{Mulberries}...So Early in the Morning

Call me naïve, but I rarely doubt a nursery rhyme. Which is why it wasn’t till I reached the ripe age of 29 that I discovered that mulberries don’t actually grow on bushes.

On the contrary, mulberries grow on trees so tall that the lowest of their branches often tower just about my reach on tippy toes. I discovered this when András and I found a mulberry tree at the edge of the park blocks just two blocks from our home.

In pursuit of collecting the thousands of tiny berries before they fall to their squishy death, I’ve implored András to carry a step ladder the to the park with me for late-night pickings, encouraged nimble friends to climb its branches and sometimes even just waited, patiently, for them to drop right into my hands. But we rarely take home more than a pint or two.

After two years of meager harvests, András recently let me in on a little secret. In the old country, folks unfold a large old sheet under their mulberry tree and employ a little rascal to climb up in the branches and shake them until all the ripe berries fall to the sheet. They gather the edges and carry their loot home for preserves or pies.

Having neither an old sheet nor a little rascal, and a mulberry tree past its peak, I thought I’d have to wait until next year to put that plan into play.  Until yesterday, when my friend Jenny pointed out that there were several more enormous trees, branches heavy with purple or white berries, lining the path that adjoined our two parks where I often take an evening walk or run. That’s what happens when you’re too busy marching forward to stop and look up ~ you just might miss something incredibly delicious.

People always ask me how I eat these foraged mulberries. I’ve twice collected enough to make mulberry lemonade popsicles, and recently picked enough during a bike ride into the woods with my Dad in Illinois to turn into mulberry shortcakes, which were both superb. They are also excellent on premium vanilla-bean ice cream. But the truth is they are best of all eaten out of hand straight from the tree, or the bush, if that’s where your mulberries grow.

{season's first}

.....there's something magical about the season's firsts.

4,000 species, and none of them edible

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul. ” ~John Muir

miranda, ca

It took 6 hours and three rounds of car snacks to get to Humboldt Park from San Francisco, but it was worth every minute to drive 1 mile between the old growth Redwoods that reach over 30 stories high on either side of the Avenue of the Giants. Even more moving was to stand among them in the hush of the late afternoon, when everyone else had disappeared and gone home for dinner, to lie amongst their trunks and strain our necks to see to the top where they reached endlessly toward the light.

But as grand as the tallest trees were standing upright, some reaching over 360 feet {taller than Niagra Falls}, it was the fallen giants that truly inspired awe. Laid out like tunnels and tracks in a giant playground, we ran their lengths and jumped from one to the next, stopping only to admire their impressive root systems yanked from the soil, exposing a massive web of wonder for the life it once lived.

There are a number of things that inspire wonder in a forest of this magnitude, facts worth committing to memory, memories worth making if you’re up for the drive. If you watched Ken Burns' National Parks series on PBS last month, or read the Redwoods issue of National Geographic, you may already know that the oldest recorded redwood, over 2,200 years old, stands in Humboldt Park. And if you’re a lover of cheese, you may also know that this is the county for which Cypress Groove’s illustrious and unforgettable Humboldt Fog cheese is named. But did you know this fact?

There are over 4,000 species that live in or on a fallen giant.

4,000 species, and none of them edible, at least by my standards, which is why we were grateful to find at the Avenue Café after sundown, right on Avenue of the Giants across from the cabins in Miranda where we stayed. Avenue could be classified as a diner, but a decidedly west of the Colorado River diner; the kind of place where wispy Teva-clad blondes from Oregon aren’t afraid to order sausage and eggs, where kids layered in colors and wools look like they’ve been styled for the outdoor issue of GQ toddler {this doesn’t actually exist} and where grilled cheese, made with artisan cheeses on a locally baked 7-grain bread, is a far cry from the American cheese laden sandwich {really, it’s not even cheese} most of us grew up on. It’s the kind of place where the only beer on tap is the local Eel River organic Blonde Ale, which is the perfect thing to get one in the mood for the obligatory tick-check, fireside in a cabin, that follows any good romp in the woods.

Toadstools A Plenty

jamaica, vermont

On Sunday, after the wedding, we woke up in the Three Mountain Inn in Jamaica New York, an inn I picked not only for their plush featherbeds, but for its proximity to Jamaica State Park, one of Vermont’s finest. After breakfast, we took a little walk down to the park for some exercise before hitting the road for home, and within minutes inside the park, we found a path lined with plump, fresh mushrooms. Fat white ones with conical caps, brown speckled ones, and lots of LBMs {little brown mushrooms}.

