Hedgehog mushroom and ham quiche
It’s mushroom week here on Justinsomnia, as Stephanie and I try to consume the 4.5 pounds of mushrooms I foraged with Danny at Salt Point State Park. First up, hedgehog mushroom and ham quiche.
We followed this basic quiche recipe, adapted from the Culinary Institute of America’s New Professional Chef. Stephanie made the pie crust based on Michael Ruhlman’s recipe in Ratio. For the mushrooms I rinsed off the leaf bits, and then dry-sauteed them until we constructed the rest of the quiche.
Mushroom foraging at Salt Point
A certain type of person goes into the woods to hunt for mushrooms, but to me that always seemed like a relatively esoteric, specialized pursuit. And then it started popping up in a number of things I was reading. Michael Pollan went foraging as part of one of his meals in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Peter Mayle described it as a sort of French national activity in A Year in Provence. Georgeanne Brennan talked about friends who foraged for cèpes (porcinis) in A Pig in Provence.
And then there was Danny.
During our sliders party last November, I found him in the kitchen, with a red backpack at his feet, waving around a very thick book as he described to some friends how he was taking advantage of every possible moment to go out hunting for mushrooms—in particular porcinis. He said it had gotten so bad recently that he had actually taken time off from work to go foraging within the optimal window of opportunity, which was only a few weeks long.
I was surprised to learn, given that my only exposure to porcinis was their importance in French and Italian cuisine, that they actually grew in US. And then he unzipped his red backpack and pulled out one of the biggest, densest mushrooms I’d ever seen. It was a porcini he found that morning. It must have weighed at least two pounds, which given what I know now about the prized porcini, means he’d found an $80-100 mushroom.
Danny offered to everyone listening that he’d be more than willing to let us tag along to fully plumb the depths of his newfound obsession. For us, life intervened, but some other friends took him up on the offer and sure enough, they came home with mushrooms. For free! Now my curiosity was really piqued. Once an available weekend presented itself, I sent Danny an email letting him know I was interested. And that is how I found myself waking up at 6:30 yesterday morning, scooting in the rain over to his house, and then driving for two hours up to Salt Point State Park for some truly epic mushroom foraging.
We arrived around 10am, and to our great surprise, several other cars pulled into the park at the same time, other people clearly on the hunt for mushrooms. We made haste up a trail towards the Pygmy Forest, based on a tip Danny had received through a contact on Flickr. Not more than 10 minutes in, Danny was off-trail, having very quickly spotted some hedgehog mushrooms (Hydnum umbilicatum). As my eyes adjusted to the underbrush, I started seeing them too. They were everywhere. Not mushrooms as far as the eye could see, but as we scrambled along, we’d see two here, three there, some were very small, with caps two inches in diameter or less.
What Danny was really looking for was something commonly called the black trumpet, or more ominously “the trumpet of death” (Craterellus cornucopioides). His first sighting was right in the middle of some hedgehogs, a black flowery thing, barely poking up above the forest floor, and hardly distinguishable from the surrounding detritus of leaves and pine needles. Again, once my eyes adjusted, I started seeing them more and more.
Along the way we found another edible, yellowfoot chanterelles (Cantharellus tubaeformis) which were taller and waxier than the other two.
Over the course of four hours, the two of us went mushroom crazy. At one point we filled each of our buckets and had to hike back to the car to unload our spoils. And then back out we went, eventually stumbling upon a veritable cache of black trumpets further up the trail. By the end of the day we’d collected nearly nine pounds of mushrooms, just within the allowed limit of 5 pounds per person. When we got back to Danny’s house, we laid them all out to better appreciate our take. It was a truly awe-inspiring sight.
End of an era: Blogger shutting down FTP service
When I started Justinsomnia back in the summer of 2002, I setup Blogger to publish to my university webspace via FTP. In the spring of 2005 I started playing with WordPress because that’s what Ruby was using for OrangePolitics. My last post published using Blogger was watching unc beat duke on March 7, 2005. A few days later I posted Say Hello to Wordpress, and the rest is history. Sort of. I actually continued using Blogger to publish my “neatlinks” via FTP (which I included dynamically in my blog) until February 12, 2007, when I incorporated them into my WordPress setup.
Anyway, it seemed only appropriate that I should pay my respects to a service I owe so much. Google will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. Couple this with the recent news of Haloscan going the way of the dinosaur, and this truly is the end of an era.
Machine translation, semantic HTML, and embedded code, oh my!
It’s hard for me to believe that in the not so distant past I worked as a web producer for O’Reilly’s now defunct Online Publishing Group. Basically I was a sort of HTML jockey, shuttling articles through their content management system while ensuring that they all had consistent markup.
Since the articles O’Reilly published online dealt predominantly with programming, the vast majority contained code snippets and samples. Thus one of my primary roles was to ensure that the embedded code displayed properly on the web. Our HTML “style guide” dictated that all code be wrapped in <pre><code></code></pre> tags. I remember at the time thinking it a bit redundant—I occasionally embed code on my blog, but for simplicity’s sake, I use <pre> alone.
I discovered today another value to the semantic use of HTML: machine translation. I was looking through my referrer logs, and noticed someone had translated one of my posts with code samples. And sure enough, Google translated everything within the <pre> tags, mangling the code. Gah!
