Species of Least Concern, episode 2

[urbpan]

Hey everyone! The second episode of my podcast is up!

http://soundcloud.com/urbpan/species-of-least-concern

Please listen to it and if you like it, "like" it on facebook. If you don't like it, don't be shy tell me why!

If you want me to keep making them, please offer suggestions for topics or send me stuff to identify! Future episodes will have other peoples' voices besides my own, as I hope to hold interviews via skype, or even in person if I can swing it!

It's only eleven minutes long, just put it on as you do the dishes or something.

Comments

Wow

[greenmonk (from livejournal.com)]

Ooh! I am going to listen!

Re: Wow

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Yay! Hope you like it!

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you talked about mulberry. It's weird, because I've never really considered that they were food. That's true of a lot of forageable plants. Even though I know, intellectually, that they are healthful, possibly tasty, and best of all, free, I just don't think of them as "food". "Food" only comes from intentionally grown plants, whether by farmers or out in my own backyard garden. Come the Apocralypse in December, I will not survive. But at least I want to live somewhere with arable land. I could not stand living in southern California, where if you didn't provide external soil, fertilizer, and water, you couldn't grow anything.

I don't think I've ever encountered an Ectobius down here. Indoors, we get Blatella vaga from time to time, and occasionally some of the more exotic species like the Cuban. I also work with roaches professionally. They will feed on human hair and skin when populations are large enough, and postmortem roach feeding can be mistaken for 2nd degree burns.

I think your next podcast should discuss Morticia!

Mulberries as food

[tceisele.livejournal.com]

We have a nice mulberry tree in our front yard that I just harvested a couple of times this week[1]. We like to use the berries to make fruit cobbler[2] and pie[3]. An easy way to harvest mulberries is to put down a tarp under the tree, then take a long stick and rap the branches smartly. The ripe berries will rain down onto the tarp, which you can then pick up to pour the berries into a bucket. You'll want to wash them, but this is easy too: just pour them into a big bowl of water, and scoop them out while picking out the obvious leaves, branches, and caterpillars. Don't worry about whether they are fully ripe or not, ripe berries are pretty mild and the red ones add a bit of nice tartness. Don't worry about the green stems, either. Just go ahead and eat them.

[1] This year, we got four gallons of fruit from that tree (which is about 20 feet tall), and there is probably one more good shakings-worth on the tree that will probably yield another gallon. We obviously freeze them.

[2] Mulberry cobbler:
Take four cups of mulberries, mix with a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice (for tartness), two tablespoons of quick-cooking tapioca (for thickness), and sugar to taste (I use about 1/2 cup). Pour them into the bottom of a baking dish.
Use any cobbler topping. I use 2 cups flour, 1 cup oatmeal, 1/3 cup sugar, 1 cup milk, 1 egg, a bit of cinnamon, a dash of salt, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 1 teaspoon baking soda. Mix this up, and spoon it on top of the fruit mix. Bake at 400 deg. F for 15 minutes, then another 15 minutes at 350 F. And it's done.

[3] Mulberries make a great extender for sour-cherry pie (if you are starting with fresh cherries, and not canned cherry filling). Just use your normal cherry-pie recipe, but replace about half of the cherries with mulberries. This cuts down the tartness of the cherries enough that you can also cut the sugar in half (cherry pie filling is normally about 2/3 sugar, which I think is a tad excessive).

[xiloxoch.livejournal.com]

I listened and loved it!

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

enjoyed both :)