Normally, one has to hunt for mushrooms. They must have a nose for these things, uncovering blankets of pine needles and rotting logs to discover their treasures. I couldn’t believe how easy this was!

But we had just begun our hike, so I left our loot behind as we hiked along the riverbed with a promise of plenty of fungi waiting for us on the way out. When we circled back, I found our stash and gave them a deeper look. I had never seen this variety on a plate before, but the fat stems and meaty caps promised something rare and scrumptious.

“We could make a fortune in this forest!” I announced. I bent down to take another look, and a local whizzed past on a bike.

“Don’t eat those!” she called out.

“See, I told you,” András said. “We can come back and pick when we know more. I’ll get you a little mushroom book for our anniversary.”

A mushroom book was not what I had in mind for our first anniversary, but I appreciated his appreciation for my interest in foraging.

“But, who knows when we’ll get back up here.” I said. “Let’s just take these, and we can get them examined by an expert. It’s not like they are purple or oozing poisonous puss!”

To my surprise and delight, András gave me the hat off his head to use as a basket. “You’re right. Let’s take a chance.”

We picked heaps of mushrooms, carried them back and drove straight to the Three Clock Inn to find Serge, who I knew from our conversation the night before to be an avid forager. We found him in the kitchen with young Francoise next to him, perched on the countertop, decapitating haricot vert.

I placed the hat full of mushrooms under his nose.

“Aha, excellent!” He exclaimed passionately through this thick moustache.

“Come, come, you must sit,” he said. He shooed us out of the kitchen and to the nearest table set for two out in the yard under a tree. A half an hour later, Serge presented us with a local trout topped with creamed mushrooms with a meaty flesh that gave between our eager teeth. This followed with sirloin and crispy roasted mushroom caps more woodsy than anything I’d experiences before. It was a magical little slice of life, an experience our curiosity had unearthed, rewarding us ten-fold. We ate like Louis XVI, proud and headless, before…

----

“Sarah, are you listening to me?” András said, snapping me out of my mushroom high. “I said, we can come back and pick when we know more. For now, let’s live another day.”

“Awe, you’re no fun,” I said. “You never let me take mushrooms from the woods!”

And that’s how it really happened. We didn’t pick those mushrooms.

We spoke to the local ranger who assured us that there were delicious mushrooms in these woods, along with hundreds of dangerous ones, but unfortunately, she couldn’t tell them apart.

On the way out, we munched on handfuls of sour-sweet green apples we found hanging off a wild trees. Then we drove ourselves to Manchester and ate ourselves silly on Mrs. Murphy’s Donuts and Stewarts insanely delicious Peanut Butter Pandemonium ice cream and Vermont Grafton Cheddar cheese. After our feast, we headed south, stopping at every farm stand in hopes of satisfying my agrarian urges.

Just past the Vermont border, we hit the town of Hoosick, NY where across from the local country deli, I spied a house hidden by overgrown shrubs and a sign on the barn behind it that read “Dog Ear Book Barn.”

The barn belongs to a crotchety gentleman who sat buried beneath hundreds of dusty rare and out-of-print books. He virtually ignored me while I made myself at home among cookbooks, children’s books, and storybooks, piling my arms with a first printing {1906} of Heroes Every Child Should Know, and the 1960’s cookbook Cooking with Love and Paprika. As the stack in my arms outgrew my budget, I tempted my wallet with one request.

“Do you happen to have any mushroom books?” I asked.

“Eh, I can’t hear a darn thing. Did you say Mushrooms?” The gentleman said. “I have hundreds upstairs, but down here I just have one.”

That one book, a 1970 copy of Blandford’s Mushrooms and Toadstools In Color appeared before me, a tiny 5 X 7 guide with the loveliest illustrations inside and out. I would have bought the book for the illustrations alone, especially considering its $3 pricetag, but what the illustrations told me were far more valuable. I flipped through, page by page, noting the hundreds of colors, textures and shapes, until I found them, on page 59 listed under, Lactarius Vellereus.

205 Lactarius Vellereus

cap 4- 8 in. across, convex at first, then depressed and funnel-shaped, downy-woolly, margin inrolled at first. Gillis distant, uniting to form a network, slightly decurrent. Stem white wooly, short, thick. Milk white, later reddish, taste burning sharp. Grows in beech-woods. August-November. Fairly common. Poisonous.

I suppose I learned quite a bit from this little experience, but mostly I learned that I loved old books, and that I may enjoy writing fiction. After all, the fictional version of this story was quite delicious.

P.S. I’m rather proud of my little $3 mushroom book, and I thought you might like to see it too, because it has such pretty little illustrations.