Tilden mushroom hunting with Shannon

Today I went down to Walnut Creek to pick Shannon up so we could look for mushrooms.  First we went to Briones, but we didn't find much.  Just a couple of boletes that were infected with another fungus.

So we decided to go to Tilden, because I know there are mushrooms there.  We found a couple, but nothing like what Drew and I found a few years back.  Here are some photos:

Western Grisette (Amanita pachycolea), below with Shannon to show the size. It's a pretty cool mushroom, in the Amanita genus, which includes the mushrooms that are deadly poisonous - the Death Cap and the Destroying Angel. I went on a mushroom hunt with Sunshine when we lived in Santa Cruz and she found a HUGE Destroying Angel. 

The Western grisette is edible, but we let it be.

 This is a Cauliflower mushroom (Sparassis radicata), well-spotted by Shannon.

Apparently these are cultivated for food in Asia. Here's a quote I lifted from Wikipedia: Sparassis crispa can be very tasty, but should be thoroughly cleaned before use as the folds can contain dirt and other material, as it grows and envelops objects around it such as pine needles. Antonio Carluccio reports that European Sparassis crispa should be picked when creamy white, and once yellow are too indigestible to eat. It is good for drying and reconstituting as it retains its cartilaginous texture and hence is good for soups.

A Sulfur tuft (Hypholoma fasciculare). This guy is NOT edible.  Here's what wikipedia says: "consuming it can cause vomiting, diarrhea and convulsions." We didn't pick this either.

So that was my day.  Not too many mushrooms this year. There was a hard freeze for a few nights in a row last month, which I think put the kibosh on a good mushroom year.  

Haul of Justice

So Jailhouse season has begun for me, and I'm trying to climb there two days a week.  I started working on a project called Electric Chair, but it sucks and the crux is a big sideways dyno that I can't do, so I gave up. I started working Haul of Justice instead, because I figured that if I'm going to fall of a route, I may as well fall off a quality route.  This one is pretty fun. Hopefully I stick with it.

It's hard.

Someone who was around for part of the Spain-Trip-from-Hell is coming to climb at Jailhouse, and I'm a bit hesitant to spend time with him.  I don't want to dredge up the past, and this guy is a notorious boundary-pusher (putting it generously). Blargh. Maybe I'll get lucky and not see him very much. What's done is done.

I remember last year I was...not spyched...around Christmas time. I don't think I got any gifts for anyone, and sort of hid from the festivities.  This year I'm pretty psyched though, and I have a bunch of gifts planned for people. It's fun!  Last year I made some truffles for my family as a last minute gift.

I have big plans for homemade gifts this year, starting with the salsas and jams I canned late summer. I want to make some cookies, some apple cider gummies (like gumdrops), maybe some biscotti, truffles, doggie treats for the dog owners, and whatever else I think of.  I wandered around Davis and picked some pink peppercorns (the trees are planted ornamentally around town), and I'll make some toffee with them.  I was worried about poisoning people, but I told Emily that they grew around Davis and she made some caramels and already fed them to people, and they aren't dead yet, so I guess they are ok. I'm glad she did some testing for me...I'm a bit conservative when it comes to eating things I gather.

January 11 I turn 31.  Or, as Bjorn and Lisa call it: thirty-WON-derful.  can't. wait.

Arsenic-based life form? Don't get too excited.

Here is a nice piece on the arsenic-based life forms hullaballoo from Slate. I think it's kind of messed up that NASA's press release was:

NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.


Because, really, that's not what happened at all.  If you want to get into the meat of the criticism, see here.

Though often science is not very scientific, at least there is a broad community for peer-review. Even if a paper or a piece of research gets beyond the first gauntlet of getting published, if it's no good, or there are big questions remaining, it will be eviscerated in the science blogosphere, and perhaps a rebuttal will be published in the original journal.

NASA scientists are not commenting.

