There once was a little mushroom called Hen-of-the-Woods. It lived on an old dead oak tree in the woods behind Rick and Lynne’s house. It went unnoticed for quite some time until one day last week.

Rick found it and showed Lynne. She could not believe her eyes. A highly prized edible mushroom growing in their woods? They decided to leave it alone having no plans in the near future for a mushroom meal.

So the Little Hen was safe and breathed a sigh of relief. Safe for now, anyway.

A couple of days ago Lynne went to check on the Little Hen, only to find that Little Hen had practically doubled in size. (And added on a few little admirers I might add that are not edible!) She had turned into Big Hen.

Lynne told Rick and yesterday he decided to harvest Big Hen. Here she is cut loose from her tree home.

Glorious, is she not?

Bella was not as sure as we were that it would be delicious!

Big Hen at rest in her new home.

Big Hen after a slimming makeover.

In the pan and smelling amazing!

And finally on the plate and into the mouth. Yum. Woody. Earthy. Absolutely delish! And very rich, like eating a beef steak!

Big Hen was joined by Chicken-in-a Pot, Mashed Potatoes (using our new antique potato ricer we found in an antique store yesterday), and glazed carrots. (If you want to see the Chicken-in-a-Pot recipe broken down follow this link to Rick’s blog. Totally worth checking it out if you enjoy cooking.)

And, yes, I lived to tell this tale today!

PLEASE NOTE:
(We do no eat any mushrooms that are difficult to identify or that we are unsure of. Hen-of-the-Woods have three different varieties that are all edible: there is no mistaking one for something else.)

Well, maybe for giants!

I found these “croquet hoops/wickets” at another haunt of mine, Ringwood Manor which is just down the road from Skylands. It’s an odd place and I use the word “haunt” pretty literally. In my opinion, it is haunted. The house itself is anyway. We went on a tour of it years ago when we first moved here and I did not get good vibes from it at all. A very unhappy place.

Anyway, I stay outside on the grounds now!

The owner used to own the iron forge at Long Pond** where I’ve taken photos in the past so there are lots of iron “things” scattered around outside and the giant wickets are just one of those things. I don’t know their purpose. Maybe they tied horses up to them??

Maybe I’ll go back soon and take photos of the outside of the manor itself so you can see it.

{**Long Pond Ironworks has two forges: one from the Revolutionary War of which there is not much left of and one from the Civil War. Here they churned out gun barrels for the war among other things.}

I took the dogs for a walk in-between rainstorms yesterday. As I walked down our street I saw different things I wanted to take photos of, so after depositing the dogs back in the house I grabbed the camera and started off on my own meandering way.

As I leave the house the tiny acorns that the big oak in front has deposited on the driveway go crunch crunch crunch under my shoes. Wet leaves lay in a thick carpet and I kick them as I walk. I think to myself that as soon as the ground dries out some I should run Johnny and start picking them up.

It’s been pretty gray, rainy and dreary this week so I needed to find some color!

The wild concord grape vine is so pretty as it changes.

I love the freckles!

As always, the creeper vines give a brilliant showing.

I came across a tree literally covered with mushrooms but that is for my mushroom post. These two bright leaves were beneath it.

I continued down our street and couldn’t resist a neighbors’ pumpkin by the side of the road.

I came to the main road, crossed over, and walked down to Green Turtle Pond. It’s just now starting to change.

Like I said, it was a very gray day with little or no contrast.

I know you aren’t supposed to split the photo right in the middle, but sometimes you have to bend the rules. I just liked the rock formation and its reflection. Plus, the one orange tree still draws your eye (right?) and at least it is off-center.

Here the trees look like a big fuzzy multicolored caterpillar.

Soon we’ll get the canoe out and paddle around when the trees reach their peak.

I walked home in the 71 degree/95% humidity, came in the house and turned on the air conditioning! In October! The dogs were all lying around panting, splayed out like black carpets on the tile floor. I have to say I was ready to join them.

One hour later a thunderstorm rolled through and we got over a quarter of an inch of rain.

This weekend is supposed to turn cold and they say we will struggle to reach 60 degrees next week. Bring it on! Oh, and Mother Nature, could you please turn off the water works and up the color volume? Thank You!

ONE LAST THING ...
This morning’s sky! (Taken at 8:30 a.m.)

Yesterday’s deluge of rain is to blame for this post. Twice in the past week we’ve had heavy downpours of rain that prompts our little weather station to flash this across its screen: “it’s raining cats and dogs.” We ended up with 2.23 inches of rain. That’s quite a bit of rain in a short amount of time, especially considering it did the same thing about five days ago.

So, I wanted to know where the phrase came from. This is what I found.

Taken from The Phrase Finder

Meaning: Raining very heavily.

Origin:

This is an interesting phrase in that, although there’s no definitive origin, there is a likely derivation. Before we get to that, let’s get some of the fanciful proposed derivations out of the way.

