish Apple Cake,¹ for breakfast the next morning.

I was responsible for the turkey this year, since my grandmother's tendency is to overcook any and all meats. For example: she uses the little pop-up timer from a grocery-store bird as a guideline. By which I mean that she waits for it to pop - which is often a sign that poultry's already overcooked - and will then wait another half hour or longer before taking it out of the oven. But my uncle will only eat stuffing that's been cooked inside the bird, and I refuse to do that.

It's a pretty basic temperature concern. In order to heat the stuffing - a pretty fine insulator - to a sufficiently high temperature to kill pathogens, you're all but guaranteed to cook the bird thoroughly dry. So, basically, you're looking at either a dry turkey or potential food poisoning, neither of which has a whole lot of appeal. Growing up, the solution was always to drown the turkey in gravy. Grandma has always made potful of gravy, using the turkey juices. All of the juices that have been squeezed out of the bird by the muscle proteins seizing tight at the high temperatures.

At any rate, we were at a bit of a bump in the road. Grandma's solution was to roast a second bird, stuffed, while I'd still do the main turkey my way. Sounded good - especially when I though it might be a stuffed chicken - until I realized that she meant a stuffed turkey. An eighteen-pounder, which was enough meat to feed all of us. So there was plenty of turkey to go around. Though it's worth noting that my brother leapt up immediately after dinner, snatching up all of the remaining pasture-raised, brined, carefully-roasted meat.

The other goodies we brought for dinner - some local, frost-sweetened brussels sprouts, a homemade loaf of whole wheat, rosemary bread, and Sharon's wonderful chocolate-covered cherry cookies and snickerdoodles - went over especially well with my immediate family. Not so much with the pickier eaters at the table, but at least everyone found enough to fill their plates. Anymore, in the attempt to please a wide variety of tastes, that seems like the best I can hope for. Unfortunately, it's an understood fact in my family that preparing Thanksgiving like I did last year - an all-local, all-homemade extravaganza - wouldn't make everyone happy. I have relatives who won't eat any vegetables other than corn or potatoes.² Even in the realm of pies, they'll only eat a sugar-loaded chocolate pudding pie; even pumpkin and apple pies will be left untouched.

So it was a genuine pleasure to do a sort-of-Thanksgiving dinner for Sharon's dad and sisters that was well-received. They'd spent the holiday at a resort near Cancun, and arrived back just in time for Bill's birthday. After a week's worth of resort food - some of which they found questionable - a dinner of "recognizable" food was just the ticket. Roast chicken with caramelized onions; milk bread rolls; broccoli; salad and vinaigrette; and a chocolate cherry cake for dessert. Even the broccoli received accolades, along the lines of "How did you make this so good?" It's amazing how careful blanching in thoroughly salted water can be so good.

And now there's just the remaining turkey in the freezer.

See, when searching for a local, pasture-raised bird, I mistakenly gave the impression that I wanted a bord to two different farms. Rather than call up one and cancel, I simply bought both. One went to Thanksgiving. The other's now sausage: one batch of Mexican chorizo; another spiced with the flavors of a Moroccan tagine; and the last flavored with fresh rosemary and shallots.

So I guess I've got some Thanksgiving leftovers, after all. But I'm entirely okay with that.

* * * * *

¹It's a well-known recipe where I grew up, but some folks find the name a good enough reason to get uppity. But it's simple: the recipe modifies a traditional German apple cake to eliminate the dairy, thus making it okay with meat or dairy if you're one who keeps kosher. The one who pointed this out to me was the original chef at the Twin Bays Cafe in Phoenixville. He was Jewish; his wife was Catholic. But he preferred his mother-in-law's recipe to his family's, and so that was the one he kept on the menu.

²On the plate, I don't count those as vegetables. They're starches in my book.

Radishes and birds' nests.

Lewisburg.

As long as I keep finding these things, I might as well keep mentioning them. The odd thing, to me, is that I'm repeatedly finding new and different mushrooms, all while walking the same streets of town. For example, I'd walked past the place I found this one at least ten times in the past week or so:



Today, I just happened to notice a few buttons, because they looked too smooth and, well, fuzzy about the edges to be stones. I had to actually get down on my knees and touch them to be sure they weren't just a few errant bits of smooth gravel kicked out of someone's garden.

Turns out they're something in the Hebeloma genus, though I can't say for sure which it is. H. crustuliniforme, maybe, but as it's poisonous, I'm comfy enough with just a genus identification. The tip-offs - after examining the spore print and various physical features - were the little beads of liquid scattered about the gills and the definite odor of radishes. Apparently they taste like radishes, too.

The real find, though, was this little patch of fungi:



And when I say little, I mean it. The biggest of them was maybe 3/8 inch across; they were so tiny that I had a hell of a time getting a steady picture with the macro lens, even on a sunny day. I even had a hard time finding them again when I went back with the camera.

They're Crucibulum laeve, more commonly known as the bird's nest fungus. The "nest" is a peridium, a sort of "splash cup" for dispersing the "eggs", which are little sacs filled with spores. Even though these are so tiny, they've evolved so that a raindrop falling into the peridium will cause the peridioles to be flung up to several feet away.

More mushrooms.

Lewisburg.

For the time of year that's supposed to signal the trailing end of mushroom season around here, I'm certainly finding a lot more than I'd expect. And it isn't as though I'm looking very hard, or even going out of my way.

Basically, if it's not on my route to pick up a newspaper, I'm not going to find it.



Thursday's find: the American slippery jack, Suillus americanus. I'd stumbled across a patch of them in the button stage, just barely visible against the grass around them. I picked the two in the photograph, so I could identify them when I got home, and figured I'd go back for the rest when they'd had a chance to mature. Wishful thinking.

When I went back, they were gone. Not harvested - though it is an edible species - but just kicked all over the place. Apparently the yellow caps were just too tempting a target, and too close to the sidewalk. Must have seemed like a good place to toss a banana peel and some candy wrappers, too. At least I managed to find a budding little turkey tail, Trametes versicolor, so I can go back and check it out in the future. It's not hard to find from the sidewalk, either, but the stump it's growing on makes it a decidedly less tempting target.



Today's find: the shaggy mane, Coprinus comatus. It's an ugly mushroom, with its scaly cap dissolving into black gunk. But, I hear, a rather choice one for the table - assuming you catch it before it "deliquesces" into a decidedly unappealing goo. I didn't find enough to bother cooking up, but I don't expect to have difficulty finding more of these in the future.

The problem with these particular two mushrooms - and any I might find while out walking the streets of Lewisburg - is that shaggy manes have a tendency to take up whatever toxins may be in the soil. While not an issue in an untreated lawn, or out in the woods, I'm wary of any lawns that aren't mine. (Especially the one down the street that's far too lush and green for November in Pennsylvania.) And anything near a road with significant traffic means there's the potential for heavy metal uptake due to car exhaust and tire abrasion, among other things.

So that wild mushroom meal will probably have to wait until spring. It is, after all, National Novel Writing Month once more, which means that any walks in the woods will have to wait until at least December.

Or later, since that'll be prime wear-bright-orange-or-get-shot season around here. Maybe I'll just hold off until morel season.