This is why I don't sleep in

Holy shit I had the weirdest dreams last night. I think it's because I overslept (usually I wake up between 6 and 7, this morning I made it until 8). Also, my housemate and I watched two intense movies last night: The Last King of Scotland and Notes on a Scandal.  So my brain was prepped for weird dreams.  I don't mind weird dreams except for the fact that they seem SO REAL. I'll even have internal conversations with myself in my dreams about how this is probably a dream but it feels real.  Very real conversations with real people...it's intense.  So here are some highlights from last night: my sister (who's been dead for almost 10 years) murdered someone that had something to do with the Catholic church.  The person was a friend of hers who was in the hospital. My parents were trying to deal with it. Simultaneously, my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend was sending me texts of her tits (in my dream she is foreign and has poor command of the English language, perhaps texting tits enabled her to communicate more freely?).  I was super annoyed by this, so I was trying to post them on the internet for the collective embarrassment of all involved, but my cell phone plan had some privacy setting that reset text messages every night so I couldn't retrieve the picture. Yes.  So. Weird.

My point is: sleeping in - not for me.

Grandma, Thanksgiving, desserts

Another Thanksgiving. This is my 30th Thanksgiving.  I've lived through a month of Thanksgivings.  Putting it like that, it doesn't seem like that many...

Since I was in Davis, I figured I'd try to do the double dinner thing.  Which in practice, didn't really work out, since I ate the first one at 3pm and the second was around 5:30. I couldn't eat anymore, so I just watch the second dinner diners eat.  I couldn't even have another glass of wine.  I'd had wine with Emily the day before, and 2 days in a row with wine is too much.

The hit of the party dessert-wise was the pomegranate chocolate meringue tart.  It was also the most labor intensive, because I made the pomegranate curd twice, because the first batch didn't set.  The pate sucre crust recipe was good, as was the spicy ganache (which I doubled) and meringue. It made one 10" tart and three 4" tartlets. I took the tart over to Emily's and the tartlets to Bjorn's.  I have no photos, but they were lovely. I also made a lemon cream tart with a spiced nut crust (sort of like a linzer sable), an amaretto pumpkin pie (which I wouldn't make again), and a chocolate bourbon pecan pie (from the Baked cookbook). I didn't actually taste the lemon tart or the pecan pie.  More and more I don't eat what I make.  I don't know why.  Probably because so much sugar makes me feel sick.  Others seem to enjoy it though, so that keeps me inspired.

I had a conversation with my Grandma on Wednesday.  Every now and again she calls and we chat.  She's 92 now.  I still haven't gone back to the ranch since my grandfather died, which is an endless source of guilt. I don't know why I'm so reluctant to go. It's weird. Sometimes I have this gut reaction that prevents me from doing things that it seems I "should" do, and I need to be dragged into doing them. Grandma understands...she says "there's really nothing here for you."  Which of course makes me feel more guilty.

Anyway, I don't know why but I asked grandma if she was scared of dying, and she said she wasn't.  Then she went into talking about how grandpa died and how she watched the undertakers put him in a body bag, load him into the car, and then watched the car go down the driveway.  She said that's how she wants to go. Of course I'm in tears at that point, but trying to hold my voice together so she doesn't know.  I don't want to depress her by bringing it up. I guess I just want to know that maybe I won't always be afraid of dying myself or having people around me die.  There's little point in fearing the inevitable.

Not one to let an opportunity to depress myself go by, I then asked her if she was happy, and she said "um....I don't really know how to answer that question". I said "well, I mean, are you happy?" And then she started talking about how she got new carpeting in the house, and what else she was planning on doing.  I dropped it.

Dicey winter drive

Driving through the Great Basin was a bit dicey yesterday, but it went ok until I got to Truckee where everything went to shit.  Chain control, tons of traffic, blowing snow, lanes that weren't entirely plowed.  I'm glad I got through because they closed I-80 overnight.

Nevada was beautiful though. Everything was freshly white. I'm not a snow lover, but a fresh dusting of snow with scattered clouds at dawn is something special. So beautiful you could never take it all in, so you just take lame dashboard photos and hope for something decent:

A few days ago I hiked around the Fisher towers. I'd never been there before. I can't believe that Roop aid soloed two of them.  Crazy.

In other news, I'm talking with a guy at CU Boulder about potentially...potentially (that's a double potential..which means I'm not getting my hopes up) doing a post-doc there.  He does interesting research, and Boulder is on the list of places to check out, so it's an option.

For all of the things I think about on my drive, and all of the things I think I'd write about, this is all I've got. When it comes to sitting down and banging it out and getting the words on the blog, most of it doesn't happen.

Utah beer

Right now I'm really happy that Utah beer is only 3.2%. That is all.