The phrase isn’t related to the well-known antipathy between dogs and cats, which is exemplified in the phrase ‘fight like cat and dog’. Nor is the phrase in any sense literal, i.e. it doesn’t record an incident where cats and dogs fell from the sky. Small creatures, of the size of frogs or fish, do occasionally get carried skywards in freak weather. Impromptu involuntary flight must also happen to dogs or cats from time to time, but there’s no record of groups of them being scooped up in that way and causing this phrase to be coined. Not that we need to study English meteorological records for that - it’s plainly implausible.

One supposed origin is that the phrase derives from mythology. Dogs and wolves were attendants to Odin, the god of storms, and sailors associated them with rain. Witches, who often took the form of their familiars - cats, are supposed to have ridden the wind. Well, some evidence would be nice. There doesn’t appear to be any to support this notion.

It has also been suggested that cats and dogs were washed from roofs during heavy weather. This is a widely repeated tale. It got a new lease of life with the e-mail message “Life in the 1500s”, which began circulating on the Internet in 1999. Here’s the relevant part of that:

I’ll describe their houses a little. You’ve heard of thatch roofs, well that’s all they were. Thick straw, piled high, with no wood underneath. They were the only place for the little animals to get warm. So all the pets; dogs, cats and other small animals, mice, rats, bugs, all lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery so sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Thus the saying, “it’s raining cats and dogs.”

This is nonsense of course. It hardly needs debunking but, lest there be any doubt, let’s do that anyway. In order to believe this tale we would have to accept that dogs lived in thatched roofs, which, of course, they didn’t. Even accepting that bizarre idea, for dogs to have slipped off when it rained they would have needed to be sitting on the outside of the thatch - hardly the place an animal would head for as shelter in bad weather.

Another suggestion is that ‘raining cats and dogs’ comes from a version of the French word ‘catadoupe’, meaning waterfall. Again, no evidence. If the phrase were just ‘raining cats’, or even if there also existed a French word ‘dogadoupe’, we might be going somewhere with this one. As there isn’t, let’s pass this by.

There’s a similar phrase originating from the North of England - ‘raining stair-rods’. No one has gone to the effort of speculating that this is from mythic reports of stairs being carried into the air in storms and falling on gullible peasants. It’s just a rather expressive phrase giving a graphic impression of heavy rain - as is ‘raining cats and dogs’.

The much more probable source of ‘raining cats and dogs’ is the prosaic fact that, in the filthy streets of 17th/18th century England, heavy rain would occasionally carry along dead animals and other debris. The animals didn’t fall from the sky, but the sight of dead cats and dogs floating by in storms could well have caused the coining of this colourful phrase. Jonathan Swift described such an event in his satirical poem ‘A Description of a City Shower’, first published in the 1710 collection of the Tatler magazine. The poem was a denunciation of contemporary London society and its meaning has been much debated. While the poem is metaphorical and doesn’t describe a specific flood, it seems that, in describing water-borne animal corpses, Swift was referring to an occurrence that his readers would have been well familiar with:

Now in contiguous Drops the Flood comes down,
Threat’ning with Deluge this devoted Town.
...
Now from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all Hues and Odours seem to tell
What Street they sail’d from, by their Sight and Smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force,
From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their Course,
And in huge Confluent join’d at Snow-Hill Ridge,
Fall from the Conduit, prone to Holbourn-Bridge.
Sweeping from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.

We do know that the phrase was in use in a modified form in 1653, when Richard Brome’s comedy The City Wit or The Woman Wears the Breeches referred to stormy weather with the line:

“It shall raine… Dogs and Polecats”.

Polecats aren’t cats as such but the jump between them in linguistic rather than veterinary terms isn’t large and it seems clear that Broome’s version was essentially the same phrase. The first appearance of the currently used version is in Jonathan Swift’s A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation in 1738:

“I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs”.

The fact that Swift had alluded to the streets flowing with dead cats and dogs some years earlier and now used ‘rain cats and dogs’ explicitly is good evidence that poor sanitation was the source of the phrase as we now use it.

In the mornings I throw the windows open wide, letting in the fresh, albeit dampish air. It feels good. It smells good. The sun is just warm enough; not too strong.

By 5:30 p.m. I go around the house closing the windows. I think about starting a fire in the wood stove.

Wow. It’s autumn. Welcome!

Autumn is not only the time when the weather changes, but also the time when our cooking habits change.

We start cooking things like cipollini onions cooked with apples and bacon.

And Swiebelwahe (Swiss Onion Tart: onions, bacon, milk, eggs), one of our favorite autumn treats and also a meal we always make at the cabin.

This year we made it with in-season local onions from the farmer’s market.(The Black Dirt Region in Pine Island next to Warwick, New York has been known for its onions for decades.) It was DELICIOUS. And so good heated back up in the oven a second time.

The recipe was adapted from an old cookbook I bought on eBay about ten years ago called Tante Heidi’s Swiss Kitchen. The recipe is here. If you make it don’t skimp or cut corners by not making the yeast dough. It makes the tart!

I love autumn. It’s so easy to get caught up in!