This made me think all the way back to my O’Reilly days, and I wondered what Google would do if I also wrapped the code block in <code> tags. Sure enough, they respected the semantic “intent” of the <code> tag and left it untranslated—BUT they also stripped out the newlines, collapsing multiple lines of code to a single line. So if anyone from the Google Translate team is reading, consider this a bug report.
Before Google Translate
After Google Translate
Note: Apparently Google will also avoid translating tags with class="notranslate".
Ubuntu on a Lenovo ThinkPad X100e
Stephanie’s brand new ThinkPad X100e arrived today, so I got to have some fun tonight and set up Ubuntu on it for her.
Installation via memory key
This was the first time I’d installed Ubuntu via memory key. Means I might not need my portable CD-ROM drive anymore…
- Downloaded the latest Ubuntu AMD64 Desktop ISO using BitTorrent
- Ran
usb-creatorto copy the ISO to my 2GB USB memory key (based on these instructions: Installation From USB Stick) - Got the “DBus error” like the instructions anticipated, so ran the following command to format my memory key:
sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdb1
- Then I reran
usb-creator - Plugged the memory key into the X100e, booted it up, and installed Ubuntu
Getting wireless to work
Of course, bane of Linux, wireless didn’t work out of the box. This tends to be expected with brand new hardware, and it took me a while to piece together the right steps to get it working.
- Basically run exactly these commands (even
sudo su):sudo apt-get install build-essential wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/34090404/rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1012.2009_64bit.tar.gz sudo tar -xvzf rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1012.2009_64bit.tar.gz cd rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1020.2009_64bit sudo su make make install
- Then reboot and you have wireless
Getting the TrackPoint scroll button to work
Apparently xorg.conf is a thing of the past, which kind of obsoletes my previous TrackPoint “scroll button” instructions. Oh well. This is how you do it now.
- Install and run gpointing-device-settings
sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings gpointing-device-settings
- Select TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint on the left
- Check “Use wheel emulation”
- Select button #2
How to choose a melon (in France)
Bien choisir son melon charentais jaune
How to choose a Charentais melon
- Le poids
Bien dense, le melon doit peser lourd au creux de votre main.
Although dense, the melon should be heavy in the palm of your hand. - La couleur
Vert clair virant au jaune, le melon doit présenter des sillons vert très marqués.
Light green turning to yellow, the melon should have well defined green grooves. - La maturité
Une craquelure autour de pédoncule est signe de maturité. Ne pas confondre avec des fentes!
A crack around the stem is a sign of maturity. Do not confuse with slots! - Frais et souple
Son écorce doit être souple, ni dure, ni molle. Contrairement aux apparences le melon est fragile. À manipuler avec douceur.
The rind must be flexible, not hard or soft. Contrary to appearances, the melon is fragile. Handle gently. - Le parfum
Son parfum doit être subtile, pas trop prononcé. Une trop forte odeur révèle un melon trop avancé.
Its perfume should be subtle, not too pronounced. Too strong an odor indicates that the melon is overripe.
Clearly the French are very serious about their melons.
Chèvre chaud “nuggets”
In my continuing series on French groceries, I would love to see something like these in the US. Are you listening Trader Joe’s?
Why do the French eat raw milk cheese but drink ultrapasteurized milk?
Not all cheeses in France are made with raw milk, but many are, including those aged less than the 60 days required to sell raw milk cheese in the US. Brie and Camembert, for example, are generally aged only 3-4 weeks.
But what’s interesting is that the vast majority of milk available for drinking in the French supermarket is ultrapasteurized (aka UHT milk) and sold in unrefrigerated bricks or liter bottles.
Photo used with permission (source)
You’d think that a country comfortable with eating raw milk cheese would also prefer drinking their milk raw (lait cru), but you’d be wrong. Thus it’s ironic that the political fight to allow the sale of raw milk in the US focuses primarily on raw milk for drinking, not raw milk for cheese. It’s almost like something got lost in translation. Let’s not forget that it was a Frenchmen, Louis Pasteur, who started this whole “mess” in the first place. I kid.
How something is pasteurized (yes, there are different ways!) is of great importance to a cheesemaker, home- or otherwise, as ultrapasteurized milk is effectively dead from a cheesemaking perspective. It just won’t curdle. It’s basically cooked. This is compared to “regular” HTST pasteurized milk which does less damage by heating the milk to a lower temperature for a short time.
Even the Time Traveler’s Cheatsheet includes a description of pasteurization (though for unknown reasons it starts off the technology section, as opposed to health).
I learned in my most recent cheese class, Sheep Showdown, that not all cheesemakers look down on pasteurization. Our teacher, Michelle Buster, told us that “to pasteurize or not to pasteurize” is as much a question of taste and legality, as it is a question of economics (everything always is). For the local Italian and Spanish cheesemakers she imports from, pasteurizing their milk reduces the risk of a batch of cheese going bad or having an off-taste. Thus pasteurization actually helps to increase their yield, and thus their revenue. On the other hand, the pasteurization equipment is expensive, so some simply cannot afford to go that route.
So why do the French drink ultrapasteurized milk? Apparently, it has to do with refrigeration. Not only is it expensive to ensure that milk stays refrigerated from the processing plant to the grocery store, but the French are known for having rather small fridges at home. Thus several liter bottles (or boxes) of UHT milk can be stored much more easily in the pantry than in the refrigerator.
