A vacation, during this? Well, for fiddleheads...

Yeah I know, pandemic and all. Heres the thing, we've got this place in Aroostock county Maine, population 67,000 give or take a few and 8 COVID cases. We've done a pretty careful job of quarantining ourselves and since we would spend the vast majority of our time at camp anyway we figured we were safe for the journey. The one variation we took from our normal trip is that we didn't take our kayaks. In retrospect that was a mistake but not a big one, we were able to rent a pair up there.

That kayak rental was really important as it let us pick fiddleheads.

I know I've written about fiddleheads on here before and they're somewhat of an obsession for us. This year's trip was a little early so our normal picking spots weren't ready yet. However there was one spot we usually pass by because we were too late that was just perfect.

Our early estimate is that we had picked around 25 pounds, I'm thinking that was probably low its probably more like 40 pounds which took us about 4 hours.

We waited to process until we got home, its really hard to blanch fiddleheads without running water and a good source of ice. My old Coleman 413E did heating duties. I really need to get my Handy Gas Plant up and running, we could have used a larger burner.

This is secondary cooling. I let this get up to 15 bags and then I'd haul the first ten to the freezer in the basement. Secondary cooling ensured we weren't putting warm fiddleheads into the freezer.

We ended up with 52 quart bags. We tend to pack them pretty full, in fact we should probably get a scale to weigh out the product for more consistent results but since its just for us it probably doesn't matter.

Anyway the rest of vacation was fantastic, the weather was perfect if maybe a little warm and we got to really relax which was great. I found time to plant a garden and Angie trimmed a bunch of trees. I'll post more on that later.