Easily Fooled

Here are two fungi you may mistake for elk horns and snowshoes. I know I did. But here is your clue. If it is less than 150µm across, it is probably fungus.

If I Were a Lactobacillus

Here is another gift idea. Find a microscope and take pictures of things you see in it. You can turn the photos into T shirts, earrings, whatever you like. Like labels for your salsa, if you are still making it.

Salsa label directions:
You will need one moldy tomato.

You may have to buy a tomato for this. Or, go to a cafeteria and wait until someone pitches their tomato slice from lunch. That shouldn't take long. Leave it out for a few days, covered with an inverted glass, until it looks like the photo on the left. Mix some of the mold with a drop of water, and put it on a slide. What can you find?
This tomato has some Botrytis. The conidia (spores) look like tiny transparent grapes.
Take some pictures, and voila! You can use a regular digital camera for this - hold it up to the eyepiece and cup one hand around the edge between the two, to block extra light from getting in. I was going to post the label here too, but my program froze up before I could save the artwork....

Below is something slightly different. It's a snowflake-like pollen grain. In reality it is about 12 microns across.

If I were a juicy lactobacillus in a spoon of yogurt, this dandelion pollen grain would be the size of a large apple tree. That is, if the dandelion pollen fell in the yogurt. Otherwise I wouldn't even meet it. But the Botrytis spore on the tomato would think the pollen grain looked like a mini van. Actually it wouldn't look like that, because spores don't have eyes. And pollen doesn't have wheels or automatic windows.

The ever so melancholy time of year is coming in, when living things try to sneak off and take a break every chance they get. I sometimes forget to check on the Ganoderma fungus. It is alive - slowly extending its mycelial range in four 64 oz. size oatmeal containers now. They all live on top of the refrigerator, kind of like a trailer park, except when they go in the oven for a warm-up. . They know it is approaching the end of fall as well. They would like to come to a grinding halt, but that is a bad idea, because I won't know how to wake them up later. I will turn on the oven, and pop them in on warm overnight. Maybe tomorrow morning they will stretch their tiny white limbs and go for a walk through the sawdust.

Minnesota - Salsa and Sentence Padding

Please don't try to bleach your own flour. I was joking.

Here in Minnesota, sentiments, among other things, are well padded.
One easy way to cushion what you mean
is to use prefix and suffix words.
Now, some words HAVE prefixes or suffixes.
I am not talking about those words.
These words ARE the prefixes or suffixes.
They are the prefixes or suffixes of the sentence subject.
A common example might be "So, are you still OK over there, then?" In that sentence, there are four prefix words (if you consider the subject to be given), and three suffix words.
The ubiquitous "Sure, pretty good" is the correct answer to that question, with the inflection weighted just slightly onto the word "good." That sentence has either two prefix words OR two suffix words, take your pick.
These and those (above) are two great prefix or suffix words, and when combined with the suffix or prefix word "ones" can stand alone as an understated sentiment. You might even be able to fit them all twice in the same sentence for a total of six, but I'm not sure.

With no segue, I need to move right into the "holiday season." October is my cue to begin making gifts in dribbles. I enjoy squirreling these gifts away until mid December. I always seem to hide the list of giftees in a different spot than the gifts and can not find the list. So I mentally re-distribute each and every item, and dole them out a brand new way. No, those are not prefix words. They are something else. I think they are emotive words. I will let you know for sure next week. Which reminds me - the most expensive color is purple, for those of you who may be regular readers.

Gift project of the week: Mystery Salsa.
Canned tomatoes are on sale. They are perfect for this project, and cut the prep time way back. Green peppers have been on sale all year, it seems like. (three suffix words).

Here is my favorite recipe.
1 15 oz can chopped tomatoes
1 green pepper, seeded and chopped
1 medium yellow onion chopped
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1 jalapeno, or other pepper, chopped*
1 TBS sugar*
1/2 tsp ground cumin

You can double this recipe.

*I use different heat and or sugar sources for this recipe each time. 
In the past, any improvisation happened inadvertently, but this year I will hone the skill.
You try it too. Here is an opportunity to get creative. Stay focused on flavors and the all-important JAR LABEL. Imagine a catchy label such as Tupelo Honey and Serrano Salsa or Minnesota Mystery-Maple Salsa. Or Trehalose and Fire Ant Salsa. Just kidding. About the fire ants. We don't have them in Minnesota.

