December 8, 2011
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Lobsters

Somebody stumbled into this blog after searching How to find Lobster Mushrooms, so I’ll take a few minutes to discuss. Many of the mixed forests in Southern Ontario have lobster mushrooms. This so-called mushroom is what you get when a certain parasite fungus attacks a host mushroom. So, you need to have the Hypomyces lactifluorum organism present and you need to have suitable hosts, usually either Russula brevipes or Lactarius piperatus. for the parasite to attack.

Some forests have a lot of lobsters. They appear sometime in July and I find more and more of them into August and some right into September. There are a couple places I go where it’s possible to collect a basketful of specimens with little effort. One of those places has a mixed bag of trees and the other features a lot of hemlock. Sometimes you can spot lobsters from a long way off, bright red shapes protruding from the ground. In other places, they tend to hide in the leaf litter and all you see is a little bit of red in the duff. Once you find a few, you’ll adapt to spotting them and you’ll find more and more. These are among the easiest of mushrooms to identify.

Look for specimens that are scarlet red and firm and as clean as possible. Once they start changing from scarlet to fire engine red, they are past their expiry. If they’re spongy, forget it, they won’t be much good. Ideally, when you slice into one of these, you’ll get white flesh with a layer of scarlett on the outside. The reality is that it is rare that you can fill a basket with perfect specimens. More often, parts of the lobster have to be cut away and discarded.

Wash your lobster mushrooms under a spray of water, removing all the dirt you can. Then slice them into thin slices, perhaps an eighth inch or even thinner. Cut away anything that isn’t white or red or firm.

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December 7, 2011
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In the modern vernacular….

….can “hinky” and “lumpy” be used interchangably? For instance, Detective Charles looked at the evidence, turned to his partner and said, there’s something hinky about this case, Bill.  Or, On the surface, all the evidence pointed to Mister Anchovy as the villain, but Detective Charles thought something there was something lumpy about the whole chain of events.

Discuss.

December 6, 2011
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The perfect crime?

I’ve been thinking of killing off Mister Anchovy.

When I started blogging several years ago, some of you will recall it was on the Blogger platform and the place was just called Mister Anchovy. Back then, I started a blog just to see what blogging was all about. Just like now, I had no idea what I was doing. People told me, hey you better not blog using your real name, and that seemed reasonable. I think after a while, my cheap ruse became evident to everyone, and when I coyly referred to my good friend or my alter ego Eugene K, most readers realized this was a Bruce Wayne/Batman kind of deal (never mind which of us is the super-hero).

After a while, I changed the name to Mister Anchovy’s and invited some other people to post there as well. That experiment was short-lived, although I enjoyed trying to make it happen. Eventually, I moved over to the WordPress platform and changed the name of the joint to 27th Street and so here we are, faithful readers.

These days I’m not convinced I need Mister Anchovy anymore. After all, posts from this blog are sent to Eugene K’s Facebook and Twitter accounts anyway. Perhaps that sounds cruel? Maybe killing him off is a little extreme. What if I retired him to some paradise island with a tropical climate instead?

December 5, 2011
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Mother Nature?

Somebody typed “Mother Nature must be drunk” into a search engine and landed on my little island in the sun, that oasis we call 27th Street. Imagine that.

I’m trying to think if I’ve heard that expression anywhere before and the closest I can get is a song lyric from Tom Waits’ Heart Attack and Vine…don’t you know there ain’t no devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk.

Of course, quickly consulting with Mr. Google reminds me that I used the expression myself back in March of this year on this blog. Um, no wonder it seemed vaguely familiar.

December 4, 2011
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John McEuen at Hugh’s Room

We were at the John McEuen show at Hugh’s Room tonight. For those who don’t know, Mr. McEuen is a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a player who seems to be equally at home on banjo, guitar or fiddle. He is a man with many stories and an excellent story-teller too. Tonight he told many of them, interweaving them amongst a wide variety of old time material. The show was delightful, fun, funny at times, and full of fine picking.

McEuen was accompanied for a few songs at the tail end of the show by two excellent Toronto area players, Chris Quinn on banjo, and Adrian Gross on mandolin. Many Torontonians know Chris Quinn’s work with The Foggy Hogtown Boys. Quite a few years ago, we used to see him play regularly with Jughead as well. The photo above depicts Mr. McEuen (right) playing Soldier’s Joy with Chris Quinn.