Halle’s Smooooth Words o’ Wisdom

After a surf along the northern Oregon coast Tuesday I found my first Chanterelles of the 2008 mushroom season: 

They were exactly where I found my first patch in 2007 only 2 weeks or so earlier.

This is welcome news.

Santa was good to me this year. Look what I got: You can get one too or download mp3s here.  

Autumn in Oregon means many things. One of my favorites is chanterelle hunting. From the Oxford American Dictionary:

“chan•te•relle | noun. an edible woodland mushroom with a yellow funnel-shaped cap and a faint smell of apricots, found in both Eurasia and North America.

ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French, from modern Latin cantharellus, diminutive of cantharus, from Greek kantharos, denoting a kind of drinking container.”

There’s nothing quite like picking your own chanterelles then frying them up the same day with unsalted butter, shallots plus a touch of soy sauce, sugar and creme before tossing the fresh-from-the-woods golden sauce with some pasta. Yum. I love eating chanterelles although the stumbling through the deep and dark woods might be the best part.

Imma huge fan of this record:

It’s raining hard here and the leaves are turning and beginning to drop.

Michelle and I are growing collards this year and decided to make some pepper sauce with serrano peppers and white vinegar to go with the greens. This bottle will brew for 6 weeks.

Resource Revival updated their site. Check it out!

Ej’s got a new blog.

Two weeks ago Michelle and I went for one of our favorite tours on Hood. The snow’s going fast. We decided to bail on a Mt. Shasta tour due to lack of snow there. A friend who spoke to a climbing ranger said that glacial ice was already appearing on many Shasta climbs and that our favorite route, the Hotlum-Wintun, was already suncupped near 10,000 ft. Last year we skied Shasta on the 4th of July and it was fantastic. Here’s to a better winter next season in the Sierra Nevada.