It is turning out to be a lovely day today! We’re at 19C/66F right now, which is our predicted high of the day, with almost no wind at all. Which means I’ve been able to get some stuff done in the garden! Finally!
The first thing to get done was take down the last of the nets and support stakes on the future trellis bed and around the strawberries. I was surprised to find more strawberry plants have been eaten, though! As near as I can figure, a deer managed to get its heat under the netting on one side.
*sigh*
I had some chicken wire around the side where a hole had been made in the netting. Once everything was cleared, I put the chicken wire over the bed for now. The strawberries – what’s left of them – will be heavily mulched for the winter, but at this point I’m thinking we may need to transplant them closer to the house, where we can more easily keep the deer away. I’ll decide that later.
With all the hardware collected and set aside, I started cleaning up the high raised bed – mostly because it’s easier on the body!
I was expecting to find shallots that I missed harvesting, once I started cleaning up the dead pepper plants, and I was right. I found quite a few, actually, considering how small the bed is.
I’ve decided I will find a place to transplant these and mulch them over the winter, so that next year, we will have shallot seeds.
I removed the grass clipping mulch on the high raised bed and got about half way through digging out weeds and their roots, when I got a message from my brother. He’s on his way over with another load. He plans to cut away some tree branches while he is here, as they have a storage trailer they will be bringing out tomorrow, and they are in the way.
I’m more than happy to get those branches cleared away!
So I paused in the garden to come in and have lunch before he gets here, as I plan to help my brother as much as possible once he gets here.
While I was waiting for my food to heat up, I tended to the dehydrated peppers.
This is three trays of peppers, combined into one. They’re back in the oven for now, while it cools down (we used the “warm” setting at 150F to dehydrate the peppers). Later on, we might pop them into a jar for storage, or perhaps powder them. I’m not the pepper eater, so I will let the family decide which they would prefer.
Time to head back into the main garden area until my brother gets here. Now that all the stakes and netting are down, it should go faster. My goal right now is to prepare as many beds as I can to direct sow into, then cover with leaves for the winter. Hopefully, we will get a head start on the garden next year by doing this, but if it doesn’t work, the beds will still be ready for planting in, in the spring.
When the last of our Red of Florence onions got processed, I set up three 9×13 baking sheets in the oven to dehydrate some. When those were done, I took the one bag of onions I kept out of the freezer, because it had a pinhole in it somewhere, and filled another baking sheet to dehydrate.
This is what those 4 trays of onions got us.
When level on the counter, the top is almost exactly between the 350ml and 450ml marks on the containers. This is after I crunched them up quite a bit, too.
This represents about 7 or 8 of the largest onions.
I’m considering processing them into a powder to use as is, or make onion salt. I figure I might get about a quarter cup if I put it through our spice grinder. I haven’t decided, yet.
Yes, all this time, the Red of Florence onions we harvested awhile back have been sitting on a screen in the old kitchen. With how cold it gets in there, they’ve been fine, and we’ve been using them as needed, but it’s starting to get too cold. Today, I was finally able to finish processing the last of them.
You should be able to go through the slide show of images above.
The first step was to cut away the shriveling green parts and the roots. When I was done, the bulbs filled my giant colander in a heap!
While I was working, the cats in the sun room were going nuts, trying to see what I was doing, so I opened the door and let them in with me. Quite a few came in to explore! One of the males is aggressively friendly. I was using the top of the chest freezer as a table. He jumped up onto it and was eager for pets. Thankfully, he was okay with head boops and arm rubs, because my hands were busy. If, however, I reached for the kitchen shears beside him instead of petting him, he would attack my arm! He even started biting, so I had to take him off the freezer repeatedly before he finally stopped.
Once the screen was clear, I had to figure out what to do with it. We made this as a barrier for the old basement door, so we could keep it open and allow cool air to circulate, while also keeping the cats out. It’s made with 1 inch wire mesh. I took it into the sun room and figured out a way to use it for the cats. It is now resting on one level of the shelf in front of the window on one side, and the cat cage on the other – though it did need propping up on the cat cage to make it level. Hopefully, it’ll stay. I then took a spare sheet of rigid insulation and cut it slightly longer than the screen. With how the frame and centre support is, I was able to fit the insulation under the screen, in between the long sides. The sheet was just narrow enough for that. Without support, of course, it started to sag, but this sheet had been used for something else and already had some holes in it. I was able to use one near the side and zip tie it to the screen, then made a couple more holes as far as I could reach on the other side and added another zip tie. Not that the cats’ weight would be on it, as the screen would hold them. It was just to keep it from sagging. The cats can walk on the wire, but there was another chunk of the insulation that I put on top, so it would be more comfortable. They’re probably scratch the heck out of it. They just love scratching at that insulation!
