#now forager

[fullcravings]

Chocolate Cremeux Cake with Espresso Buttercream

[guardian-angle22]

HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN. Actor and Tea Connoisseur.

[transmascissues]

how can you claim to be a man when you never even grew up as a boy?

you were never raised a boy, you have no idea what it's like to grow up as a boy. you were raised as the female that you are.

by what standard did i not grow up as a boy? did i not get dirty enough or pull enough ponytails or play enough catch with my dad? is it that my hair was too long or that my clothes were too pink, or maybe that i was friends with too many girls or had crushes on too many other boys? should i have built with blocks instead of playing house, or liked dogs more than cats, or wanted to become a firefighter instead of a vet? if my grandpa gave me handshakes, not hugs, would that be better for you? if the tears bad been beaten out of me, would i get to be a man?

what of the men who grew up decades or even centuries ago, or somewhere across the world from you? surely, their boyhoods looked different than yours. have they lost their right to manhood too in your eyes, because they didn’t grow up quite right? or is it just us that you expect to live up to one stereotypical concept of what it means to grow up as a boy?

and what if you were right? what if my childhood was girlhood after all? i’m a 22 year old man with a partner of 6 years and a job in the same field as my degree and an adult life that i’m building for myself. how much of myself can you really expect me to define by who i was when i was a child? i would hope you don’t define your life by the way you grew up either; maybe your childhood was good enough to be worth basing the rest of your life on, but that would make you one of the lucky ones. the rest of us will be defining our adult lives for ourselves, thank you very much.

[reclusivesapphire]

trying out something new

[happyheidi]

[highways-are-liminal-spaces]

chanterelle season 🍄

[lindagoesmushrooming]

[witch--tips]

you NEVER need to wait “until you have the money” to start practicing witchcraft. you do not need ANY money for witchcraft. you can have all the money in the world and practice witchcraft every single day without spending a single cent on it. everything you need you already have, inside of you and around you as well.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

examining your relationship with your art can be fun

but watch out

[bitegore]

soliciting your favorite recipe using dandelions! any part of the plant works for me, i'm just eyeing the new crop this spring and thinking about what i can make that isn't salad

[should-david-be-there]

david tennant in the wild (garlic)

[fullcravings]

Coconut Doughnuts

[balkanradfem]

So, since the gardening season was unsuccessful, and really sad, I've been dreaming of starting new seeds. I've decided, this time, I'm going to plant so many tomatoes that nothing will be able to prevent the tomato harvest. It's gonna be all tomato garden, 40+ tomato plants, I'll build shelters for them in case of hail, weave nets, I'm ready, let's do this.

However, it's October, and there's precious little I can do in October to start plants; if I germinate anything right now, there won't be enough sun for it to grow, and it will pout and die </3. It happens every year when I stubbornly plant basil and it checks out the daylight levels and decides to nope out of that situation.

So, instead, what I'm doing, is still learning about mushrooms! I'm going to the forest regularly and collecting anything that could possibly be edible, and trying it out. I've been lucky to find so many edible boletes, I've been drying them in the summer and I have a great dried mushroom stash, which will prove very valuable during the winter.

Now there's a mushroom that grows when nothing else is really available, the latin name is 'Neoboletus luridiformis' and it looks like this:

Cool, right? A red bolete mushroom. She's called Scarletina Bolete. Looks poisonous. However, sources claim that this mushroom is edible, granted it's cooked first. I've been sheepish to try it because it's so red, and there are red boletes that are 100% poisonous, so this is just a health risk. You can check if the mushroom is this one because it stains blue and black when you cut it, and mine do. This is how it looks like cut:

I mean that does look extremely unappetizing but it says right there on wikipedia that it's edible:

hmm so anyway, I've finally decided to stop being a coward, and I cooked the mushroom and had some yesterday! It's still not been a full 24 hours, but I'm faring well for now. If this turns to be a good food source, I'll be set for the entire year because this baby grows at all times in the forest.

Another cool thing I'm trying out is acorn pancakes. I discovered some people on youtube who are making acorn flour and then baking pancakes out of it, and I've been curious about acorns before, but now I'm set with instructions and knowledge on how to process it. Acorns were used as a source of flour before wheat was in use, and it was pretty great, because they didn't need to cut down forests, or plow the fields, or turn bunch of soil to dust; people can just collect acorns because oak trees are everywhere here. The only issue is that the acorns are filled with tannins, which is a chemical that produces a very bitter taste, which makes them not very tasty. However, people have also figured out how to ''wash the tannins out', and there's a process of boiling and throwing water away, or leaving them buried next to a riverbank for a year, in order to get them to taste good.

I haven't yet decided what route I'm going to take, but I collected some acorns last time I was in the forest:

I have to admit they feel very good to hold in hand. They're so nicely brown, almost chestnut in color, they're shiny, pleasant oval shape, and very heavy. It felt like I was holding something valuable, rich. Since they're a wild food, I know they have more nutrients in them than anything we developed ourselves, wild food generally has 3 times more nutrition than anything growing in a human-made garden.

I've also stumbled on a few acorns that have sprouted roots! I've collected them as well, and put them in a soil-filled container on my balcony, let's see if I can grow an oak tree. That would feel extremely cool to grow.

I'm also collecting and curing walnuts (apparently you can make a walnut butter out of them I did not know that), conkers (for the laundry detergent, I love them), nettle (drying into powder, using as a calcium supplement) and I've also found some violets growing at this time, so I collected the leaves for tea; they're medicinal for colds, flus and fevers.

I'm going to the forest again tomorrow, and hopefully I'll write another update about fun things I've found and trying out! Stay safe and don't follow my lead to eat weird things, unless you research them yourself.

[torchickentacos]

No more ‘family asking me about my jobs or my social life or if I have a boyfriend’. Ask me about pokemon. Ask me about snakes. Ask me about local plant life. I promise it’s going to be a much more interesting conversation for everyone involved.

[cedar-raine]

[vigilskeep]

i can have more modded bg3 head presets. as a christmas treat