Recipes and Back to Indian Pipes (Briefly)

Today P and I drove up into the high mountains east of here to help some friends who are throwing a very big weekend celebration in a couple of weeks.  While the men painted part of the outside of their house,  Koreloy and I worked in her printshop/studio sewing  handles on the 200 cardboard letterpress-printed fans she is making for the celebration as gifts for the people who are there.  After a few hours, K and I hiked through the woods to the house, and we all ate a fantastic lunch.  Featured at the lunch were not one but two pies, a blueberry one from K and an apple one from me.  This drawing shows what all of our plates looked like as we all managed to eat four slices of pie-- two of each kind.  The recipe for the blueberry pie is given here.  If you want my apple pie recipe, scroll back through this blog to about a year ago, when I posted several times about making this sugar-free apple pie with an olive oil crust!

You will be all the more impressed at our eating four slices of pie each when you realize we also had a great corn and potato chowder (two versions of the recipe given here) as well as fresh kale salad.  After this mighty lunch, K and I lumbered back through the woods to resume work on the fans.  As we walked,  K pointed out to me a place where there was a clearing that had been filled with Indian pipes last week!  By now they were all dried out and going to seed, but were still very interesting to me.

So on this page is a drawing of the last stage in an Indian pipes' flowering.  The dissection drawing is of the plant's ovary with tiny black, powdery seeds spilling out.  I think the fat, club-like base of the flower stalk is interesting.  Since this plant gets its food from a saprophytic relationship with both a russula mushroom and the roots of a pine tree, I wonder if there's some kind of food-gathering apparatus inside the club.  This plant was too desicated to see much of the interior.