Events

Mushroom Mania

Avatar photo
Events, Gardening, Mushrooms
4 Comments

A little over a month ago I took a hands-on mushroom cultivation class taught by Peter McCoy. He sent us home with a bag of straw inoculated with pearl oyster mushroom spawn and a bag of sawdust inoculated with reishi mushroom spawn. Yesterday we harvested the first bunch of pearl oyster mushrooms and it looks like the reishi is about to fruit.

In the class, McCoy showed us how to handle liquid mushroom cultures in a low-tech technique called PF Tek invented by Robert McPherson, aka Psylocybe Fanaticus. McCoy will speak at the next meeting of the Los Angeles Mycological Society on Monday, March 21st at 7:30 p.m. via a livestream you can access on YouTube.

The oyster mushrooms we’ve grown this winter have been so delicious that I’m going to get myself a pressure canner and get the PF Tek method happening at the Root Simple compound.

What’s great is that you don’t need a yard to grow mushrooms. We grew this batch of oyster mushroom in the bathroom and affectionately call them the “bathroom mushrooms.”

At over 3,500 posts on this blog we sometime get amnesia here at Root Simple. I completely forgot that McCoy was a guest on episode 77 of our podcast, currently on hiatus (I have thoughts about bringing it back, by the way). 

Inuit Fermentation: Animal-based & Archaic

Avatar photo
Events, Fermentation, Food, Food Preservation

Probably the most memorable trip I’ve ever taken was a business/art junket to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. While there I had the great privilege of hanging out with Inuit people who shared their food traditions, songs and stories. So I’m especially excited about the last North Carolina State Fermentology seminar this Thursday, June 10th at 12PM ET:

Inuit Fermentation:
Animal-based & Archaic

As part of the Arctic Indigenous diet, Inuit fermented foods are all animal-sourced, even the ones made from plants. From the stomach content of the caribou to the seabirds in sealskins, this short seminar introduces Inuit fermented foods illustrating how these rare foods present us with an opportunity to appreciate the diversity of dishes and flavors that might come from an entirely animal-sourced diet. Aviaja Hauptmann, who is an Inuk microbiologist, will discuss the role that Inuit fermentation has played and has the potential to play in the future.

Sign up here to attend live but if you can’t make it, the video will be uploaded to the North Carolina State Applied Ecology YouTube channel here.

Online Beekeeping Talk for Pasadena Grows

Avatar photo
Animals, Bees, Events
2 Comments

Hey all I’m doing an Zoom talk on beekeeping this Saturday March 6th at 10:30 AM PST. It’s freeeeeeeeeee and you can sign up here. I’m going to review basic honey bee biology and then get into the techniques of “Backwards” a.k.a. “natural,” a.k.a. “no-treatment” beekeeping, a.k.a. “bee-having” as the trolls call it. Hope to see some of you this Saturday!

Sandor Katz and Wagner

Avatar photo
Events
1 Comment

This evening you’ve I’ve got two free events ready to stream into your living room:

Dan Barber and Sandor Katz in conversation tonight, Dec 2, 2020 07:30 PM EST

Join Dan Barber, Chef and Co-Owner of Blue Hill @ Stone Barns, in conversation with Sandor Katz, author of the new book, “Fermentation as Metaphor,” as they discuss all things fermented.

During this exciting event, bestselling authors and food rockstars Katz and Barber will discuss connections between microbial communities and aspects of human culture: politics, religion, social and cultural movements, art, music, sexuality, identity, and even our individual thoughts and feelings.

Click here to register.

I’ve blogged about it before, but the Metropolitan Opera is replaying a spectacular staging of Wagner’s Parsifal. Let me sum up Wagner: hours of glacially slow exposition building to moments where your third eye opens and you find yourself in a full on mystical experience. Parsifal is Wagner’s most transcendent work. Here’s directions on how to access the opera and what else is on. They play one free opera every day for a 23 hour period.