My neck of the woods

I went for a drive on Friday. There is this place only about half an hour from the city called Hvalfjördur (Whalefjord).  It's a long fjord that used to be the major road to the north, but has now been replaced by an undersea tunnel.  It's a very deep fjord and I remember how tiring it was to drive it on the way home, first all the way into the fjord and then all the way out again.  But it is a really nice place to go to, especially now that there is hardly any traffic there.

I had the idea to just wander about and look at the plants and see what I would find.  This is of course a slightly crazy time to go to the countryside, the plants are dying and all the leaves are turning yellow.  And red.  Glorious reds and oranges and it's just all very pretty.  I'm not much of an autumn person.  It's my least favorite time of year.  But this autumn has been quite nice and we haven't yet has a powerful low pressure system blow away all the leaves.  But it's getting a bit cold and as everyone knows it's always really windy out in the country.  So I dressed in my trusted ski overalls (bright red and easy to find should I get lost and have to be rescued).  I also made myself some sandwiches and took some cookies and something to drink and drove off.

I hadn't planned to pick any berries.  In fact I hadn't even thought about berries at all, and even if I had, I would have been sure that they were all gone.  But I saw so many fat and juicy berries that I had to pick them.  They were Empetrum hermaphroditum, which I understand are called crowberries in English. We call the plants krækiberjalyng and they are the most common berry that grows here. I will make saft from them.  Saft is just the juice with a bit of sugar to sweeten, but I thought using honey would be nice. It will be very healthy with all the antioxidants of the berries and the the antiseptic properties of honey. I like to have berrysaft to take in the morning, one tablespoon a day, with the fish oil.

I also found some lichens. Actually I found a lot of lichens and I collected some. I'm not quite sure what type they are, but suspect one of them is a Parmelia. I need some more lichen dyed wool for my someting-soft-and-warm-around-the-neck-this-winter-project. My mother also gave me an Umbilicaria lichen that she collected for me.  My mom wrote her BS thesis about moss and lichen that grow on the graveyard wall that is a stones throw from where we lived . I'm very excited to try to dye from that. It could give me that elusive purple.

And I wasn't alone in the fjord.  I had the company of the local sheep that still haven't been rounded up for winter.  I love the way they look, so haughty and arrogant.  Like they own the place.  And of course they do. I was just the visitor.  This is where they live all summer long.  I thought it would be nice to post a picture of them in their natural habitat.  So if you see Icelandic lamb in Whole foods, you can be sure that you are buying mountain lamb.  They are almost like goats they climb so high.

When I came home I went to the store and bought some fresh lamb's liver for dinner.  I used to get inards, like liver, hearts and kidneys for dinner very frequently as well as whalemeat and seabirds.  But so many people have stopped eating that although I don't know why.  My husband wasn't used to this type of food, but I've gotten him to like both liver and whalemeat, but he won't eat the kidneys and hearts, but the dogs love those.

Liver is really delicious and very easy to make.  We use lambs liver almost exclusively here, but calf liver is very popular in Italy and I think some nations eat liver from grown cattle.

But I think that if you can make a delicious meal with just salt and pepper as the only seasoning, then that food is the best.  So here is my liver recipe:

Slice one onion and brown it on a pan until it is soft in half olive oil and half butter.
Cut the liver into fairly thin slices and brown them on both side in the pan.
Pour some water over the whole thing and let it simmer for about 10 minutes or until the liver is no longer pink.  But don't cook it longer than that, check it by cutting into the slices.  Liver gets very tough and unappetizing if over cooked.
Thicken the liquid to a sauce by your preferred method, I use a maizena thingy from the store.  I also add a bit of cream to the sauce if I have some.
Season with salt and pepper.
Serve with boiled new potatoes, fresh salad greens and red currant jelly.

So now I just have to make the saft, make some Rhubarb syrup from the last of the Rhubarb stalks this year and then make fruit rolls from the left over mash.  I'm also wondering if I could make fruit rolls from the left over mash of berries.  And I'm all out of yoghurt and the sourdough bread is almost gone.  I bought a lot of broccoli at the store since they had them on offer and I've started to eat this delicious Broccoli soup for lunch.  So I'm making a lot of soup and freezing it.  And then there is all the timber that I got for free and plan to use to make raised beds for the allotment garden.  And I'm crocheting that warm thing and also a jacket type ting from the sweater that I unraveled last week.  I really wish I had another weekend coming.

Peltigera soap

I had to use the lichen infusions in soaps.  That's just obvious.  If one can get colour from something one has to try it in soap.  I was very curious to see what I would get from the lichens in terms of colour.  So I made a few soap with the different lichen decoctions that I had.

After some thought, I decided that they would all share the fragrance of Vetiver, but I would add other essential oils that I felt would match the colour or character of the specific lichen I was using.  Vetiver is a masculine kind of scent, rather dry and I thought it was a great base scent.  I knew that there was no hope of the lichen scent to come through the soaping process on it's own.

One lichen, Evernia prunastri (Oak moss) is extensively used in the perfume industry as a fixative and base scent.  The method of extraction is a trade secret and anyway, I couldn't get hold of that, it doesn't grow here, so Vetiver had to suffice.  But other lichens also have this very distinct and generally pleasant smell and one of the benefits of using lichen as a dye is that the wonderful scent stays with the yarn or cloth through it's lifetime and every time the garment is washed the scent is very noticeable.

