Kurt’s mom sent us on a hike off someplace in Maine to a fire tower where the blueberries grow. If we were good little bunnies and didn’t eat all the berries, there would be a pie in our future. Kurt was armed with some plastic grocery bags. We parked the car, chatted with the previous hikers (“Absolutely gorgeous! You’ve been here before right? Such a great day for it!” etc.), and made it about thirty feet into the path before Joshua got his mushroom eyes on and spotted some chanterelles glowing from the forest. Joshua and I turned into raving lunatics and bolted off into the underbrush to collect. The glory of discovery lasted around thirty seconds unfortunately and I had to bolt or be consumed entirely by mosquitoes. I sprinted back to the trail to pace around with Kurt until Joshua emerged, a wild look in his eye. Chanterelles! In Maine! Who knew; it had been so long since we had found the little guys, and this variety was very similar to the variety you find in Oregon rather than in California (a much superior variety in our opinion—petite, fragrant, and clean). We were pretty excited. Kurt and I continued on (we were on a hike, after all) while Joshua darted off the path here and there every time he thought he saw something. And we kept finding more chanterelles; before too long we had amassed almost one plastic vegetable bagful, probably three pounds. We never found any blueberries; I guess it just wasn’t the right season.

What to make. What to make…

Answer: Pasta with Chanterelle Cream Sauce.

What you need:

Pasta. We used a sort of large unbent macaroni that wasn’t penne. I’d probably choose farfalle if I had to pick one type out of thousands.
Bunch of chanterelles which you picked fresh the same day after going on a lovely hike that had a view but no blueberries.
Olive oil.
Butter. What, did you think this would be a healthy recipe?
Cream. Get a big thing of it just in case. You can always use the remainder to put on coffee or mix with cream soda for a delicious snack.
Chopped pecans.
Garlic. Think sublime; too much garlic tends to overrun chanterelles. You want the garlic smished.
Chervil which you picked fresh from your herb garden. (Oh right! 1. Plant herb garden. 2. Go chanterelle hunting…) Chop it finely.
Salt and pepper. Al gusto.

How to do it:

First, you need to clean the chanterelles. This involves cutting off the ends of the stalks and brushing off the dirt (a paintbrush works if you don’t already have one of those froofy mushroom brushes). It is best to not clean them by washing because mushrooms will absorb water like crazy and soggy chanterelles pretty much suck. Use water only in extreme emergency. Also, cut out any weird sections (burrowing insects or slug slime, depending upon how squeamish or protein-hating you are), double-check your species, etc. Then slice into thin sections.

Dry sauté the mushrooms. Chanterelles have a lot of water in them even if you didn’t wash them and if you just start cooking with them without releasing some of it, they just end up soggy. Get a dry skillet hot (so water droplets dance around) and toss in the mushrooms. Add a bit of salt to help them release the water if you want. Stir around a bit and pretty soon they will start releasing a shocking amount of yellow liquid. They will also smell really good. Pour off the liquid and reserve and continue stirring them around until they stop releasing water more or less and the rest of the liquid has evaporated. Take mushrooms off burner and set aside. I chopped them finely for our cream sauce (you could leave them in slices or even puree them with some of the cream depending upon what texture you want.)

Put pasta on to boil.

Heat up some oil and butter in the skillet; add garlic and after a moment, add the chopped pecans. Toss these around in the oil until the pecans are a nice toasty consistency (I’m a pecan novice—I just tasted them to see if they were all crunchy and buttery and called it done); don’t burn the garlic either. Add the chopped chanterelles and toss around in the butter/pecan/oil/garlic. Now stir in the cream and reserve mushroom broth. We added enough cream to make the sauce look ‘right.’ (If you are looking for a smoother sauce consistency, you would need to set the pecans aside before adding the mushrooms, puree the sauce, then add them back in last—or sprinkle them on. Or puree them too. Whatever.) We let the sauce simmer very gently for a few minutes then called it done. Adjust the taste with salt and pepper.

Put pasta in your preferred serving bowl and pour sauce over it. Sprinkle chervil on the top to make it look pretty. Lamely, we did not manage to get a photo of the finished product.

She looks rather pleased about those prunes (those are prunes, by the way, squashed into a consistency that one does normally not expect prunes to assume); it’s hard to believe but she was screaming bloody murder earlier.

After Maine, we headed south to Boston where a post-wedding east-coast family gathering was taking place at Elise’s parent’s house. I probably mentioned that my brother Sage married Elise in June, but I’m a loser and didn’t post any photos. I guess I was under the assumption that nearly everyone I know who reads this was in fact at the wedding. Not so, it turns out, so here are the photos you all have been waiting for.

The day after the party we all headed to Cape Cod, where Elise’s family has a small cottage. The weather was somewhat uncooperative but we were able to take some good walks after it stopped raining and were even persuaded to dip ourselves in water that was less than 84 degrees.

The last night we were there, we went over to the outer ocean side just before sunset and there were dozens of people fishing in the surf. Bluefish is evidently something that is fished regularly off Cape Cod and nowhere else. People were pulling in large fish everywhere we looked. One guy who was fishing right in front of us hooked one and when he reeled it in, he gave it to us. Pretty exciting. We split up into two groups: put-the-baby/clean-the-fish and get-the-groceries and met home later to cook dinner. I believe everyone was very glad Joshua was there to gut and clean it.

Along the surfline on the beach were zillions of tiny dead fish. It was very odd; they were all perfect and glittering things and the colors were so bright against the tan-colored sand, like little fishy sapphires.

We left early-ish the next day for the drive back to Lexington. Here’s a photo of what the sky was doing somewhere across southern Pennsylvania.

Auntie Cheyenne and Riley.

It had rained the day before and so the sky was very clear with quaint little puffs of cloud. This must be the third most photographed building in New York; we did our part.

Big. Buildings.

Scenic!

This has never been done before.

We had visited the Met on our first NY visit—twice actually—and had only dented a few sections. The Met is ‘suggested donation,’ with a big scary sign that suggests you donate $20. We had heard it was free and our plan was to swing by for a couple hours here and there during our stay but the suggested donation thing had us all bent out of shape. You know, not $20 since it was no longer early and we’d wasted precious hours already but not too little so they think you are a cheap bastard or something. Turns out the ticket girls could not care less about you or your suggested donation.

There was a group of mormons in the park giving free popcorn and Books of Mormon to passers by. One of them was attracting the attention of small children with some trippy utopian chalk art.

This is a ‘corpse flower’ (titan arum), which bloomed at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden a few days before we arrived. When we got there it was alone in a large room specially designed to keep the teeming throngs from trampling each other in their attempts to record the glory with their mini camcorders and cell phone cameras. The flower no longer smelled like dead bodies and the large sticky uppy had fallen over. It was pretty awesome nonetheless.

(Botanical drawings by Nancy Blum, also at the BBG.)

We saw an Broadway play called The Lieutenant of Inishmore. I enjoyed it but I have to say the New York Times and other reviews that were enlarged and posted in the windows of the theater were a little overenthusiastic. The play was touted as a ‘screamingly funny’ ‘scathing’ and ‘gleeful,’ ‘gruesome,’ dark comedy about an IRA-like splinter terrorist cell. So it was also controversial and stuff. Mostly it was about Irish accents, the word “feck,” and dead cats.

After the play we dissed the clamoring horse cabbies and walked under our own power up 5th Avenue, taking “art” photos of the window displays and night scenery.