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RE: How Has Natural Medicine Impacted My Life? - Part 2 - Kombucha and Water Kefir - My response to @naturalmedicine's question, with ALL SBDs pledged to #tarc
TOO LATE to resteem this one - oh no! - but I can still Tweet and FB share, so there's that. Thanks, Herbalist Master, for this - inspiring! - how lucky you are to have women in your life who modeled natural healing and taught you what they knew. Now I'm trying to acquire a taste for the healthy stuff. Mom came from a long line of European pie bakers. Cakes, cookies, breads, potatoes, garden veggies (there was that!), but most of all CARBS and SUGAR, and it's in my DNA. Bring on the kombucha and sauerkraut... hide the sweets!
Yeah, we had our share of baking going too, though my mom always did her best to throw some nutrition in there with all the sugar.
Her oatmeal cookies (now mine) are still the best, made with LOTS of eggs, and I've actually modified the recipe slightly so my version is gluten free and uses coconut sugar instead of refined white sugar, so they're a whole bunch healthier than once upon a time.
And still completely yummy.
Mushrooms. The most horrific scene in a Willa Cather novel is when Antonia's family in a fit of generosity and gratitude decide to part with some treasure brought back from the Old World, something dried, wrinkly and dark, as a gift to their neighbors.... who sniff the "treasure" later on, and toss it all into the fire.....
The misunderstood but valuable contribution of the Shimerdas to the Burdens, the dried mushrooms, represent the inability of people like the Burdens to value and make use of the Old World. Mrs. Burden, seeing no use for them, just throws them away. But for the Shimerdas, the mushrooms were a tasty addition to meat sauces. The metaphor suggests how people adapt to their new environment in various ways and at various speeds. Some cling on to the old ways; others innovate in the new land. Without making the Burdens look hardheaded and xenophobic, this metaphor shows that they are sometimes quick to dismiss the strange ways of their foreign neighbors. My Antonia: Metaphor Analysis
LOLOL, we have our own version of that here.
In Poland, sarniac is one of the prime gourmet mushrooms that is highly prized and sought after every autumn. So imagine Marek's delight, the first year we lived here, when he discovered a large patch of sarniac mushrooms on our place, near the original home on the property. Prolific and easy to get to . . . woo hoo!!!
His dad was even more thrilled, as sarniac are almost never sold fresh in the States, and are extremely pricey dried, especially when flown in from Poland.
And imagine how thrilled they were to initiate me into the mystical realm of this culinary delight . . . only to discover that, while I am a long-avowed mushroom nut, I truly can't stand the taste of sarniac, which strike my cultured papate as something akin to a blend of industrial waste and battery acid. Blech.
I promptly told them they could have every single sarniac on the place. No, really. Take them. All. Please.
That said, at least I didn't throw them into the fire. I'm thrilled that they love them so much. I just don't want any. Ever. ;-)
Oh, I love it! Whenever someone spurns our asparagus and rhubarb, I just say good, that much more for me. The Midwest is known for morrels, and I've never acquired a taste for them. Too hard to soak 'em in salt water long enough to get the sand loose, and rinse all the sand out. Maybe it's the soil I find them on, but that grit on my teeth is nasty. So, you can have all the morrels, and I'll hog the asparagus.
Woo hoo! Yet another area of agreement.
Asparagus and artichoke are my two favorite vegetables. Hands down. I'll take them over all comers.
And yeah, funnily enough, one of the things that made us choose this particular property was that, the first time we came here, we found an ancient morel.
And, in closing in on seven years here, we have literally never seen another here. At all. ;-)
On the other hand, we do have blue and yellow chanterelles, and LOTS of boletes, so life is good.
And one of my plans for this place has long been to bring in lots of other native mushrooms and herbs, which bit by bit, we've been doing each season.
I really want to inoculate a couple of our oaks with hen of the woods mushrooms. Pure deliciousness. ;-)