making new england forests a bit jealous

The west coast is not necessarily known for its eye-popping fall color.  There are of course a few exceptions – if you’ve never seen a cottonwood tree turn golden yellow, backdropped by the Sierras or Rockies that have been freshly dusted with snow, all under a crisp bright blue sky…well, you need to put that on your bucket list. But overall, most trees’ leaves around here turn to a dull color and then unceremoniously drop to the ground.

That said, I have been continuously surprised by the fall color year after year in Seattle.  Capital Hill seems to be the most spectacular.  And this year, the color has been off-the-charts spectacular nearly everywhere. Even though the city puts on a better show than the country (the Japanese maples and ginkos in people’s yards are especially fantastic), the yellows of the big-leaf maple trees that dominate our western WA forests have been particularly bright this year.

If I had my act together sooner, I would have dedicated a day or two to touring the city with my good camera to catch all of this splendor.  Instead, all I have are occasional snap-shots I’ve taken with my iPhone, mostly from being surprised at the absolute beauty while out walking or running.  Because my iPhone camera is so crummy, I have boosted the color just slightly in these photos to more clearly represent what I saw. Ok, ok – I may have embellished a little bit…but really, not much.

Enjoy!

 This is on my bike trail to work

Neighborhood house

Neighbor's dahlia garden

The footbridge over the park

Grape leaves growing on a garage door

One of the many Japanese maples around here

View from the new dorms on campus

In the park

One of my favorite houses in our neighborhood, made only better with this fall color!

the mushroom hunt to end all mushroom hunts

Our friend Tristan sent me a text two weeks ago stating "My grandparents found 35 lbs of chanterelles at their cabin yesterday!"

That was a call to action for AJ and me.  Our collective best day ever has been four lbs. We had to see this fabled forest that Tristan texts about, the one that supposedly churns out an exorbitant amount of mushrooms.

We piled in the Subaru on this classic, crisp PacNorWest fall weekend and drove to the grandparent's cabin on Hood Canal.  It sits on 100+ acres of pristine forestland and has nearly one mile of waterfront, backdropped by the Olympic Mountains.  The landscape is steep, and the cabin is about 800 sq feet built right into the hillside.  Hood Canal is 50 yards down the hill, visible from all aspects of the cabin through the tall forest.  Nothin fancy, but everything a cabin should be.  Unbelievably fantastic.

The forest was dark, green, wet, but also bright with yellows from the big leaf maples changing color. And the forest floor was absolutely dripping with mushrooms.  Within one minute of being there, AJ found about three lbs of lobster mushrooms.  There were countless other kinds of mushrooms EVERYWHERE.  And there were chanterelles too.

In fact, we found 30 lbs of them. And another 10 lbs of lobsters.  All told, we searched for about three hours, packing up our bags and passing up scores of remaining forest mushrooms on our walk back.  We retired to the cabin, fired up the pot-bellied stove, opened some fantastic wines, and enjoyed a superb mushroom risotto compliments of AJ.  A real PacNorWest fall adventure - what a treat.

 The cabin's deck, perched high above Hood Canal

The top of this white mushroom was the size of a salad plate

Tristan finds the mother load - chanterelles

I find a giant lobster mushroom - weighed about 2 lbs

AJ likes to cut some mushrooms!

Heavy bags, filled with loot

We even found white chanerelles for the first time - this one was the size of a softball

Back to the cabin we go to 

AJ preps the table for our loot to dry

And that's what 30 lbs of chanterelles looks like

Had to get down to the intertidal - beautiful Hood Canal

 Some fall color on the beach

J and A

Salamander!

Back into the forest and up to the cabin for dinner

Gotta start the night with a French red taste test

Mushroom risotto, arugula and red pepper salad, homemade sourdough bread - absolutely delicious

Below are some other pics from the weekend, mostly of mushrooms and the forest.  There are so many types of them - sizes, colors, shapes...these are just a few.

(yes, that's a real mushroom!)

For those unfamiliar with the Hood Canal, its that long hooked waterway connected to Puget Sound.  Blue dot is the cabin.

Now wer're back home and have cleaned and processed all these mushrooms! We set some aside to eat all week, and the rest were sauteed and bagged to go in the freezer.  Now we have enough chanterelles for the year!

  Lobsters and chanterelles - you can see how much bigger the lobsters are, and how they got their name

Mushrooms waiting to be cleaned, two skillets going on the stove, and then after cooling down, into the ziplock they go

a few scenes from fall

It has been raining lots around here.  In biblical proportions.  Summer was long, warm, gloriously sunny - simply fantastic.  But full stop - summer is now over.

Yet with that abrupt change comes the magic of fall.  I can do with a few less of the winter-like storms we've had already, but hey - this is the PacNorWest.  Below are some scenes from the fall thus far, which has been truly enjoyable.

Harvested hops from the garden.  AJ made her first fresh-hopped beer from them.  Its great.  The corn up above is from her garden too.

AJ in the forest for the first mushroom hunt of the year.  So far, 2013 has been tremendously good for chanterelles - our last haul yielded 4lbs!

Such beauties!

The awesome orange trees in front of our neighborhood bookstore.

Fall is a good time to move inside to do some projects out of the elements - here are two cases of Chilean carmenere that I made and bottled.

The season also brings with it AJ's superior cooking skillz.  This is one of her latest inventions - homemade pasta with leaves and flowers from the garden embedded.  Beautiful and soooo delicious - these are chives.

And my personal favorite about fall - the light in the afternoon.  Simply stunning.

aaaaaand, we're done

AJ and I finished the bathroom about five months ago.  But a major snafu with our shower curtain order lead to a ridiculous delay in actually being 100% done done.  And with our old crummy plastic curtain in there, it seemed an injustice to take pictures until it was truly finished.  So we just got the shower curtain, AJ modified it, and now its up.  And because the bathroom is done, that means we're finished with our house.  Perhaps its time to change the name of blog?

Below are some pics of the newly improved bathroom... We love it!

This was what we started with.  Yep - looks like the bathroom in some crummy college apartment.  The materials were as cheap as they get, the water pressure was nil, there was no natural light, and the ceiling fan - which automatically turned on when you flipped the light switch - sounded like a 747 taking off.  

And viola! Here's the new one!  We swapped the toilet and sink, brought in a 1922 refurbished Kohler clawfoot, put up some wainscoating, and extended the tiles from our kitchen to seamlessly flow into the bathroom.  Also added a skylight to bring some natural light into the space.

Sorry - gotta show the nastiness again.  One of the things we hated was there was barely any storage, and the storage that was there was exposed in wire shelving screwed to the wall.  

Taaadaaaaaaa! Adrienne had the stroke of genious to use a corner sink, saving us a bit more room - which matters when the only bathroom you have is 5'x8'. The vanity slides on barn door tracks to reveal shelves.

We got rid of the wire basket shelves everywhere and built recessed shelving between the wall studs.  The doors are also on barn door tracks, so you can hide the stuff you want to.

And we added a big skylight - 2'x4' - so lots of natural light instead of the cave-like conditions that were there before.