Walking, onions, and walking onions

One of the nicest gifts I've been given this year (in a ridiculously competitive field, let me tell you) was a 10kg sack of brown onions. Those onions came into my life late in May, and they kept us in onioniness right up until early September, when the last few began to sprout and I had to eat them quickly before they had a chance to win me over, get me planting them out under the Granny Smith, giving them names, and knitting them scarves.

I do grow an onion, of a sort. It's the Egyptian walking fellow. In Summer, he sends up a stalk laden with bulbils; the bulbils grow in the air, weigh the stalk down, make contact with the ground and start putting down roots - voila! new onions! It's a pretty nifty arrangement, saves raising onions from seed blahedy-blah, but, alas, it's not doing anything for my immediate onion supply: the Egyptian walkings are busily enjoying the Spring, with nary a thought of fattening their bulbs.

This year's Egyptian walking onions of insouciance, demonstrating their capacity to chillax in the presence of Esme, if not to produce appreciable bulbs.

Happily, it just so happens to be the Season of Ubiquitous edible Onion Weed. By onion weed I don;t mean the pretty but otherwise pointless so-called onion weed with which I grew up in the wilde of NSW (Nothoscordum inodorum or Allium neapolitanum, nothing to write home about on the gastronomy front), but, rather, the delicious, faintly garlicky, and plentiful Allium triquetrum, or three-cornered leek, growing rampantly along the banks of a Merri Creek tributary near you (or me, more to the point).

Free-range onion weed.

While they don't have the world's enormousest oniony bit, the greens are like a particularly lovely mild shallot. I pulled up a clump from a nearby weedarium yesterday, and whizzed them, leaves, roots, flowers and all, with chickpeas, cumin, chilli, coriander and salt to make falafels. They've made their way into kale & tempeh cook-ups (oh yeah, I sure know how to party), lentil surprises (ditto), and been chopped into potato mash. There's a recipe floating around somewhere for tempura-battered onion weed flowers, which sounds like a dangerous dish to get fond of, but - on the other hand - the onion weed season is brief and the fried stuff is delicious.

In other matters alliumnal, I've got a wicking box full of King Richard leeks on the go. I've been so proud of the way they were growing, my plucky leeks, and then this morning, as we were nearing the end of our 15km creek-side walk from home to CERES (just thought I'd mention that in passing, our 15km walk to breakfast at CERES ... did I say it was 15 kilometres? before breakfast?), we stumbled across the Merri Creek market garden, and spied these beauties that make my leeks look like puny blades of grass.

 Intimidatingly good-looking leeks, buried up to their shoulders and everything.

So that put me in my place. Some kind of leek farmer I am. On the other hand, we came home with half a bagful of free onion weed, so spem in allium.*

* an incredibly sophisticated pun (punion!) on "spem in alium". Vastly improved by this footnote. Or, you know, not.

Saffron Milkcaps and the glory of free mushrumps

A couple of months ago, my mum and the Lalorians visited Petty's Orchard, a sort of living museum for heirloom apple varieties tucked quietly down a lane in suburban Templestowe. It was May, so there wasn't a lot to see, apple-wise, besides the lichen-laden boughs of the trees, espaliered and trellised in various exciting configurations, but we poked around in the produce shop attached to the orchard, and after a while I noticed that Mum was looking intently at a box of pine mushrooms for sale.

We popped up to the motherland in north-east Victoria this week for a Sibling Convergence of Excellence (with Bonus Partners and Offspring and Non-Human Vertebrate Companions, so, in short, ten humans, two cats, one beagle, ten chooks) and Mum mentioned to me that there were some fungi down the road that looked very like the pine mushrooms she'd seen. I've bought pine mushrooms before - for a mere $35 a kilo or so - so I already had a good sense of what they look like, how delicious they are, and how rarely I can justify getting them. Here were multitudes, growing in the good old earth.

Saffron milkcap, aka pine mushroom, aka Lactarius deliciosus (the name's a clue), fruiting like a boss.

I'm not a super confident mushroomer. There's a mushroom that pops up round Lalor in Winter that looks quite a lot like the field mushroom, Agaricus campestris - sufficiently so that we gathered some a few years ago and started cooking them. They stunk of burning rubber and we realised, before anything untoward had happened, that they were yellow stainers, Agaricus xanthodermus. So I'm wary (I've heard enough about death-caps over the last few years), but obviously not as wary as I am greedy. Also, your Lactariuses deliciosuses are famously some of the most easily identified mushrooms in Australia. 

I took a couple of photos:

Mushroom showing off her gills and bare stipe.

Mushroom showing off depressed cap.

and then plonked them up on Pfaczbuch with demands for a final verification from the team. This is not the OH&S-authorised method of suspect fungus identification, by the way, but I happen to have some very cluey friends in the foraging department. One of them (the son of a couple of early-adopter permaculturalists, who grew up eating straight from the garden, the kind of person you could rely on to magic a four-course dinner out of a roadside nature strip) instantly started reeling off synonyms for "pine mushroom": Edel reizker, revellones, saffron milk caps. So three of us adults chucked a few in our mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) soup and never looked back.

The next day, my littlest nieces and I set off up the hill behind Ma Harlot's to forage for mushrooms. Which is, you know, highly responsible aunting, especially considering that amidst the pine mushrooms were the similarly coloured Amanita muscaria, infamous psychoactive intoxicants.

Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, hanging out in the woods .

The nieces were thrilled with the hunt. Or maybe that was just me. Someone was thrilled, anyway. We clambered back down the hill with about five kilos of beauties, and then cooked pine mushroom and kale risotto for ten people, leaving enough pine mushrooms over to accompany dinner for the next few days.

Pine mushrooms a-chopped in preparation for mush-sotto. The flesh stains a coppery blue when bruised.

