From Eli:

A recipe from Tree:

In the fall giant puffball mushrooms seem to be everywhere ... forests, roadsides, city parks and empty lots. Safe to eat (as long as they are still fresh and white inside), hard to mistake for anything dangerous, but honestly pretty bland.

Generally, I think they work well as a tofu replacement in most recipes. Puffball bacon is my favorite:

Cut the mushroom into thin bacon like strips

Marinate the strips for several hours in tamari or soy sauce with a touch of maple syrup and a bit of nutritional yeast

Heat a lightly oiled pan (an iron skillet works best) over high heat.

When the pan is hot, fry the mushroom bacon until it is almost crispy.

Flip the bacon multiple times while you are frying. It's inevitable that some will stick to the pan, but the burned bacon bits are pretty tasty anyway.

Let the bacon cool in the pan, and it will continue to crisp a little bit.

I love to use the mushroom bacon to make BLTs, but it works great crumpled over salads, or in any recipe that one might use bacon as an accent.

Enjoy.

Fellow fermenter,

After awaking on Sept. 3 at the crack of light and cooking my day’s supply of freshly winnowed rice (pebbles and all), I rode my bike ten miles down the Baptism River Road to Finland, MN, where I met up with Fuzzy to go riding on Island River. We got to the river. Another shit year for rice, he says, it’s thin, we were late, but mostly the water levels are so low (sometimes by feet) that you can’t paddle through the rice beds. We go to another lake and he tells me usually the rice covers many times what the tiny patches are this year. Never mind I say – we are subsistence ricers, we’ll take what we get. It starts to lightning as we pole through the lake.

By the time we get in I am wet and shivering in the rain. He drops me off in town. I make some phone calls trying to redeem repeatingly failing Craig’s List attempts to get my few things from Chi to Mpls. I bike up to the land with my bag of rice on wet mud – harder than I was anticipating – and when I arrive at our parking area, there is a pickup with two fifty-gallon drum halves filled with bear fat and two bear carcasses. It is already starting to rot and we have to haul it ½ mile uphill to our land to render it.

For over two days, we render what we can. The hunters throw out most of the bears, who are honestly just cubs, most of them less than 150-200 lbs. They keep a few prime cuts, and the rest that goes wasted could honestly feed a village. Night has fallen; it’s raining. I am carrying the carcass up hill and I slip on a rock and the carcass lands on the dirt and I simultaneously shriek and howl and whimper and cuss and cry and grind my teeth at the intensity and horror of the whole thing. We do as much as we can but still lose buckets and buckets of meat and fat. I fall ill and am out for days, just now recovering. This is harvest season…The return POB is my personal one now – POB 477. Love, Mark

I actually hit the forage twice. On Monday night i was walking home from Lincoln Square. There is a grade school on Wilson with a little prairie/garden in the corner by the street. Since I have a homing instinct for tasty treats I noticed the berries glistening in the streetlight. I foraged from outside the fence--i happened to have my travel mug with me, which made a handy vessel. It was too dark to see much but i foraged by touch, reasoning that if the fruit came off the stem easily, it was ripe. The next morning, delightful cereal gems. (I think that might be part of a haiku.)

Last night I was walking over to Lincoln Square with Kristy. We stopped to pick on the fly. There was a guy tending the garden inside the fence. I was squatting to pick from low canes and heard him say, "are you picking raspberries?" I popped up and that made him laugh with a little surprise. I asked if he was a teacher--he had a bandana on his head from which slunk a salt and pepper braid. He looked friendly. "Yes. I teach ecology. We have the garden, and go on a lot of field trips--to the river (only a few blocks away) and nature preserves...." "I want to go back to elementary school," I responded. He told us that we were welcome to come into the garden and pick from inside. On the way back, we did just that. I was very careful to only pick the ripe fruit because I'm going back--maybe tonight--to get another helping.

spontaneous vegetation are plants that grow where we did not will them to grow. they are mostly immigrants whose original seeds traveled in the pockets of humans, in the ballasts of ships, in airstream or in the guts and on the feet of migrating animals. these seeds produce plants that thrive where domesticated plants don’t - in soils too poor, too dry, too acid or alkaline, too compacted, i.e. urban soils. mostly these plants are called "weeds" and they make up the bulk of inner city areas. they colonize cleared sites quickly and remain wild and undomesticated. they improve soil. create habitat and many are edible and/or medicinal.

collecting and using spontaneous vegetation carries the following advantages:
1) they provide flavors and textures not to be obtained elsewhere
2) they are clean in so far as they are not genetically modified and not sprayed by pesticides or chemical fertilizers
3) they are free and abundant
4) they are higher in nutrient content than many domesticated plants

wander open lots, sidewalk cracks, alleys, train tracks and expressway embankments to find ingredients for your morning omelet, your afternoon tea or this evening’s salad.