High on the Hog

This past week I melted some more glass and gave another shot at making glass antlers. It was really exciting to be making glass in my little shop and it feels good to be making progress. I was able to turn out some half decent antlers and to get a feel for blowing glass . I’ve been using a mix from Spruce Pine which is different from what I’m used to, but its a nice glass to work with. Using a different glass formula is a little bit like switching from ice skates to roller blades, really not much difference in style, but it takes getting used to. My glory hole worked pretty nicely, but used a ton of propane. Although l made some antlers, I feel like I still need to get better at them along with doing some tweaks to my equipment. I also want to temporarily make the glory hole smaller so as to use less fuel.

This week, on my days off, I’ll be working on some of those tweaks.

In the meantime I'm thankful that working part time is bringing home the bacon. We may not be living high on the hog but we're getting by and enjoying this time in our life.

I'm always looking for mushrooms at this time of year. I'm not an expert, but there are several mushrooms that are easy to identify, don't have poisonous look-alikes and are delicious to eat! We stick to only eating those. Chicken of the woods (polypore) , hen of the woods (maitake), and cauliflower mushrooms (sparassis). 

There's an old saying that says there are two kinds of mushroom hunters, the bold kind and the old kind. When it comes to picking mushrooms, we choose to be the old kind. 

 Last week we found 13lbs of chicken of the woods. We sautéed some, froze some, made a big batch of chicken noodle soup with mushrooms and Jenelle even pickled some.

Yesterday Jenelle and I went for a bike ride up on top of the mountain above our place. It's a two track gravel trail that runs along the top of the mountain. At the end of our ride, we lucked into finding some cauliflower mushrooms in their prime. They were delicious!

My friend's son tried some cauliflower mushroom. He absolutely loved them and said that they were his new favorite. He renamed it the bacon of the woods. And l can definitely go along with that.

And if that’s the case, I'd have to say that we're living high on the hog after all!