PICKLE CROCK ROCK

Like Dirty Harry or some other manly man said - maybe it was Shane or Rhett Butler, though in slightly different words - Sometimes a man's gotta do what his wife says he's gotta do. 

How true, that truism, even in the middle of a heavy snowstorm up on a mountainside in modern-day Japan, where wintry impulses can drive wives in certain strange ways, one wife deciding, for no husbandly pinpointable reason, to make a big batch of daikon pickles the old-fashioned way using a traditional brown ceramic pickle crock of the kind seen out here in the countryside, which is all well and good, though this is one of those BIG pickle crocks - so big I could take a bath in it, but she'd kill me - and all is going well: the daikon are pared, sectioned, further smallified and laid out carefully to fill the crock, then the pickling stuff is added, until right at the end comes the crucial part, when a large, heavy weight is needed to place atop the mass of protopickles, weigh them down and in time compress them into full pickledom.

Thus it was that, as husband, I donned my heavy hooded snow jacket and my deep snow boots, shouldered my way out the door into the howling blizzard and began to wade through the snow (finally it snowed!) in search of  just the right rock. I knew it was out there somewhere beneath all that white: the rock of ideal weight, size and shape - lies flat, smooth, easy for a small woman to safely grip for lifting in and out of a big ceramic crock, yet heavy enough to compress a big batch of firm, but buoyant daikon slices.

Not many times in the lives of the dauntless men of history has one such rugged individual found himself pushing his way through a blinding blizzard with a big broom in one gloved hand and a conveniently sized whisk broom in the other, in search of the perfect rock for pickles. I'm fairly sure I may be a pioneer here - I seem to have a lot less daunt than I used to, and my boots are rugged - so I guess I was creating a new man-genre for the modern day, broadening the macho spectrum, setting the bar for picklers who come after, which is why I had the brooms, because foresight and optimization are key in these Indiana Jones situations, it’s a matter of survival, bottom line, in terms of both weather and uxorial relations, so in this case it helped a lot that I just happened to know where there were some excellent rocks out there in the howling blizzard beneath the deep snow - even as darkness was falling - and that some of those rocks might just meet the pickling parameters. So what if the Spring thaw reveals a big picklerock-shaped gap in the stone-wall-to-be; those will be new times, as all times are new, with new solutions visible to the naked eye elsewhere on the property. 

When I made it to where I thought the rock wall was (I didn't miss by much) I used the big broom to sweep the top row of rocks clear, then dusted to further detail with the whisk broom so I could assess the rocks in their individuality, much like a diamond merchant in Amsterdam. All men in snowstorms looking for that special picklerock for their wife can definitely use a good whisk broom; you can take that to the bank, so to speak, or write it down in case your wife... well, you know how these things happen, these torques of fate that launch you hunched over into a blizzard packing two brooms. Nothing new, right?

The pickles, which by the way rank in the upper echelons of probiotic aristocracy, are now fermenting in a downstairs closet.

Time to get back to doin' the things a man's gotta do. 

INDIANA CAN HAVE THE PUBLICITY

I started growing - or rather attempting to grow - hiratake mushrooms sort of as a lark, a few years ago, as detailed here. I'd found the spore on sale, had a few oak sections available, thought I'd give it a try but didn't expect much, given my experience with other sorts of exotic mushroom varieties; plus, being in sync with dozens of shiitake logs all over the place for all these years, these mushrooms would provide but a drop in the bucket, if indeed anything at all made it into the bucket.

So far I've learned that hiratake fruit just after the shiitake have finished, at least up here in this ecolocale, and even though I got some sterling hiratake last year, the oak sections soon looked like they'd been coopted by shelf fungi, so I had by degrees begun giving up on the hiratake agenda. Thus it was that I 'forgot' to check the logs under their cover of leaves, twigs and burlap.

Then a few days ago I entered the jungle of my garden and headed along the ancient path toward where legend had it that some old logs had been sequestered under forest debris, plus some older cover; upon exposing the logs, I found that one log had done nothing, as expected, but that the other had sprouted half-heartedly about a week before, so such mushrooms as there were were no longer prime, but even subprime hiratake are a gourmet experience, so we enjoyed them. But I figured that this year was the last gasp of an amateur effort. I had learned some stuff, and might try again with some other varieties, maybe get some a couple years down the road.

So I forgot once more about checking any further until a couple of days ago when I chanced upon familiar signs of an ancient mushroom tomb and decided, albeit pointlessly, to look once more, see if the other log had done anything. I pulled back the cover from the unproductive sections and saw there amidst the crumbly dun of the forest debris the most beautiful fronds of graduated pearl-gray mushrooms cascading down in lifeglowing perfection that I have ever seen.

No treasure hunter has ever felt more awe. Well, Indiana Jones might have come close for the first milliseconds of beholding that golden idol he had expected to find, but the gorgeousness of this natural radiance, shining there amidst the the dull matte of leaves, twigs, burlap and duff where nothing at all had been expected, I think puts me a few paces ahead of that intrepid movie character, plus there was no curse on my discovery. And as to the deliciousness, I got the better deal. Indiana can have the publicity.