Before I set that up, though, I put the remains of another sheet against the window that’s missing the inner pane. It doesn’t fill it – we tried cutting pieces to fit before, but the insulation kept wanting to fall away, no matter how we tried to secure it – but it’s enough to reduce the chill from that window where it counts.
So now the cats have a sort of “cave” against that wall, covering the space we set up for them. It gives them another level to climb on that is under the shop lights. I have those set to turn on with the motion sensors, after dusk, and the insulation under the screen will help keep some of their own body heat in, underneath. Also, they won’t get blinded every time one of them moves. Yes, I have the lights set at their lowest level of brightness, but when it’s night, it still seems really bright!
Hopefully, the racoons won’t knock it off or something.
Once that was done, it was back to the onions.
The first batch of onions I cleaned up was for dehydrating in the oven. I have four baking sheets, but they are too big to fit side by side in my oven. This oven does not have an element on the bottom, though, so I was able to put a baking dish on the bottom for elevation, and that allowed me to fit three trays in.
For the first tray, I tried slicing the onions long ways and laying them out on a cooling rack in the baking tray. I could only fit about 1 1/2 larger onions on the tray that way. For the second one, I tried cutting them on the round and laying them out on another cooling rack, but they just fell through the openings. I ended up putting parchment paper down instead, the laid out the slices. The rings didn’t want to separate, so I cut the rest in half lengthwise, first, then sliced them. They still needed to be broken apart aggressively before the pieces could be spread out evenly. Still, I was able to fit about 3 larger onions on, that way. For the third tray (I didn’t bother taking a picture of that one), I just chopped the onions and spread them out. That was another 3 or 4 larger onions.
Those will take a while to dry, so the rest of the onions got chopped up for freezing. I would have wanted to dehydrate more, but chopping and freezing is a lot faster!
For that part, I tried out a trick I think I saw on Pinterest. Loading into freezer bags is a real pain. I’ve tried several different ways to support the bag, but the best I could come up with was to put it in a large measuring cup. It would still be floppy, but not as much.
This time, I got out our canning jar lifter. The slide lock part of the bags gets turned inside out, as I usually do to keep the locking parts clean. This lip then fits over the curved jar lifting end, while the flat handles act as a stand. The lifter can be opened as wide as the folded over part of the bag allows, and holds it tight. After filling the bag with the chopped onions – I fit 2 1/2 cups per size medium bag – the lifter can be squeezed together to free the top. After the flipped over part is flipped back again, the lifter can be opened wide, allowing plenty of room for the filled bag to be removed.
My goodness, I wish I’d known about this trick long ago! This was the easiest, fastest filling of freezer bags I’ve ever done!
I had to stop chopping part way through, as my back was starting to give out (yes, I even used a stool to raised one leg while I worked), which was a good time to have the supper my daughter made for me. Then it was back at it.
In the end, there were 14 freezer bags filled. All but one of them went into the big freezer. Before sealing the bags, I would close it most of the way, then stick in the short end of an elbow straw in the last gap and suck out the air to vacuum seal it. One of the bags lost its vacuum. I couldn’t see a hole, but there had to be one, somewhere. So that bag went into the fridge to use right away.
I’m quite happy with our onion haul this year. Even though one variety failed completely for some reason, we still have plenty of cured and braided onions, both yellow and red, to use throughout the winter, as well as some shallots, and now we have 13 bags of chopped onions in the freezer, 1 in the fridge, plus more dehydrating in the oven. It should be interesting to see how long this supply lasts us through the winter.
One thing about these Red of Florence onions; their shape makes them SO much easier to cut up! Plus, they taste good, so win-win!
A lot of the tomatoes we set up in the sun room are slowly ripening. There isn’t enough to bother cooking them into a sauce or whatever, but more than we can conveniently eat, so I’ve started dehydrating them in the oven.
It’s mostly Yellow Pear tomatoes that we have, and they are so small, I am dehydrating them on parchment paper. I had two baking sheets full, but when they were mostly dry and quite shrunken, I combined them into one.