I do have Mystery peppers this year. They are so crazy hot! They were supposed to be non-spicy Anaheim eat-them-off-the-bush type, and I took a big bite right out in the garden. About halfway through the thought "this pepper has a sweet, yet pungent fruitiness that warms the tongue" I suddenly had to spit the whole bite right across the pepper plants and onto the green bean patch.

Whatever you choose for your sugar and heat, simmer everything together 45 minutes. Ladle boiling hot into hot, sterilized jars, cover with canning lids the way you always do, and process for 15 minutes. THAT was a whole slew of suffix words. Lots of padding!
And the innuendo of the words is staggering. Or maybe that is just the heat of the mystery peppers.

Make the jars pretty after everything has cooled off. Put it all in a box for later.

The Cheapest Color

White is the cheapest color in so many ways.
If you reduce a food to white, it will just sit there like a bump on a log.
case in point....
flour
rice
sugar
oil (sorry, gotta hydrogenate that to turn it white)
I am not talking about protein here, because that will still rot at room temperature if it has any moisture in it, even if it is white.This phenomenon can be put to good use, and it may occasionally save you money in the long run.

What about things that are not food? White is still cheap, when it comes to fabric and paper, because bleach is cheaper than dye and mordant.

White cars, are they the cheapest? Your insurance company will say "you betcha." I can not believe that is true in North Dakota in the middle of winter. On the other hand, maintaining a white yard in North Dakota in the winter is waaaaay cheaper than any other color. And no maintenance! Unless you feel the need to spiff your snow up. Or get in and out of your house after the blizzard.

I will come back later to cover the most expensive color.

Eating Wood

Whether or not cellulose is a good thing for humans to eat, is a difficult question. Several individuals have expressed shock and dismay at suddenly noticing it is in the ingredients list of your favorite foods. and some you don't like too.

I am really on the fence on this one. "K," who started this whole can of worms still has people commenting on the comments of other people's livid remarks. These remarks include ‎"YAY to the world of 'less expensive food, now we can buy bigger cars and more shoes!!" Yes, that is out of context. The original incendiary spark can be found here - Not Food?

And the full blown inflagration centers on the apparent deception to the consumer, who thinks he or she is getting edible food at the grocery store, while lo and behold, it is parts of trees or cornstalks, more likely, that we are actually "eating."

Personally, I am irritated that we can't figure out how to digest the stuff already. At this day and age, we could be responding to references about our ever expanding mid sections with "That's my reticulorumen, don't you have one yet?" We would need our reticulorumens to house a few bacteria we don't already own. I think they could be easily ingested by making some dirt milkshakes.

The same humans who don't want to have a go at eating chopped paper may not have tried the delightful and largely inedible slippery elm porridge. Made from the inner bark of the slippery elm, this porridge has the distinctive flavor of wood shavings. I have eaten it many times, and I didn't put on an ounce.
Have you seen this pop-up ad? One trick of the tiny belly. Eat wood.

I MUST point out that wood is not cellulose. Sure, some of it is but there are many other things to digest in wood, such as lignin. You try digesting lignin sometime.

 My Ganoderma, in its jar house, truly enjoys a wood diet. I treat the youngster to a warm-up in the oven twice a day. Just over 100ºf. Soon, it will be moving again. More space, more wood, more oxygen.

This all reminds me of a joke. What is brown and sticky? A stick.

BEANS Beans beans

The beans are being counted. Petaluma gold rush is a wildcard. It seems it has crossed with anything that bloomed in proximity to it. Maybe something is wrong with its flowers, maybe gremlins climbed around on the vines at night and popped the flowers open before they had a chance to self-pollinate.

One of the gremlins may be named E.M. She lives down our street. E.M. definitely gets into other people's back yards, possibly their gardens as well. She made her way up the B.N. right-of-way and popped the heads off all the sunflowers she could find, then stuffed them in a bag she was shielding herself with. I don't have definitive proof of this, but I COULD see her, and she WAS hovering over spot after spot behind the garden, and she DID have a large cloth bag which appeared to be larger every time she picked it up. I am just enough afraid of her that I did NOT run out back to holler "GO AWAY and put some UNDER garments on before you show up again!"

Today I noticed that the sunflowers were all headless. The sunflowers outside of the garden AND the sunflowers inside the garden.

