A friend of ours lives in Lithuania. She’s far from the capital city, living in the small rural town her family is from. She’s quite a wonderful person and we haven’t seen her since she moved out of the US to be back home.
We reached out and she invited us to stay with her. She lives in Saldutiškis which is right outside of Utena. We’re staying in Riga, Latvia, which is not far to Lithuania, but with her being outside of the capital, the bus routes looked onerous. Multiple stops, and we’d have to leave early in the morning. So I did what I always do — hit the easy button and rented a car. There’s not a lot between Riga and Saldutiškis. A few small towns and lots of farms. But the drive was easy and the border crossing between these Baltic states was as eventful as driving between states in the US.
It was really great to see Kotryna thriving in her new life. Her house is in a beautiful bit of forest and she was so generous in offering to share her space with us for a couple of days.
We know Kotryna from dance, which she is gifted at. She and a friend of hers have been teaching a Bachata class in Utena which was just too good of a chance to pass up, so Chrissy and I made sure to visit at a time when we could drop into a Bachata lesson. The lesson was great. They’ve got a great group of committed dancers. It was surreal and completely awesome to dance with Kotryna and her students at their Monday night class, followed by a social on the lake. … But my intent for this post was to talk about what we did the next day, foraging in the forest.
Ok, so I’m a city kid. I was born in a big city and have lived just about all of my life in urban and suburban America. The idea of going into the woods and picking up things off of the ground to eat is… not something that I’ve grown up with. But now, after having done it, it was completely awesome. Kotryna and her boyfriend, Modestas took us out to their favorite spot of the forest to forage, and we came back with an excellent bounty of chanterelle mushrooms and blueberries.
It really didn’t take us all that long to collect enough of both for a meal for the four of us. Since we were there in August, it was a bit late for blueberries, but while we were gathering mushrooms we kept noticing blueberries too so we started to collect those as well.
Kotryna prepared the mushrooms with onions, sour cream and dill. We had that with some mashed potatoes from Modestas’s mom. The blueberries were saved for dessert, when we were introduced to a baltic treat, blueberry soup!
Blueberry soup is a 3 ingredient dish. You mash up wild blueberries with some sugar and pour a bit of milk over that mixture in your bowl. You’re then greeted with this otherworldly color and spoonful after spoonful of deliciousness.
Not having ever eaten wild mushrooms, I’m not sure that I’d ever have the confidence to know what was edible but having someone who does this regularly show us what to pick and how to pick it was a great experience.
The flexibility that traveling the world slowly offers is so much better than even my already high expectations.