That jar is all of them!
Once I’d combined the Yellow Pear tomatoes, I set up a cooling rack and started dehydrating some Cup of Moldova tomatoes. Once the Yellow Pear tomatoes were done, I filled the baking sheet again with more of them. That finished off what I’d picked earlier, but this morning I gathered more ripe tomatoes!
I am considering powdering the yellow tomatoes, and doing some of the red ones in olive oil. Or just powdering the whole lot of them. They’ll take up less space that way. It’ll be a while before they’re all dehydrated, so I have time to decide.
As I’m writing this, I am hearing the wind pick up outside, and the trees are starting to get whipped about. While today’s high is supposed to be 17C/63F, tomorrow is supposed to have a high of only 3C/37F. Tonight’s low is supposed to be 1C/34F, but tomorrow night we’re supposed to drop to -3C/27F.
My plans for yard work would have had to change, anyway, as we are now getting a steady rainfall right now, but there was plenty to work on indoors instead.
The kitties were getting pretty wet, so I left the sun room doors propped open. I’ve discovered why I’ve been finding things knocked out of the top shelf of the shelf shelter. Despite the two bottom shelves being set aside for the cats, some of the little kittens have been climbing up into the top shelf, where all sorts of miscellaneous stuff are kept, and sleeping on some pieces of rigid insulation in one corner! So I am leaving the sun room available for them to shelter in, more comfortably.
Because I’m a suck, when it comes to the kitties! 😁
Yesterday, I had a chance to talk to my brother on the phone, in between his attempts to call my mother. He started trying early enough to catch her before she went to church, but she wasn’t answering. It turned out she was watching her religious programming on TV and wasn’t answering the phone. Then she went to church, and stayed out for hours after.
*sigh*
I got a message from him after he finally got through to her, well into the afternoon. My mother’s apartment was going to be sprayed for bed bugs again.
Today.
She was wondering about staying in a hotel again, since she has to stay away for 12 hours.
*sigh*
So I called her, but her Polish program was on. It was almost 4, so when she said she would call me back when it was done to talk about the bed bug spraying, I said fine.
An hour later, I finally called her myself. I could hear the TV still going, and there was another Polish mass about to start. She wouldn’t have called me back until ALL her Polish shows were done! Meanwhile, I’d delayed working on supper so I could answer the phone without being in the middle of cooking – and I’d already skipped lunch (I lost track of time and forgot to eat).
*sigh*
My mother has zero respect for other people’s time, but expects everyone else to respect hers.
Ah, well.
We talked about her apartment being sprayed again. She did not want to stay at a hotel again, because it’s so expensive (it was actually very cheap, but she doesn’t know what hotel stays usually cost these days). So, she asks me… What was I going to do with her for the day?
Seriously?
What we finally worked out is that I will wait until I get a call from her, letting me know the exterminators have arrived – which I am doing right now, as I write this. They can show up any time between 9am and 4pm. I will then go pick her up, and we will run an errand for her in the city near my sister’s place, and then she wanted to visit my sister.
Who works a 5pm to 1am shift today.
I told her to call my sister first, to make sure stopping by was okay.
Then we’ll have to figure out what to do for the rest of the day. Even then, she’ll end up having to hang out in the lobby or something before she can go back into her apartment. Unlike her neighbours, who can go back after 6 hours, because they don’t have respiratory conditions.
But she won’t stay at a hotel again.
*sigh*
I also had a talk to her about letting me know right away, if her apartment is going to be sprayed again. She got the letter last week, and just didn’t bother telling anyone. I have no idea what she planned to do, had my brother not gotten through to her and then told me.
So my day today is completely gone. I can’t even start anything, unless I can drop it as soon as she calls.
One of the things I wanted to do was get crab apple cider vinegar going. I ended up having to ask my daughters to do it overnight which, of course, changed their plans, too.
They were sweethearts about it, though, and we now have three 1 gallon jars in the big aquarium, safe from cats, fermenting. This time, not only did we stick with just cheesecloth to cover the jars, but the apples are weighted down with slide lock bags filled with water to keep them submerged.
They didn’t use up even half of the apples I picked yesterday!
