Day Twenty-Five: Zen, Mushrooms, and a Canoe

Highlights today:

Dashing through the sprinkler! It's cold!

• More sprinkler play.
  
• More Lego play (we made a dump truck airplane!).
  
• Yahtzee mastered. Taiya won.
  
• Started a patch of wine cap mushrooms. Daisy "helped."
  
• Harvested a pile of oyster mushrooms.
  
• Planted four juneberry bushes.
  
• Talked to coworkers on conference call.
  
• Sunny, warm but not blazing.
  
• Chlorophyll therapy enjoyed.
  
• Read a few pages in Zen Mind, Beginner Mind.

I find the gills of oyster mushrooms
to be completely mesmerizing.

• Jeremy took William for his first canoe adventure on one of the farm ponds.
  
• Taiya and I got a lot of her homework done while they were gone, laughing throughout.
  
• Found a Sourdough Maple Walnut Bread recipe on King Arthur Flour I want to try immediately, and probably will tomorrow.
  
• Made sauteed onions, zucchini, and oyster mushrooms for dinner, with rice and smoked pork.
  
• Tried to watch Star Wars for the first time with the kids, but experienced technical difficulties. Ordered DVDs to try again.
  
• Finished Danny, Champion of the World. Started Anne of Green Gables. 

For scale, that's an eight inch chef knife.

One thing I have noticed about my food aesthetic is that the meals I like the best would be both familiar to and appealing to hobbits. I just love the way hobbits relish simple foods, and if I can imagine Samwise and Frodo salivating over the meal, if I can see Merry and Pippin finagling an invitation to dinner, I'm doing well. I imagine they would find our packaged, processed foods sad and puzzling. If I settle for mac n' cheese or a dry granola bar, I feel their disappointment. Tonight's dinner made me think of the hobbits: sauteed vegetables and mushrooms with butter and thyme, rice, a bit of tender pork on the side. I think Jeremy also appreciates the hobbit approach to life, as he is partial to pipeweed (the legal kind), like all good hobbits are, and could rival any hobbit in his appetite.

Today overall was a fun day. William said canoeing was his favorite part, and Taiya said her's was spending extra time with Daisy. Mine was the mushrooms - I am so glad we started mushroom logs last spring, and some of them took and are are now producing a bounty.

Chlorophyll therapy.