How to tell Scouts are coming for dinner

March 11, 2013

Scout Dutch ovens at Camp Wisdom

Scouts coming for dinner – Dutch ovens ready for duty at Wisdom Trail District Outdoor Leader training, Camp Wisdom, Circle 10 Council BSA, March 9, 2013.

Dutch ovens lined up for duty is a tell that Scouts and Scouters are expected for dinner, aren’t they?

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Leave a Comment » | Boy Scouts of America, Cooking, Food history, History, Outdoor Recreation | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Greg Marley’s “Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares” in the kitchen

December 29, 2011

Happy to see Mr. Marley has a video to accompany his book of last year, Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares.  Marley hasn’t aged much in three decades; think it’s the ‘shrooms?

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Greg Marley’s “Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nigh…, posted with vodpod

From Chelsea Green TV. Chelsea Green publishes Marley’s work.

Greg Marley, Maine mycologist and author of "Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares"

Greg Marley

Marley’s book was a finalist in the culinary history category for the 2011 book awards from the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) , and won the 2011 Jane Grigson Award from IACP for distinguished scholarship and depth of research in cookbooks.  The award was named in honor of publisher and food author Jane Grigson, who herself published a volume on mushroom cookery.

From the Chelsea Green authors’ bios:

Greg Marley has a passion for mushrooms that dates to 1971, the year he left his native New Mexico and spent the summer in the verdant woods of central New York. Since then, he has become an avid student and teacher of mycology, as well as a mushroom identification consultant to the Northern New England Poison Control Center and owner of Mushrooms for Health, a company that provides education and products made with Maine medicinal mushrooms. Marley is the author of Mushrooms for Health: Medical Secrets of Northeastern Fungi. He lives and mushrooms in Rockland, Maine.

Greg and I met a couple of summers later, in “the verdant woods of central New York.”  We struck it off as two westerners in the usually wet East (though it was very dry that summer).  We worked together four summers, tramping the woods, canoeing the Adirondacks around Saranac Lake, singing (we were half of the barbershop quartet in a production of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man” and joined around campfires on a hundred sparkling occasions), and sampling wild foods, in our work with the Louis August Jonas Foundation.

Nice to see a kid from the neighborhood doing good, and maybe well.

Leave a Comment » | Cooking, Food history, History, Nature, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

18 mushroom hunters dead — don’t jump to conclusions

August 30, 2010

What would kill 18 mushroom hunters in Europe?

Reuters gives the scary headline:

Mushroom hunter “massacre” claims 18 lives in Italy

MILAN | Mon Aug 30, 2010 12:52pm EDT

MILAN (Reuters) – At least 18 mushroom-lovers have been killed in accidents while hunting for their favorite fungi in the mountains and forests of northern Italy.

Mountain rescuers say eager mushroom seekers are abandoning safety procedures as they don camouflage and hunt in darkness to protect coveted troves, la Repubblica newspaper reported on Sunday.

“There is too much carelessness. Too many people don’t give a darn about the right rules and unfortunately this is the result,” Gino Comelli, head of the Alpine rescue service in northwest Italy’s Valle di Fassa, told the newspaper.

You may be a fan of the fungus yourself, or mycologically or botanically or culinarily inclined, and right now you’re thinking, “If these guys don’t know what the safe mushrooms look like, they shouldn’t be out in the woods.”  You’ve heard the stories of the mushroom experts who ate something they swore was safe, and of the lovely eulogies delivered a few days later.

But you’re leaping to conclusions.  Not so fast, Bunky.  Pay attention.

Yes, the death toll is astounding.  But it’s not mycological poisoning.

Seventeen people have died in nine days — six in 48 hours alone — mostly from sliding off steep, damp slopes in the northern mountains, la Repubblica said in a story headlined “the massacre of the mushroom hunters.”

Another person has been missing for more than a week, it said.

Ansa news agency said a man who had been hunting mushrooms was found dead on Sunday in the Alpine region of Valtellina.

A combination of August thunderstorms and hot weather has led to a bumper mushroom crop that has drawn the first hunters of what is expected to be a boom season.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

An Oklahoma or Pennsylvania deer hunt would be more analogous — it ain’t mushrooms that killed the mushroom hunters.  It’s just plain old being-careless-in-the-woods.

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Forgotten anniversaries: Microwave oven patent

January 26, 2009

Some history really does need to be rewarmed.

January 24 marks the anniversary of the granting of the patent for the microwave oven, “Method of treating foodstuffs.” Do your texts even refer to this by-product of World War II?  What benefits of microwave ovens can your students come up with?  Will they offer the apocryphal question about how Native Americans could possibly have invented popcorn with their wood-fired microwave ovens?

Dr. Percy L. Spencer noted that a chocolate bar in his shirt pocket had melted when he was working around an operating radar tube, at Raytheon Corp., during World War II (the patent application for microwave cooking was filed on October 8, 1945).  With a little experimentation, he determined the microwaves from the radar tube were rapidly cooking things — think exploding egg, think popping corn.

Drawing from the patent of the microwave oven, granted to Percy L. Spencer on January 24, 1950; courtesy the Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation

Drawing from the patent of the microwave oven, granted to Percy L. Spencer on January 24, 1950; courtesy the Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation

One of the problems Spencer had to overcome was that radar tubes cooked foods way too fast.  He had to tune the magnetron tubes to produce wavelengths with less energy, to heat food more slowly so the cooking could be controlled.  Spencer explained this process of invention in the first page of text on the patent itself.

Perhaps one could create an interesting DBQ with only patents, tracing radio and radar through the microwave oven.

This is one device you probably can demonstrate  safely  in any history classroom.

Resources:

Tip of the old scrub brush to Rhapsody in Book’s Weblog.

5 Comments | DBQ sources, Food history, Historic documents, History, History images, History museums, Invention, Science, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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