Have you ever tried a serviceberry? I hadn’t, until this past Arts Fest weekend. My friend said she picked a gallon of serviceberries in downtown Iowa, and pointed out the trees replete with magenta berries growing on Iowa Avenue. “They taste like a blueberry, but also kind of like a cherry,” she said. I picked […]
Botany
Posted inFood & Drink
Botany: Flex your culinary muscle and impress your guests with this tasty recipe for roasted spaghetti squash
What does a zucchini and an acorn squash have in common? Genetically speaking, everything. Pumpkins, summer squash, spaghetti squash, pattypan, delicata, acorn squash and zucchinis are all domesticated variants of the same species of the new world vine cucurbita pepo. So the difference between a pumpkin and most squashes is equivalent to the difference between […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Botany: Where to find Dryad’s Saddle and how to cook them
A few days after a particularly Old Testament-like storm, I noticed what looked like the Starship Enterprise sprouting from the trunk of a maple. It was a massive disc-shaped fungus known as the Dryad’s Saddle. These parasitic polypores are some of the first mushrooms to appear in the woods during morel season in the spring, […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Forest gold: Find chanterelles while avoiding their poisonous look-alikes
I was selling mushrooms at a farmers market in Upstate New York last summer when this happened: “Forest gold!” said a self-proclaimed “old hippy” as he grabbed a few golden chanterelles off my table. “I used to do all the purchasing for a famous restaurant in San Francisco,” he said, “I won’t tell you which […]
Posted inFood & Drink
New Oyster Cult: Mushroom foraging in the IC area
Early each spring, on sunny days when the oak leaves are still as small as squirrel ears, the “cult of the morel” emerges: Iowans, poking around south-facing slopes for the prized mushrooms. But morel hunting can prove frustrating. A day’s hunt may yield only a handful of undersized mushrooms, and prices for morels can exceed […]