If I had more jars like this, we’d be making more. As it is, I did have a fourth jar, but after talking to my mother about what we were planning to do with the apples, she asked for a gallon jar so she could make sauerkraut. She wanted one of her old jars in the basement, but those have been sitting for more than a decade. I’ve actually gone through and washed the dozens of jars I found down there, and those particular jars are only being kept because we will used them to make bottle bricks for the walls of the cordwood shed we will be building. I would not consider them food safe anymore. So I’m bringing her one of our newer jars, instead.
So the apples will be used to make hard crab apple cider, instead – though that won’t be started on until probably tomorrow.
Meanwhile, I still did my morning rounds, which included a small harvest.
I had not yet washed these. They are wet from the rain.
There were some summer squash I could have picked, but I decided to leave them to get a bit bigger. I was able to hand pollinate some other squash, though. Which is interesting, when the flowers have puddles of rainwater in them!
According to the long range forecast, we’ve got at least a couple of weeks of hot, mostly dry weather. After that, the overnight lows are expected to be just a few degrees above freezing. I’m hoping that changes. If we have the month of September with no frost, there’s still a chance for some things to mature.
We have more red tomatoes that I should pick later today, or tomorrow morning. The paste tomatoes will go straight into the freezer with the others, until there is enough to start making tomato paste. The others will likely be dehydrated.
Our first attempt at dehydrating them worked, but took a long time. We kept needing the oven for other things. Though my daughter did not slice them super thin, they shrank so much, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get them off the rack they were on. They came off surprisingly well, though.
It was just one tray of tomatoes, so it’s not a lot, but I definitely think it is worth doing again.
Along with the red tomatoes, the Yellow Pear tomatoes have something to pick almost every day.
I did break down and taste on of them. After all, I’d been able to eat the tiny Spoon tomatoes without gagging. Maybe I could eat these ones, too?
*shudder*
Nope.
The Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, meanwhile, are finally starting to turn colour, but it will still be a while before we can harvest any of them.
We most definitely need a mild September. Hopefully, a mild October, too!
Ah, well. Whatever happens, happens. We’ll deal with it.
Hmm. I really should be making myself something to eat before going to my mother’s, but… Murphy’s Law. The moment I start something, the phone is sure to ring! 😂
Yesterday, I weeded mint out of the beet bed – one entire end was completely stunted because they were shaded out – then kept on going, harvesting mint from the path as well. The sump pump drains into here, and the growth is absolutely lush! By the time I was done, I had a huge arm full! This is all mint that was here before we moved in, so we have no idea what variety it is. I know it’s not spearmint. I don’t think it’s peppermint, either, but I really can’t say for sure.
Once inside, I took the best leaves off the stems and gave them a wash. Then I cleaned up and dragged in the old window screens we used last year for curing onions, drying spinach, etc. I covered the mesh with paper towels, then set out as many leaves as I could fit onto them to dry.
I didn’t even use half of what I’d gathered!
Yes, this is the drying mint!
I used small glasses and jars as spacers so we could stack the screens on top of each other, but the cats were incredibly interested in what was going on. So we put more little jars as spacers on the top and covered the whole thing with a cloth. We still caught them on top of the stack, but at least the cloth kept the leaves clean.
Then, some time later, my daughter got Cheddar out from under the cloth at one end. *sigh* We tucked the ends under the bottom screen as best we could.
When I lifted the cloth on one side this morning, however, I found the cats had still managed to get under it!
I salvaged what I could and set it up again on the old dishwasher that’s still waiting to be taken out to the junk pile. Since the leaves have shrunk, I was able to fit them closer together on the screens that needed to be redone. For now, we’re keeping the sheet off, so they can get more air circulation.
Drying things on screens like this can work quite well, but protecting it from the cats is a problem!
Meanwhile, I used fresh mint to make a big pot of strong mint tea this morning, and there is still lots left in the fridge. There is much more to harvest in the garden, as we want, too.
The chives are blooming right now and ready to harvest if we want to make infused chive blossom oil or vinegar again. We have the olive oil to do that now, but I won’t be picking up more of the white wine vinegar I like to use until we do our next city trip. I might just harvest the chives, anyway, and freeze the extra until we are ready to make the infusion.
I love that we can already start harvesting things and preserving them!
Looking at them this morning, I thought we could just harvest the plants that had started to go to seed and leave the smaller ones, but when we were ready to start, we realized that the smaller ones were going to seed, too!
We ended up using our three biggest baskets to hold it all.
