Mushrooms, Chugunoks, Apples and Icons (video review)

Mushrooms

I am still enjoying the videos of the "widow" from Ukraine. She appears to have a fairly large network. Different people keep popping in and helping her.

Eastern Europeans love their mushrooms.

She is collecting them from what appears to be a managed forest of Pinus sylvestris (commonly called Scotch Pine, a Eurasian species) and Quercus rubra (commonly called Northern Red Oak, a North American species). The Boyarka Forest Station is one place that is documented as having that combination of trees but I am sure that combination exist in many other places.

There are many places in Michigan and Pennsylvania where you can find this combination. The difference is that the Pinus sylvestris is from abandoned Christmas tree farms and the Red Oak is the native. 

Mistletoe in trees circled in red

 

Mistletoe population density in Ukraine. Lifted from a peer reviewed academic paper.

Given that she prepares Chicken Paprikash (a classic, Hungarian dish) in this video and the prevalence of mistletoe, it is a decent guess to assume she is in not in the eastern half of Ukraine.

Kettles

The widow has a cooking system. The stove in the outdoor kitchen has a side-draft fire-box.

 

Called a "Chugunok"

The shape of the kettle means it can be fit through a hole in the top of the stove and more surface area is exposed to the heat than a square-bottomed kettle.

Gathering firewood is a time-consuming task, especially if you cannot use power equipment. A nice thing about hand-tools is that they always start and hand-saws are not very loud.

Her indoor cook-stove has inserts that can be removed to create a hole that is sized to the pan or for gentle heat, she can rest the pan on top of the inserts.

Cooking systems that reduces the amount of firewood needed on a daily basis can save hundreds of hours of work a year. 

Apples 

Yes, I am an apple nerd. These look like "Idared" apples.

Many of the apples grown in Europe are of North American origin. Idared is a popular storage and cooking apple in Europe. The trees are precocious and productive. The fruit are large, keep well and is relatively tart. Unfortunately, the tree is very susceptible to fire blight. "Enterprise" is a good substitute for Idared.

Icons

The Ukrainian widow whose videos I have been enjoying appears to follow the Orthodox practice of Christianity. I am unfamiliar with the shrouding or decorating of icons for Advent. If memory serves, those icons were not shrouded before Advent in earlier videos.