It's a northern tradition!

 You might remember back in 2020 when we picked a bunch of fiddleheads, well we've done it again.

I've written about fiddleheads a few times but as a reminder these are ostrich ferns that have not yet unfurled themselves. We pick them in the Aroostook valley in northern Maine. For best results we kayak down river to spots that are difficult to get to on foot. This prevents us stealing somebody's spot and causing hurt feelings. Back in 2020 we picked and froze 52 quarts which was a record. This year we did 58 quarts, a record I think will hold for a long time.

After picking the fiddleheads need cleaning, some of them have a paper "chaff" on them that will come off in a light breeze, they also tend to have a little grit on them from where they came out of the ground. Both are easily fixed with this cleaning roller. My "Uncle Bunny" (actually he was my grandfather's cousin) made it at some point in the past, nobody alive knows exactly when. He died in the early '90s, so certainly well before that, probably in the 1960s. There is a fan that goes with the unit and blows across the drum but there was enough breeze that we didn't bother with it, sometimes the fan is more work than it's worth.

We decided to process up north and haul home frozen fiddleheads, this is my 413C on water heating duty. In 2020 I said I needed to get my Handy Gas plant up and running and I wasn't wrong. The 413 is up to the job but only just. The red cooler is full of cold water. The fiddleheads go in boiling water for 3 minutes and then into the cold water to stop the cooking process. Then out onto the towel to get the bulk of the water off before going into bags and into the freezer. We really like the zipper style vacuum bags although Angie's folks got us a vacuum food sealer that we might try next year.

We did this all at my aunt and uncle's house in town, it's really handy to have running water.

The freezer at Cushman house was a real convenience. This is half of our take. We initially froze them at the house in town but that freezer already had some food in it so there wasn't enough space for all of the fiddleheads.

With any luck it won't be all that many years before we can process fiddleheads at Cushman house. I powered up the water system while we were there and it made pressure, the same as it did last year. I'm amazed considering the age of the pump.

So anyway, even accounting for giving some away 58 quarts should hold us for a good long time, we've still got 1 or 2 bags of the 2020 fiddleheads and even one more bag of 2017 that I found while digging around in the freezer. The nice thing is that fiddleheads don't really suffer from freezer burn and are still fine to eat even when the freezer dries them out.

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.