mmmmmmmmm....

X-posted from LJ November 10:

Good morning!

This weekend, we turned these: into these:

Candy Cap mushrooms are my new best friend. We were gifted some by C's mom earlier this year, and we bust them out for only the most special experiments. Like a batch of Saturday morning pancakes. We only needed two of these babies to add an incredible earthy sweetness to a very basic pancake recipe. The flavor is very strongly maple, perhaps the only way to get a truly natural maple flavor on the West Coast. I'm not sure these can be found here in the Northeast. Anyway, they might as well be pure gold for the price, but the teeniest bit goes a long way. If you come across any, you'll get the fullest flavor by grinding them up (we used the coffee grinder) and drawing the flavor out with fat. Our pancake recipe uses melted butter, so we just sauteed the pulverized mushrooms in it while the butter was melting, then dumped that into the rest of the batter.
Next experiment most likely will be shortbread.

And, since the camera is being totally wonky, and I'm not updating my shop until AFTER the BBB, I have no yarn to share. I do, however, have some knitting progress:

The sweater for the little guy. It's so....BOY. Not sure I like the stripes so much, but said boy seems to think they're grand. I had half a sleeve done, but noticed that I was using two different sized needles, which made the fabric ripple a bit. Oops. So I'm starting fresh on the sleeves and I really hope I get through them quickly because I'm so bored with a sweater project by the time I get to the arms. I have a sweater for myself all done except for the arms and I almost would rather stab myself in the eye with a double-point needle than to actually start knitting a sleeve with it.

Tonight we have a sweet little event at school called Lantern Walk. We made paper lanterns with tissue paper "stained glass" windows. We will walk through the woods with our lanters and share a meal around the fire when it gets dark to celebrate Martinmas. From Wikipedia:

Historical meaning of Mardipäev

Originating in France, the tradition of celebrating Martinmas spread to Germany in the 16th century and later to Scandinavia and the Baltics. In Estonia, Martinmas signifies the merging of Western European customs with the local Balto-Finnic pagan traditions, it also contains elements of earlier worship of the dead as well as certain year-end celebration that predate Christianity.

Martinmas actually has two meanings: in the agricultural calendar it marks the beginning of the natural winter, but in the economic calendar it is seen as the end of autumn. Among Estonians, Martinmas also marks the end of the period of all souls, as well as the autumn period in the Estonian popular calendar when the souls of the ancestors were worshiped that lasted from November 1 to Martinmas.

Like St. Michael's Day, celebrated on September 29, Martinmas is also known as the celebration that marks the end of field work and the beginning of the harvesting period. Following these holidays, women traditionally moved their work indoors for the winter, while men would proceed to work in the forests.

And there you have it.