Winter Robin

We spotted this robin during the Christmas Bird Count last Saturday. This is my Solstice/Hannukah/Christmas photo for 2011: warmest wishes to everyone, and thanks for reading Penelopedia.

Raspberry Season

It seemed everyone was blogging or Facebooking about all the black raspberries they'd picked in the Arb this weekend, so this evening Dave and I went for a stroll to see if there were any left for us. There were! In a leisurely 30 minutes in the lower Arb we picked this small bowlful of beautiful, sturdy black berries (there are a few here that probably shouldn't be, as they are still red). They are much smaller than the commercial raspberries from Silkey Farms I bought at the co-op yesterday, and much less fragile. We will eat them with ice cream. Yum.

By the way, this photo is pretty cool if you click on it to see the large version. The close-up view of the dark, shiny berries and the white bowl is striking.

Interesting Woodland Berries - Mostly Poisonous

While hiking in Temperance River and Tettegouche State Parks along the North Shore last week, we noted a variety of berries - some familiar and a couple not familiar at all.

Red baneberry (Actaea rubra) - poisonous; nearly identical to its close relation, white baneberry (below).

White baneberry (Actaea pachypoda) - poisonous. Also known as Doll's Eyes because the black dot on the smooth white berry is reminiscent of the eyes of china dolls. (This is what I love about wildflowers -- they have such wonderfully descriptive traditional names. One of my favorite such names is Bastard Toadflax. They don't make names like that anymore.)

Bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) - a member of the dogwood family, with pretty, flat, four-petaled flowers in the spring that are similar to the flowers of the wild strawberry (which is unrelated, being a member of the rose family). These berries are edible and sometimes used for jelly; one source notes, "edible but hardly worth it due to the single hard seed at the center to which the edible part clings tenaciously."

Bluebead Lily (Clintonia borealis) - thought to be mildly toxic. These were new to me. They don't look as if you'd want to eat them; their blue is just a little too lurid, or metallic. The photo below gives a better view of the long, smooth, lily-style leaf of this plant; the one above has a better bunch of berries but if you look closely you can see that the stem protrudes deceptively through unrelated leaves.

Bluebead Lily (Clintonia borealis) again - see note above.

Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus) - a large raspberry-like berry on a sprawling plant with huge maple-like leaves; related to the raspberry and the rose. I had never seen or heard of these until just the day before, while reading the wonderful book A Place in the Woods, by Helen Hoover (that will have to be the subject of another post). Hoover and her husband, professionals from Chicago, made an abrupt change of lifestyle in the late 1940s and moved to a cabin in the north woods near the Gunflint Trail. She mentions thimbleberry jam, and I had been wondering what a thimbleberry was.

And, of course, there were familiar wild raspberries, of which we picked a few -- and enjoyed them exceedingly.

Silkey Gardens Strawberries

Among the local foods I've purchased at the co-op lately are Silkey Gardens strawberries. (Check the "Local Foods Recently in My Kitchen" sidebar item for others.) They were marked as Minnesota Grown, but I wasn't familiar with the name so I checked out their website and their listing with the state department of agriculture's Minnesota Grown directory. Turns out they are about as local as you can get -- they are right down the road on 115th St., technically still in Northfield, adjacent to Dundas. Their Ag department description reads:

A family owned small fruit farm and orchard offering pick-your-own and pre-picked strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, apples and more.

Their website notes that they are just in their third year of production, and so far strawberries are the main crop, though they will have limited quantities of blueberries and raspberries and hope to expand their offerings of these and the other fruit mentioned above as their plantings mature. Pick-your-own hours are most days 6-11:30 a.m. and 6-8 p.m., but they ask pickers to call for current conditions before coming out (the number is 507-645-4158).

I've eaten my way through my first quart of Silkey Gardens strawberries the last several mornings, and bought another today. I've not had a good track record of eating enough fruit and vegetables -- especially fruit -- in recent months. I'm trying harder (and finding the food tracker at MyPyramid.gov to be a useful tool to help make sure I eat a more balanced diet). Local strawberry season makes it easy to change my ways.

Recipe for a very pleasant breakfast:

• One slice of Just Bread multigrain bread made by Brick Oven for Just Food co-op, spread with...
  
• chunky natural peanut butter (I definitely go for the with-salt kind and the chunkier the better), accompanied by...
  
• 5-10 ripe strawberries, plus...
  
• half a glass of orange juice, and
  
• tea or coffee
  

On another local-foods note, I have been invited to write an article about eating locally for the next issue of ComPost, Just Food's member publication (also, I'm sure, available at the store), which will highlight the annual summer Eat Local challenge. Watch for it in a few weeks.

Eating (and Drinking) Locally... in Oregon

I've just returned from a couple of days in Oregon, where I drove through 50 miles of the stunning Columbia River gorge and passed miles and miles of orchards, fruit stands and wineries near Mount Hood. (It looked a lot like this photo, which is from the Hood River Chamber of Commerce site, although the trees were covered with fruit, not blossoms. And yes, that's Mount Hood in the background.) Alas, being on a business trip, I wasn't really in a position to stop and buy bags of ripe fruit or bottles of wine to bring back with me. I did sample a couple of items featuring the Marionberry -- a large, delicious blackberry that was developed at Oregon State University. I had Marionberry flavored Tillamook yogurt at the airport this morning, and last night I watched boats of all kinds slip past as I sipped a gorgeous mixed berry mojito at a restaurant on the Willamette riverfront in Portland. I guess that's called "drinking locally" -- as long as we ignore the rum and lime juice. I also sampled the famous Tillamook cheddar cheese in a crab and shrimp melt after the mojito was gone.

Earlier yesterday my colleague and I lunched on a hillside patio in the picturesque town of Hood River, which is apparently one of the most popular wind-surfing destinations in the world, due to the winds that are funneled along the gorge.

Both restaurants' menus noted that they use local and organic ingredients whenever possible. I'm seeing this more and more -- not that I eat out much, but it seems it's almost becoming an expectation in good restaurants these days. Since local food is likely to be the freshest, it makes perfect sense.

A Walk in the Woods

A friend and I found our way to an eastern spur of the Cannon River Wilderness Area (Google map here) on Sunday, from an unobtrusive entry point on Hwy 20 (Cannon City Blvd), south of Northfield. Shortly after you enter the woods, 60 wooden steps lead steeply down into a ravine, and an alternating boardwalk and trail winds through woodlands, crosses Fiske Creek, and climbs to a lovely oak savannah decked with wildflowers -- yellow black-eyed susans and purple spikes of blazing star (liatris) -- where on this occasion a red-tailed hawk wheeled and cried overhead. It was one of the prettiest spots I've ever seen, I must say. We also came upon several growths of black raspberry canes, and gathered a couple of handfuls of sweet, glossy, black berries.

Afterward, I picked up my 7-year-old son from his dad's and told him all about it, and he was so intrigued we went back out and did the whole walk over again.

Update: My friend thinks I should have mentioned seeing a female American Redstart in the woods -- a lovely little gray and yellow bird (the male, of course, is more boldly colored). We're near the edge of their summer breeding grounds, which are mainly to our east.