Two dead thrushes in two days on UD‘s deck! Both flew into our sliding glass doors. I think both were young… There’s always a bit of bird carnage out there – maybe four birds a year? – but I’ve never seen two of the same species on two consecutive days. And thrushes, with their famous song.
UD gets more interested in mushrooms each autumn. Her back woods, as you know, are all about dead trees, and she’s been delighted with her giant puffball crop and various less flashy fungi. Today she pulled from a tree what turned out to be a full shelf of oyster mushrooms which yes yes I know you can eat but UD is afraid to eat any mushroom she forages. She doesn’t trust her ability to identify them.
Mushrooms are very in lately.
A haughty orange cat has taken over UD‘s property. It always makes sure to be tramping around when UD‘s outside, and it stares insolently at UD, but refuses to approach. It has the look of a real predator, and UD‘s garden and wood, with its birds and rabbits galore, is just the thing. Today, as UD leaned on her rake (taking a break from dragging leaves curbside), she watched as the orange cat made sure UD was watching, and then shat in a stand of azaleas.
On the plus side, the cat took a long careful time covering up – with soil, leaves, and twigs – what it had done.
Another regular in UD‘s woods is the deer with one antler. I’ve watched this character year after year. Its dead antler never fell off; it hangs, a blackened fragment, off the side of its head. UD usually shoos away deer who get close to her house, but she has a soft spot for One Antler.
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UPDATE: Yikes. Were those birds gifts to me from the cat?
… have produced many Giant Puffball mushrooms. They’re out there right now, only yards from my office window. They look like the brains of aliens that have been dropped from spaceships. Effing ginormous.
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PUFFBALL UPDATE: In the space of an hour, I’ve gone from being repelled by them, to being afraid of them, to being fascinated by them (I got online and did some reading), to putting on my gardening gloves, picking through my woods, and pulling one of them up.
It’s not the biggest, but – in its pasty pocked surface-of-the-moon way – it’s the most lovely.
I took it to Mr UD, who held, stroked, and sniffed it. I took it to La Kid, who drummed it like a bongo and sank a nail into it. I sent an email to Gabe Mandel, my foraging chef neighbor, and told him to take the rest and cook them.
In this recent post, UD described a
17-year-old neighbor of hers, Gabe
Mandel, foraging through UD‘s acre
in search of edible wild plants for
his ambitious and creative cooking.
Gabe has now hit the big time.
The Washington Post
has a long article about him.
With plenty of pictures and
plenty of wonderful details.
Excerpts:
… [L]ast year, the Walter Johnson High School junior scored an internship at Murray’s Cheese in New York, then spent a month working at Cafe 2 in the Museum of Modern Art. Mom keeps a scrapbook of it all. Its most recent entry was Gabe’s two-page spread in the March-April issue of Bethesda magazine as one of 10 “Extraordinary Teen” honorees.
“I just like cooking. A lot,” he says. “Whatever I make.”
What Gabe is making these days is inspired by what grows close to home. After devouring the Peterson Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants and a similar Smithsonian guide the way he does cookbooks of progressive chefs such as Thomas Keller and David Chang, he was soon picking sweet woodruff, gill-over-the-ground, jack in the pulpit, fiddlehead ferns, wild ginger, sourgrass, Japanese knotweed and bamboo shoots.
“I think ‘wild’ is going to become the Next Big Thing,” he said on a muggy spring morning as he tromped through neighbors’ yards, reciting fun facts about each treasure. “I started foraging because there are so many flavor profiles we never use. Did you know that some plants develop flavors as defense mechanisms?” No trespassing was involved; Gabe has bartered samples of his cooking for access.
“We are happy to have him come and take bamboo,” said Joan May while she sipped her morning coffee on the porch and watched the young hunter crunch through tall, leafy stalks to reach the tender shoots.
“You want the ones that grow in the shade,” he said. “But they need to be boiled, because they contain cyanide.”
The ‘hood is also where Gabe gets to work on his knife skills. A year and a half ago he walked into Black Market Bistro with a résumé, newspaper clippings and lots of ideas. Chef Donald Dennis hired him to do prep two days a week. “He came in with a head full of knowledge,” Dennis says. “He’s fun to have in the kitchen. Certainly a lot of energy. His skills are developing, and his parents are very supportive. A lot of parents push their kids away from this industry.”
