Morning dew, black berries and winter mushrooms

It's autumn. We enjoyed still one warm weekend on the island in late September. It was 14 degrees C in the morning and nearly 20 in the afternoon. Rose joined us, but no youngsters came this time.

Without any rain in the past couple of weeks the grass was very wet. Morning dew was intense and beautiful, showing all the spiders’ nets. The leaves had turned to autumn colors although there hadn't been any frost at night. Most of the apples and plumbs had dropped from the trees. Only some fishing boats were on the sea.

 

Third generation of butterflies

 

Despite of late September, summer flowers were in blossom and the third generation of butterflies were flying around them. I managed to capture by camera the Queen of Spain Fritillary, which is quite rare and not often seen in Finland this time of the year.

Rowan berries shone red and the branches were drooping heavy the huge amount of berries. These are very healthy berries that could be utilized, but they are bitter and I have never picked them for cooking, just for decoration. Instead, I picked some black berries, Sorbaronia mitschurinii in the garden. These berries are said to be very healthy superfood, they have a strong color and a bit bitter taste. I put it in the juicer together with apples and got bright red juice. In addition to all the flavonoids and vitamins, the taste was good, too.

Mushroom steaks

Rose and I went to pick mushrooms and lingonberries. The first winter mushrooms, Craterellus tubaeformis, had popped up. I also found some Albatrellus ovinus mushrooms. These are mild and tasty mushrooms that turn bright yellow inside when you fry them.

I made steaks from them on Sunday. I brushed the caps with egg and then rolled them in breadcrumbs seasoned with lemon pepper. Then I added butter on a hot skillet and fried them on both sides so long that they got a nice brown color outside and yellow inside. If they don't turn yellow but brown instead, then you have picked the wrong mushroom, Albatrellus confluens, which looks almost the same but doesn't taste good. 

 

Harvest time - tons of apples

This weekend in early September was warmer than Midsummer! Wonderful time to pick and preserve what mother nature has to offer. I had a couple of extra holidays and enjoyed fully the harvesting time.  From the forest I picked and dried porcini mushrooms. While they were in the Evermat dryer, I focused on fruit.  

There was a big crop of apples and plums in the garden. This is actually the first summer when the plum trees brought from my mother's garden in Turku are bearing fruit.  I dried a small amount of apple rings and plum halves, however, it was only maybe 0.1 percent of the crop. Then I made one lot of plum lemon marmalade. Preserving the small plums is very time-consuming because the stones have to be removed manually… I picked 170 stones from the kettle.


The chilies were also ripe and I tied them in a thread and just hung them out to dry.

As we have a large family and everyone likes juice, I thought we could use the tons of apples lying under the large old apple trees and make apple juice. We invested in a proper juicer and found a robust one, the largest of Kenwood’s models, most suitable for these amounts of apples. You can feed whole apples in the juicer.  

I pressed altogether seven 10-liter buckets of apples in two days and got 12 liters of juice and 20 liters of pulp. That felt like working in a juice factory, the entire kitchen was filled with all kinds of bowls and buckets. But the juice was very good, sweet and tasty and full of vitamins! I froze part of it, gave some bottles to our daughters in Helsinki and we’ll drink a couple of liters next week. And we’ll continue our juice factory next weekend.

 The days were busy, and to make the cooking easy, we made a lamb-cabbage stew in the oven. We had some lamb shanks and local vegetables, so the ingredients were prima. I fried the lamb first in a frying pan and the shredded cabbage with butter and syrup, too. Then we let it stew four hours in the oven until the meat was tender and came loose of the bones. 

The dessert was made of apples, of course, and in the oven, too. I scattered some oatmeal in a lidded pan, added pierced apples, plenty of cinnamon and some syrup, put the pan in the oven covered and after half an hour the dessert was ready. It was served with Valio’s vanilla sauce.

Feasting on porcini mushrooms

A week ago I checked the forests nearby and didn’t find a single penny bun bolet or porcini (Boletus edulis  in Latin, herkkutatti in Finnish, cèpe in French, Steinpilz in German) mushroom yet. Then one week later, these delicious gourmet mushrooms had popped up. They were everywhere.

 

On Friday evening I picked a basket-full from behind the house. On Saturday I went to a small forest one kilometer away, and couldn’t believe my eyes. Within an hour I had the basket and two plastic bags full, altogether 8 kgs of gourmet porcini mushrooms, which is an all-time record for me. There have been summers that I didn't find a single edible penny bun, as the worms like them, too. And our neighbors.

First night, we had porcinis 'al naturale'. We put them on a frying pan, first without butter, and after they had dried a bit, added butter only. At the table we sprinkled some Kosher salt  and black pepper on top of them. If you wish, you could also add some Thai soy sauce.

 

On Saturday, I tried a recipe ‘heavenly porcinis’ according to a Finnish recipe Taivaallinen tattipaistos found from Google.
 

Heavenly porcinis

• penny bun mushrooms
• butter + olive oil
• 1 – 2 onions
• a bunch of flat-leaved parsley and/or mint
• 1 garlic clove
• black pepper
• salt

Heat the skillet and add butter and olive oil. Fry chopped onions, and add little salt and some of the parsley and mint (I used both herbs at the same time). At mild heat let them simmer for about seven minutes. Meanwhile, cut the mushrooms into dice or larger pieces. Then add chopped garlic and black pepper, and turn on some more heat. The mushrooms will be added last with some more parsley. Continue frying for about five minutes so that the mushrooms get some color but remain juicy inside.

As we were only two eaters, we couldn’t eat them all fresh. On Saturday I also started drying the mushrooms which is the best way to store them. Our little Evermat dryer was working hard two whole days and nights. At 40 degrees C it took about 6 hours to dry one lot.

I also found two interesting mushrooms in our yard, parasol mushrooms. I have never tasted them although they are graded 3-star and regarded as gourmet food in Italy. I planned to try them on Sunday, but luckily didn’t... JD got some kind of norovirus, and if he had eaten a parasol mushroom earlier, he certainly would have blamed me for trying to poison him with strange mushrooms. I have to try these next year, if I'm lucky to find them. They are very rare.