Musings From The Farm Comfortable living in your own skin

We haven’t really taken a vacation in years, so we decided to take a long weekend to get away and celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary. On our way we first stopped at my brother’s sailboat. He and his wife sold their business and their house and now live on a sailboat. Soon they are sailing from NJ to the Florida keys for the winter! Now that is an adventure. We ended up going to Long Beach Island, NJ. When our kids were very little, for quite a few years, my parents rented a house there and invited all of us (their six children and our spouses and children). It was crowded and chaotic but we loved it and always had a good time. But as the saying goes, you can never go back home. It was great to go back but it wasn’t the same. Many of the places we liked to go were no longer there. The damage caused by Hurricane Sandy last year was still evident and sad, although it didn’t damage  the north end of the Island where we stayed. We did climbed to the top of “Old Barney” as they call the lighthouse. That was always an annual event.     

The beach and dunes get rearranged from time to time but the ocean is still the same. Going there after labor day was nice too. It’s not hot enough to want to take a dip, but I’m not that big into swimming in the ocean. I love walking on the beach and watching and listening to the waves. Dean can hardly get me away from the beach to do anything else. We haven’t been there in 20 years and I’m so happy we had a chance to go. Now I’m feeling refreshed and ready to go back to work.

I’m a confessed wild mushroom hunter; I love foraging for wild mushrooms much to my husband’s (Dean) concern. He had learned as a child never pick or eat wild mushrooms because they will kill you. If you don’t know what you are picking he is probably dead right. It is true that there are some mushrooms that are poisonous and some that are edible and safe. You know that you can buy cultivated mushroom at the store, eat them and enjoy them without dying. But I do like picking mushrooms. I guess I like to live on the wild side sometimes. I only pick one variety.  I was shown how to find them and I feel pretty sure I can identify them safely (Dean starts to perk-up with the “pretty sure” comment). They are called pinkies and commonly grow in cow pastures. When I learned how to identify them from a friend, I was already an avid wild food forager. I have a natural ability to identify and remember plants. Dean is horrible at this (no offense, honey), I still have to point out poison ivy to him (not unlike my son and his friends poison ivy debacle!), as well as the weeds he left when weeding, and the plants he weeded by mistake.

Each fall when the weather is still a little warm but wetter than summer, I see their little white heads popping up in our pastures. Even though I’m pretty sure (there is that term again) at first glance they are true pinkies, I’m still careful to examine them and make sure they are not something else. Most notably, they are confused with a charmingly named mushroom called the Death Angel. Nice right? Yeah really, the Death Angel mushroom will kill you. I have harvested mushrooms and cooked them for friends and I feel very trusted when they are brave enough to eat them. Are you wondering if Dean eats them? Well, if you ask him, he will wink and say; “It depends if she is mad at me or not”.   :o)

 Dean says I’m crazy for foraging for wild mushroom; I don’t know, what do you think?

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