Yes, these are our Easter baskets, and one of them still has its decorations. The flower garland is woven through the basket, so it doesn’t come off. :-D
Each of those baskets is filled with a different variety of spinach, though to be honest, I can’t tell any difference. They were even supposed to mature at different rates, but between the deer, the heat and the lack of rain, they all matured at the same time.
Nutmeg was hanging around while we were working, and my daughter noticed he was playing “cat and mouse” with something. It turned out to be a frog!
She rescued it.
We see frogs fairly regularly in the garden beds. That makes me happy. More frogs means less bugs eating our produce! :-)
We used shears to cut the spinach, so all the roots, along with the plants that weren’t suitable to harvest (like the teeny ones the deer got to), are still there. The beds will get a thorough clean up, probably tomorrow, so we can plant lettuces, next.
We dragged out the screen “door” that fits at the top of the old basement stairs, and covered it with the mosquito netting we’d been using to protect one of the beds. We also brought out a couple of our largest bowls. The spinach got washed in the bowls in batches, which also gave us a chance to start taking out any weeds that came along for a ride, and removing some of the yellowing or damaged leaves. After being washed, they got dumped on the mesh and got another rinse with the hose.
Then it was time to start picking over the spinach and destemming them. I set up the wagon to hold the screens I’d washed earlier, to dry spinach on.
My daughter and I then started going over the whole pile, picking out the best ones for dehydrating or into bowls, and dropping the rejects with the snipped stems for composting. We worked for about an hour, hour and a half, before my daughter went in with a filled bowl, to start supper while I kept working on the rest of the spinach.
The filled screens were left on the roof of the kibble house to drain for a while. They went into the sun room when it started to rain a bit, though we never got more than a smattering.
After about three hours, here are two of the three bowls that were filled. They are all really big bowls. Big enough to mix a 6 loaf batch of bread dough.
I’m hoping to be able to set up more batches to dehydrate out of this, but it depends on how well it works in the sun room. I’ve got the light I used to keep transplant trays warm on for the night, plus the ceiling fan. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get really hot, which means the sun room will be even hotter. I’m hoping that means they will dehydrate fairly quickly, and I can set up at least one more batch.
As for the rest, we might blanch some for freezing if we can’t use it up fast enough, but mostly, we plan to just eat it. :-D The girls have been looking of recipes for things like spinach soup to try, or maybe make another batch of their modified palak paneer sauce. We don’t have paneer, though.
I’m rather happy with our first garden harvest – and with being able to have one so early in the season!
While it may have taken a long time to clean it all, we were most entertained.
By skunks.
We had a whole parade of them, coming and going, including the mama and her babies.
All SIX of them!
I don’t know where she’s getting them all from! She started coming by with two. Then we saw her carrying a third. Today, she showed up with five – or so we thought. I took some video and, after I uploaded it and watched it, I realized there was six.
Gosh, they are so adorable! They came back several times, including just to run around an play.
As for the other skunks that showed up, I did end up stopping to take a hose to them. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see them in the kibble house, but I could hear them, and they were not getting along. It turned out that only one of the containers had kibble left in it, and they were all trying to get at it. Then there was the one greedy guts that just wouldn’t stop eating.
Oh, and a question I had was answered. In the mornings, when I would go to refresh the cats’ water bowls, I would find one of them with kibble half dissolved in the water. It was always the bowl closest to the kibble house, but they’re far enough away that it couldn’t fall in by accident, as I had assumed was how it got into the heated water bowl, when we were still using that. The skunks, of course, use the water bowls, too. This evening, I saw one of the skunks come up to a water bowl, drink some water, then basically pick its teeth with its claws before drinking some more.
The reason it isn’t good for skunks to eat kibble is because of how their jaws are hinged. But they’ve got that figured out. The skunk was getting kibble stuck in its teeth, and was using water to get it out. The kibble would then fall into the bowl it was drinking from, for me to find in the morning.
They’re smart little buggers!
They also made what could have been a long and dreary job quite fun. :-)
Today has been another day of rain and high winds.
After today, we’re going to be back to high temperatures and sun. My Weather Network is forecasting 37C/99F on Wednesday! I think that must be some kind of typo, because I’m not seeing that anywhere else. The highest I’m finding is on my phone’s app, which is forecasting 27C/81F on the same day. Even so, it’s going to get hot again, and I am really, really glad we’re getting this rain right now!