Random

Who knew there are endless rules for the pinning of insects? I said this was going to be random... Their little legs and antennae must be placed, they can't be positioned in any way except horizontally, they should face left, and flies' heads should be turned. The insect must be five millimeters above the first I.D. slip and ten millimeters above the second I.D. slip. The pin should be on the right side of the thorax. The most useful tidbit is that, by refrigerating your dead insects before pinning them, they lose some of that disgusting crunchiness when the pin is first inserted.
We feared a killing freeze two nights ago, so I picked all the beans, ready or not. They are hanging by their stems, upside down and there are hundreds of them. The winners so far are Arikara and black turtle.

 Followed by brown Norwegian and (yes!) Petaluma gold rush. But with hundreds of pods still to count the final results could be completely different.
We would all probably like to have our own dolipore septa with perforated parenthesomes but unless you are a homobasidiomycete it is just not going to happen. Sorry. Which reminds me. I hate a certain size. It is the size that things are when they are just about too small to get a good look at with a compound microscope. You know, the size that people who already know what these things should look like say "you can see it right next to the (insert word like dolipore) if you look carefully." So you look carefully and all you can see is tiny smudges that look exactly like the smudges on the far side of your range of view. I think that is about two microns. Stupid smudges. 
OK, one last thing. Do you think a reputable chocolate company should charge eight dollars for a box of chocolates when the pieces include varieties such as "spackling paste - toothpaste combo covered in dark chocolate" and "bathroom deodorizer flavored cream filling swirled wirh a milk chocolate nougat outside?" There are a number of companies here in M whose owning parties think if you just keep changing the smells and flavors of the products every two and a half weeks, you are bound to come up with that billion dollar creation no one can get enough of, sooner or later. I am convinced the recipe is simpler and more precise. I think I almost have it. You can buy a copy of the recipe in progress for only three dollars and forty seven cents, because it will have to go the USPS route. And you will have to sign a non-competition agreement. Someone will out and out steal it otherwise.

Treatise on Trehalose - or - Gano moves to the suburbs

The Ganoderma has moved out of its cramped quarters, to the pristine and expansive landscape of pelletized wood fuel, "Good Mews" kitty litter and hydrogen peroxide. Will it thrive there? I have been hauling it around to the warmest spots - indoors or out - to help it get a grip on life in a jar.

Here are the worried parents.

One of the many neat things about mushrooms is their inventiveness in their day to day needs. Take energy needs, for example. A human would settle for plain old sugar. Dextrose. Sucrose. You know, the stuff you like to eat because your body doesn't have to do a THING with it - it is already broken down and ready to go. Now, a mushroom doesn't store its sugar that way. It has something sneakier in mind, which is to store sugar in a form that it thinks other creatures won't recognize, or want. Well, it has made a mistake there, because this sugar is becoming popular.

It is called trehalose. Kazuhiko Maruta discovered a slick approach to manufacturing trehalose.  Of course, once Cargill caught word, their R&D people went straight to town. And like so many other facets of our American lives, trehalose is now really about C O R N. 

Cargill's slogan ought to be "Trehalose, the sugar you can't buy here in the US!" Trehalose can be bought and used in all sorts of recipes around most of the globe. The resulting food can be imported to the US. You can buy this imported food and eat it in the US. You just can't buy trehalose sugar in your local grocery store, go home and bake a cake with it in the US. On the other hand, if you would like to buy some trehalose, pop a teaspoon of the stuff in your mouth for what ails you, that is perfectly alright. By mail-order as a health supplement, it can be yours for only $10 or more per lb.

Now, some people still like to call trehalose the fungus sugar. And why would you want to eat it anyway? You could also call it the bug sugar, since bugs make it as well as mushrooms. As a sugar, it has some amazing properties. You may decide you want some after you check out Eric Drexler's blog HERE

He forgot one important quality of the stuff. Mess around with trehalose in the kitchen, if you ever get your hands on some. Baked foods sweetened with trehalose don't "brown" in the oven. They just stay the color they were when you put them in, even though they get cooked. I have yet to figure out why I would like to do that to my baked goods, but I know I want to.

OK, lastly, dinner yesterday. Pork grilled with rosemary and garlic, goat cheese turnovers, beets and spinach with a raspberry glacé and walnuts on top. For our anniversary, and enjoyed in the backyard to the sound of one billion cicadas, crickets, and other trehalose-producing bugs. Proprietary recipe, until it wins the Pillsbury bake-off.

Graham Crackers with Ganoderma on the side?

Why would anyone make graham crackers when you can buy them, you ask.
Well, these crackers are as bad as eating out and out pie crust for all their pseudo health innuendos, and yet they could fool the casual observer. Making them is restorative in a way similar to re-inventing the bicycle.