… As their son nears resolution of the looming College Question, the Mandels have huddled especially close. Visits to the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, N.Y., the New England Culinary Institute, Johnson and Wales, the French Culinary Institute and New York University’s food studies program have been checked off the list. Traditional culinary schools don’t seem like a good fit, but neither does a regular liberal-arts institution, where Gabe would have to work at a restaurant to keep his hand in food.
“I’m leaning toward a gap-year option,” Gabe said last week. “I want to see the world.”
For now, he is looking forward to a second summer stint at MoMA’s Cafe 2 and to a seat at the StarChefs.com 2010 International Chefs Congress, to be held in New York this fall.
His folks got him tickets for his birthday.
After the massive snow, a sudden and massive spring in Garrett Park.
As I walked my acre just now, picking up small limbs from yesterday’s windstorm and large limbs from last month’s snowstorm, I saw the son of friends of ours. They live at the bottom of Rokeby Avenue.
He was bent over in the forest adjacent to our place, examining white flowers. He’s La Kid’s age, studying to be a chef.
“Find any unusual plants?” he asked me. He held open in his hand a guidebook to edible plants. “I’m foraging.”
“Funny you should ask. These … crocuses? … look new to me. I’ve got plenty of smaller ones, lighter purple. These are different.”
“Those are Russian crocuses. They’re
darker. Kind of shimmery gray on the
outside when they open up.”
“How did they get here? Suddenly?
So many of them?”
“The wind maybe.”
“Squirrels.”
“Definitely squirrels.”
“But listen. I find all sorts of strange things in the back.” I motioned to the purple field behind me. “Feel free to forage my territory.”
A car horn beeped.
“That’s my mom. Thanks! I’d like that.”
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Another Snapshot from Home, if I may. This one also involves a plant.
A few months ago, Mr UD drove a neighbor – an older man, who no longer drives – around Silver Spring for a few hours as he did some errands. The man, John Wilpers, brought a flowering plant to our house as a gesture of thanks.
(I was very close friends with Terry, one of John’s children, when I was growing up in Garrett Park. She works in Baltimore now. We’re still friends.)
But that’s not the snapshot from home. Here’s the snapshot from home. I’ll give it this headline:
GARRETT PARKER WINS
BRONZE STAR
FOR SAVING TOJO’S LIFE
Washington Post:
More than six decades after the end of World War II, a retired U.S. Army colonel this week received the Bronze Star Medal for his part in the arrest in 1945 of Japan’s principal wartime prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo.
The medal, one of the highest honors conferred by the military for combat actions, was awarded to John J. Wilpers, now 90 and living in Garrett Park.
… In January 1947, Wilpers’s commanding officer at the time of the arrest recommended Wilpers for the Bronze Star Medal for his actions Sept. 10-11, 1945. The paperwork describes how Wilpers located Tojo’s Tokyo residence and broke in after hearing a gunshot.
Once inside, Wilpers found that Tojo — who knew his arrest was imminent — had shot himself in the chest. Wilpers reportedly secured Tojo’s weapons and found a Japanese physician who, “faced with Captain Wilpers’ .38 caliber revolver,” administered first aid until U.S. medical officers could arrive.
… What happened to the original recommendation is unknown; it apparently did not make it through the chain of command, or might have gotten lost, said Lt. Col. Mike Moose, a public affairs officer with the Army’s Human Resources Command.
… Wilpers’s family did not learn about his involvement in the arrest of Tojo, who was eventually tried and executed for war crimes, until his son Michael stumbled upon his name while studying at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Wilpers did not pursue the forgotten award until 2002, when he contacted the Awards Branch of the military. In a typewritten letter he wrote: “Dear sir, In the process of putting my military records in order (old geezers tend to do this when they suspect that they may be nearing the long slow slide to Forest Lawn), I came across the attached 1947 recommendation . . . for an award . . . If the recommendation was not approved, just a phone message would do. If it was approved, I would prefer the simplest notification possible… “
