I heard a car door slam the other day and looked out the window to see an unfamiliar pickup truck in our driveway. I stepped out onto the back porch and saw a man crouched under the big oak tree at the edge of our yard, white plastic bag in hand.

“Hello?” I said.

“Oh, hi,” he said. “I’m just here to collect these mushrooms. I heard you were going to be bringing some topsoil in today, so I wanted to save these before they were buried.”

I walked over to where he was crouched, and there were several large clusters of brown mushrooms fanning out of the ground—some of them larger than a head of lettuce.

“They’re Hen-of-the-Woods,” the man told me. “I sell them to the local gourmet restaurants, and they pay me well for them. I call them my ‘mushroom dollars’. You should try some!”

He handed me one of the mushroom clusters, then gave me his business card, which said, “Master Gardener” underneath his name.

I brought the mushroom cluster inside and washed it off, then looked it up on Wikipedia to make sure we weren’t going to poison ourselves. Everything checked out.

Evie and Emma checked out this alien thing that had been sitting near the kitchen sink drying off.

Apparently Hen-of-the-Woods is also known as maitake, and is prized in Japanese cooking, and amongst gourmands. I decided to sauté them in some olive oil with a bit of Kosher salt.

They were fantastic. Unfortunately for the mushroom collector, he’s created some rabid new fans of the maitake/Hen-of-the-Woods, so he’ll have to cross us off the collection list next year. At the very least we may owe him a dinner at our place (with maitake, of course) for showing us that those bizarre-looking brown clusters growing under the tree were not only edible, but delicious. If I were starving in a forest (or our back yard), that would probably have been one of the very last things I would have tried.

We’ve finally unpacked enough boxes to take a few interior shots of the house.

Here’s the kitchen, where we spend probably 80% of our waking hours. We bought the island legs for $20 each at a junk shop. They were porch posts from over 100 years ago, but sawed off and sanded down, they made great table legs. You can see Evie’s little area in the back right corner.

… and the dining room and living room…

… TV room…

… and the front porch, which faces out onto the river, across from an 1860’s lighthouse. We try to catch as many sunsets from here as possible.

We’ve been insanely busy here, but I’m finally ready to post some new house photos. There were some monstrous, gnarled juniper bushes in front of the house, almost completely obscuring the views of the river. I took a chainsaw to them, and had a friend remove the two young maples, which were badly placed and only going to become a bigger problem over time.

Just this week, Malcolm (my father-in-law) dug out the entire front planting beds, which took several days. Earlier today, Malcolm and I planted about 20 plants along the front, which will fill in a little over time.

Next up, a small hedge along the top of the front beds.

Pics of the inside coming soon….

Here’s a sequence of the kitchen renovation—which is still unfinished. There was initially an add-on staircase down to the basement on the right, which took up a good chunk of the room needlessly. We also tore out all of the old cabinets, which were damaged and pretty useless. The one difficult decision was the old fireplace. The chimney had collapsed years ago, so it was unusable. After a lengthy debate, we decided to use the mantle and bricks elsewhere, and take it down. There’s going to be a pantry in its place.