Update on the reishi mycelium. Here is one, very much alive and negotiating with the other piece in the dish. They are dancing the self - non-self tango that mycelia like to do.

Circles, Not Spheres

Sometimes I think I am going to do a lot of things.

Thanks to Kelly, lolo and General Mills for your inspiration (links below).

Photographing and gazing at my petri dishes makes me want to make round things. I am making round things right now - whole wheat orange blueberry cupcakes. I'm including some round things I would like to make, but I am NOT GOING TO. You can make them. Do you like hamburgers? These are not hamburgers. Do you like food? Betty Crocker has something different for you. It is called what looks like plastic but isn't and it isn't food either. The knitting cupcakes are probably going to be hard hard hard - they include a how-to video.

Muffins:
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup unbleached white flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
grated zest from one orange
1 cup fresh blueberries

Heat oven to 350º f. Grease the bottoms ONLY of your muffin cups. (One regular 12 cup tin, or a 6 cup "Texas" size tin). You will need to run a butter knife gently around each muffin when they are all done, but boy do they climb the walls if the walls aren't greasy slippery slopes.
Mix the dry ingredients in a big bowl. Mix the wet ingredients and the orange zest in a medium bowl. Save the blueberries for the end. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir that up gently.
Then add the blueberries. Fold them in as lightly as you can but don't take too long about it. You don't want to lose all that fluffy carbon dioxide hiding in the batter. Evenly divide the batter among the muffin cups.
Bake them (don't open that door to peek! Until close to the end!) 30 - 35 minutes for the regular size and about 45 minutes for the Texas size. Turn them out onto a rack to cool. You will need the butter knife. They are kind of like heavy clouds made out of food, so handle with care!
 

They leapt off

I would have entered this post yesterday, if Jacqui would have let me.

Jacqui is behind the fuzzy counter at the auto insurance appraisal center.
What is it like in the office with Jacqui?

"I’m stupid about that!" she chirps, when I ask her if she thinks I can get on the internet using their password. “I brought my laptop in to use it when I was hired here and it didn’t work. So I don’t think you can get on.”

Twig mom has just left. She had a cracked bumper too. “I was at Bumper to Bumper (what does THAT mean?), and I looked down for a minute, and CRUNCH I hit the person in front of me. She was so nice. I could have had a mean one, but she got right out of her car and said ‘Are You Alright??’ That teaches me. “

“He said it would be 900 dollars. Can you believe it? For a little crack? “

“Oh, yes” coos Jacqui. “That’s what we’re here for.”

It’s my turn. Jacqui hands me paperwork and a check for 800 dollars. Jacqui has been talking with the man behind the scenes, the man who is actually making the calls on everything in this building.  He called her to the back ten minutes ago, to "look at something" and when she came out I heard her say “That’s really weird.” Now she is as chipper as ever.

“Jacqui, what do you think about the crack?” I am wondering if it occurred because it is a stress point,  or whether someone actually bumped it in a parking lot as my rep seems to have decided. He has never seen this car, cracked or otherwise.

“Well, you COULD get it fixed. Or not. A lot of people don’t.” Jacqui is obviously barreling down a different set of tracks than I am.

“No, I mean, what do you think about the way that crack looks? I couldn’t help overhearing…”

“Lots of people just use the money for something else. It would look better if you got it fixed... You can do all kinds of things, anything you want with the check, you know. That’s what we’re here for!”

She thinks for a moment. Then, cheerfully, “Just be sure to save the paperwork. Then, if it cracks there again, you don’t have to pay another deductible!”

The Ganoderma really plunged off their little fungal islands yesterday onto the agar medium. Dish B had a contaminant, so I transferred the uncontaminated bit to two new plates with potato and spirulina in its mini-world. Now it is fearful again and "thinking about it."

Dishes A and C are slightly ticked at me for not including more in the way of protein. They will just have to sweat it out for another day or two.

Waiting for Ganoderma

Yes I am waiting. Three little pieces of Ganoderma on a specially prepared medium, with some of its favorite food, I think. While I am waiting, I am processing orange marmalade and crab apple jelly, opening dried bean pods, knitting, baking a pizza.

I have 18 varieties of beans growing and or dying in the garden. I am harvesting all the dried beans. The variety with the most (beans) wins the whole bean plot next spring.
I want it to be Petaluma Gold Rush, but it won't be that, so I may have to have a second bean plot just for a runner-up.

What was in the cold air return.