In between rainfalls, we managed a trip into town, and I even got a bit of weeding done in the garden. We’re going to need to do a LOT of weeding once this rain passes. The weeds are loving the rain as much as the things we actually planted.
Speaking of which, while weeding among the corn earlier, I did find some radish sprouts. They are recent sprouts, not the ones that came up before the corn did, then disappeared. So we will have at least a couple of radishes. Unless these sprouts disappear, too!
Gosh, I’m just watching the trees outside my window as I write this. If a section of that big maple came down right now, it wouldn’t surprise me at all!
With this weather, our internet is seriously cutting out. It’s taken me more than an hour just to be able to start this post, and I still can’t get images to load. So this will be a quick one!
I wanted to share some of the new things we’re trying this year. The chives are blooming, and we decided to try making chive blossom vinegar.
I got a small bottle of white wine vinegar, and we’re simply putting clean, dry chive blossoms into it (after removing a bit of vinegar to make space. Some of the blossoms are left whole, while others had the bit at the bottom taken off, so all the individual flowerettes are loose. We’ve been adding to the bottle as more blossoms open up, then we’ll let it sit for a couple of weeks, in a cool, dark place, giving it a few turns every now and then. After that, the vinegar will be strained and re-bottled. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out!
I’ve also started to dehydrate spinach leaves.
I use our oven to dehydrate things, using the “warm” setting, reduced to it’s lowest temperature of 145F (default is 170F). For something as light and thin as spinach leaves, I shut it off and let the oven light on to stay warm. We can only fit two trays in the oven at a time, but after I went to turn the leaves and found they’d shrunk enough, I combined them into one pan and left it for the night. In the morning, I just crushed them lightly, and put them in an air tight canister. There’s maybe 1/3rd of a cup of dried, crushed leaves from the 2 trays. We’ll keep doing small batches like this and, eventually, we’ll reduce them to a powder instead of flakes. It kind of reminds me of dehydrating celery. You start off with what looks like so much, but by the time it’s completely dehydrated, it looks like there’s nothing there! :-D
Now it’s time to see if I have enough connection to publish this!
At our last Costco trip, we picked up large packages of three different types of mushrooms. After using as much fresh mushrooms as we wanted, I planned to dehydrate the rest. I really like the mushroom salt we’d made, but wanted to have mushroom powder, without the salt, to use. The powder is an excellent flavour enhancer.
We had used a dry “gourmet mushroom blend” we’d picked up at Costco to make the salt, but it looks like they don’t carry it anymore. So I decided to just dry our own mushrooms.
I had used a coffee grinder to made the mushroom powder for the salt. The mushroom blend had some very large pieces – large enough that I cut them with scissors before I could put them in the coffee grinder. Even so, some of the thicker, more leathery pieces would jam the blade.
With that in mind, I very deliberately sliced the mushroom pieces quite thin, before laying them out on baking sheets to dry. I had enough button mushrooms to fill one sheet, while the other was filled with shitake and crimini mushrooms. The “warm” setting on our new oven is 175F, but I put it at the lowest temperature it would go: 145F. Then I left the trays in the oven overnight.
This morning…
Well… they did dry very thoroughly!
This is the sheet of white button mushrooms. They had been quite crowded together, and I could barely fit all the pieces in. They are now about 1/3 – 1/2 the size before drying.
They are also thoroughly stuck to the pan.
The shitake mushrooms didn’t shrink anywhere near as much, and were easy to loosen.
These are the crimini mushrooms, which are also very stuck to the pan! I have been using a spatula to try and scrape them off. We’ll keep working at it, little by little, as we are able, throughout the day.
Well, I wanted powdered mushroom, and I’m getting powdered mushroom!
Normally when I dehydrate in the oven on pans, I like to use a cake rack to allow air circulation under whatever I’m drying. Some things are just too small for that, which is why I didn’t use any this time. I was thinking that it might have been better if I’d had a drying screen, but looking at how the pieces have adhered to the pans, I’m thinking they would have done the same to a screen. At least with a pan, I can scrape them off and still use them. If they had stuck to a screen, there probably would have been no way to get them unstuck without damaging the screen.
So in the future, I’ll know to cut crimini and white button mushrooms thicker! I know we should be able to leave them whole, or just cut them in half, but I don’t want big pieces. I’ll have to find that balance.
We’ll just have to get more mushrooms and try again.
Not that we need an excuse to get more mushrooms! :-)
The Re-Farmer 