I started with Peltigera canina and used a recipe for the soap that I think is going to be a good one.  It contains lard which I find gives a lovely hardness to soaps in the absence of palm oil, which I have a hard time getting without even getting into the ethical issues.  I didn't expect any colour from the Peltigera and I didn't really get any.  I'm pretty sure that whatever slight colour there is, is as much a function of the essential oils as the lichen itself.  So why bother?  Well, besides satisfying my own curiosity, I thought they might be cool to try out.  The Cetraria islandica soap that we made some time ago turned out to be very popular.  And lichens have many unique components and they are still being researched for all sorts of medicinal uses.  Many have anti bacterial, anti viral and anti fungal properties.  Peltigera canina has been used as a liver tonic and cough medicine, as well as to treat urinary disorders, thrush, tuberculosis, and rabies. I wouldn't count on it as a rabies cure, though!
The recipe for the lichen soap was:

30% Olive oil
25% Lard
25% Coconut oil
15% Soybean oil
5% Cocoa butter

The water phase was Peltigera canina decoction and I scented with Vetiver, Orange and Cubea litsea.  I put some dried plant material on top of it just to make it a little bit interesting.  I didn't have the dried lichen so I used Gallium verum, Ladys bedstraw, which I had handy.  Peppermint and Lemongras. (I made a mistake, the soap in the picture is indeed scented with Vetiver, Orange and Cubea litsea, but the water phase isn't Peltigera canina.  I got my soaps a little bit mixed up, sorry about that.  The right picture of this soap is in a post dated Nov. 7 2011.)

I made four soaps with the different lichen decoctions that I had and I had a blast.  They didn't give any spectacular colours, but there was one surprise.  But I like the Vetiver scent with the variations and I think these soaps just might be the coolest gift to the biologists in the family.

Will the lichen do anything for the skin?  I don't know, but I decided to use some of the decoction in a face cream.  It's quite nice and since I have been reading some magazines with cosmetics ads I'm pretending it's one of those 100$ miracle night creams that will make me beautiful overnight.  And guess what!  It seems to work.  Overnight!  I just love the placebo effect.

Lichen: Peltigera canina - Obsession nr. 1

Lichens have totally taken over my life for the moment.  They are so weird and different that it's hard not to be fascinated by them.  There isn't that much information around about lichen dyes and what little there is is often without latin names and that makes everything difficult.  I use latin names a lot although I realize that some people think that is very snobbish.  It isn't.  It's the only way to talk about specific plants without causing confusion.  I read about plants and dyeing in many languages and common names are very different from country to country and they tend to be quite arbitrary so that translating them is no help at all.

Lichens are totally different from other organisms and not much is understood about how they work. They may look like they are a single organism, but in fact they are two or more partners that form a symbiotic relationship. One of the partners is a fungus (mycobiont, for those who are interested) which makes the vegetative body of the lichen which houses the other partner, the photosynthetic (photobiont) one. The photosynthetic partner (there can be more than one) is usually green algae or cyanobacteria (cyano is from the greek kyanos=bluegreen) and it's funtion is to produce energy for itself and the fungal partner.  Cyanobacteria is quite well known to most soapers: Arthrospira platensis and A. maxima are the latin names of Spirulina which can be used to make green soaps.

There are about 13,500 species of lichen on the planet, but only 750 are found in Iceland.  Lichens are basically of 3 types:

1. Foliose - which means that they are leaf like in their structure.
2. Crustose - those are like a crust stuck to a surface and are usually very thin and tightly attached. These are about 75% of all lichens.
3. Fruticose - these are branched structures.

One of the problems with lichens is that they can be very hard to identify, but at least it's fairly easy to classify them by the above and work from there.

Since lichens grow very, very slowly I am careful to harvest only common lichen that I find growing abundantly.  I have a rule of never taking more than 1% of any plant material that I collect and therefore I have no fear of collecting too aggressively.

I have known about lichens forever, as my parents taught us well and especially about the more unusual plants like lichen and moss, my fathers specialty.  But I wasn't all that interested in them although I remember noticing how many different species of moss and lichen can grow on one tree trunk in one of the last trips I took with my parents about a year before my father died.  He pointed it out to me and showed me how different things grew on different sides of the tree trunks as well as at different heights and on different tree species.

Peltigera canina isn't a particularly good dye plant.  So why did I write a post about it?  Well, about a year ago when I noticed this lichen growing on a rock in the woods on my evening walk with the dogs.  Something about it fascinated me, and I was hooked from then on.  I collected a little piece and took it home.  I was quick to identify it as the very common Peltigera canina.  It has been used as a medicinal plant to treat treat wounds, urinary disorders, thrush, tuberculosis, and rabies. I later found it growing simply everywhere in the woods and in many other places.  It is amazing how a whole new world opens up when we discover something new.  And what a wonderful world it is.

It will give a light yellow colour to wool and silk.  There are lichen that will give reds and purples, so yellow isn't all that special, but I love it anyway.  It's soft and natural and it goes well with many other colours.

I have been using Icelandic wool (Lopi) to dye, but for the lichens I decided to use alpaca wool.  It's so wonderfully soft that it's obscene.  I need something soft and warm for this winter.