We’re somewhere in the hills outside Seattle, Washington. I’d tell you where, exactly…but then I’d have to kill you.
Entering an undisclosed forest in the Pacific Northwest to find golden chanterelles.
This is golden chanterelle season. We hike through a mousse of gray fog, into a forest of Douglas fir trees. In the Pacific Northwest, chanterelles have a mycorrhizal relationship with Douglas firs; the mushrooms feed on sugars from the tree and the tree, in turn, provides nutrients for the mushrooms (on the east coast and in California, the mushrooms tend to grow under oaks).
Regardless of the type of host, chanterelles are only found at the base of live trees. We learn this from our guide, Matt Stoecker, an amateur mycologist, who has been foraging in the Pacific Northwest for 21 years. He learned about mushrooms as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, from Dr. David Miller. He also credits a large amount of outside reading and in-the-field experience (literally), for much of his knowledge.
Video Recipes & Food Diary – ifood.tv
Developer: Future Today, Inc. Cost: Free Runs on: Android, iPhone Website:www.ifood.tv
Think of iFood.tv as the food version of YouTube. They currently get a self-reported 4 million monthly unique visitors. This month they launched their Android app and updated their iPhone app, which both tout 40,000 recipe videos. If that seems like a lot, you’re right. It is. Ultimately, I found that this app suffered from too much of a good thing.
This app has five main navigation tabs: Home, Search, Favorites, My Diary and More. Home brings you to the main opening screen. The Home screen is compiled of eight whopping pages of tiny thumbnails to “help” make the process of finding recipes easy. These thumbnails organize recipes in various categories and sub-categories, from “Dessert” and “Kids” to “Cheese” and “Halal.” As you can imagine, just sorting through the eight pages of categories can quickly become a chore.
There are a lot of lonely kitchens out there. And there is a corresponding passel of great meals and dinner parties yearning to break free around one of those underutilized islands…if the chef lived in something other than a studio with hotplate.
A new site, kitchensurfing, allows members do just that: surf for kitchens, chefs, food companionship.
We either yearn to have one, yearn to share one or yearn to meet up with other people who love to eat in one.
But if the guys at Kitchensurfing have their way, we won’t be yearning for long. Book a chef, learn how to cook, barter to create unique events through this new, impeccably designed site… the idea is virtually anyone, at any skill level, with any kitchen, can find something here.
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