Yesterday, in the hour before packing, I headed up the hill again, and gathered up a modest supply for us to take home. We left more than half of the mushrooms we spotted, not least so that they'll spore well for next year. Perhaps we needn't have worried (these mushrooms were fruiting all over the place: along a road six kilometres from my mother's house, under the deodars in the local cemetery), but there's a lot about the secret life of myco-things that I don't understand, and maybe the trees need them, or something in the soil does.

I therefore conclude with this moss-log-dolphin-wombat-hole assemblage, symbolising the interconnectedness of things and/or processes in the organic world. You're welcome :-)

An Expotition Down Edgar's Creek

I had a (crazily beyond optimistic) fellowship application due with a fancy-pantsy German university on the last day of May. Despite warning everyone who'll listen about the perils of last-minute-dom, I found myself taking full advantage of the fact that we are on the far eastern edge of the world, the wondrous wonder of time-zones, and so kicked up my heels adding commas and tweaking adjectives until 7.36am on the 1st June, 144º58'E. Because I get asymptotically more beastly for every minute that I am awake after about 11pm, I'll often put myself to bed with something not quite finished and get up in the wee hours the next morning. And then, even if Doing Things at the Last Minute (and/or Hour) is Bad-o-McBadpants, I get to feel a kind of righteousness about polishing off a 5000-word document and flinging it etherwards in the general direction of Münich before your average Joe has had her Sunday porridge.

The day got a whole lot less productive after 7.36am. I went back to bed and finagled my progesterone pessary into place. I jettisoned my plans to mow the nature strip or mop our chook-poo-compromised living room floor or excavate the sediment of junk that's settled on top of the vacuum cleaner (if indeed the vacuum cleaner hasn't decomposed down there ... it's been a while). I didn't drain the goitre of my inbox. I didn't open the 108,000 word document I have to read and annotate by Wednesday. I may have watched an episode of The Time of Our Lives on iview, because what's a bespectacled Melburnian in her mid 30s to do?

And then we spent the rest of the day going for a walk along Edgar's Creek. Edgar's Creek is a proper creek, right up until it gets to Lalor, where it finds itself curtly disciplined into a broad concrete drain that stops the water from soaking into the soil and instead rushes it down south to join Merri Creek and then the Yarra. Up our end, just on the paddocky side of Lalor, organic life is doing its bit to slow down the flow. The drain is thick with reeds and tribes of gawky moor hens.

 The paddocky end of Lalor, looking north, towards the bucolic warehouses of Cooper St, Epping. Note delicious cardoons, fennel, and wild brassicas.

Where Edgar's Creek leaves its spongy soilbed and enters the concrete creek control facility, with bonus inscrutable creek-straining fence thingy, on the tippy northern edge of Lalor. Note blackberries.

Representative Edgar's Creek moorhen. Note Vietnamese mint in foreground.

A plucky adventurer.

The creek travels from the paddocks down between the back fences of rows of backyards, and we make a habit of tramping it from loquat season until the end of plum-time because of the high likelihood of stumbling across fruit left to drip onto the ground. Further downsteam, though, as it gets to Thomastown, Edgar's ploughs its concrete way through a kilometre or two of dark satanic mills. We always stop before we get here, not so much because of the lack of fruit trees or the high likelihood of wading through the industrial goo that gets into Edgar's at this point (just your average toxic dose of lead, arsenic, cadmium, etc), but because by now we've walked about five good kilometres and we have to walk the same to get back home again.

Wuchatsch House, from before the brick-veneerealisation of the Lalor/Thomastown borderlands.

Suburban sheep, doing their thang.

Also, by now we've generally seen the sheep, and our lives are thus complete; we can turn back satisfied. Yesterday, though, in the spattering rain, we kept going: past the sheep, past the Thommo Recreation and Aquatic Centre, through the creek tunnel under the Ring Road (a blaze of glorious graffiti as high as the spray-can can reach), then we had to cross the creek (wading, in my now thoroughly saturated shoes, through the arsenic-enriched waters) to the more navigable western bank, south past the massive Thomastown electricity terminal station, through a cyclone fence someone had kindly already cut open for us, and then down into Reservoir, where the edges of the creek get backyardy again.

 The tunnel under the six-lane northern Ring Road. Excellent acoustics; great place for choral recordings, spray-can-based-artwork, camping holidays, &c. You can barely hear the cars above. Water most definitely not potable, but on the other hand it didn't completely dissolve my shoes when I waded through it a few hundred metres downstream.

After the industrial strip, things get pretty excellent. As with the good people of Lalor, the Resvians of Reservoir are backyard agriculturalists with a keen eye for a bit of public land that can be appropriated for the cultivation of broccoli.

So there's a lot of this sort of thing, self-allotted allotment gardens, artfully terraced:

And here. I love that these people have positioned deck-chairs so that they can enjoy their view across the cabbages to the concreted drainage canal.

Note water in bottom righthand corner, lapping at edges of concrete. This far downstream, the creek's picked up three suburbs' worth of street-water and is positively gushing towards the Merri.

The best things of all, though, are the adjacent houses with little fowl-portals cut into their back fences. A gaggle of chooks grazed out the back of one house, scampering across rocks and behind prickly pears as we ambled into sight, and next door were eight Muscovy ducks, who one by one ducked (ha!) through their portal to escape us. As the co-proprietor of an establishment which sorely lacks for much needed chook-pasture, I was pretty impressed, let me tell you, by the good use of this de facto common. I can see something going wrong in the fox-meets-bird department one of these days, but at least the bird would die with a crop full of juicy green grass and a lot of outdoor adventuring under her belt.

So that, ladies and lentilmen, is what I did yesterday. Stay tuned for further adventures in the inner outer north.