Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Kaatscast: the Catskills Podcast is a biweekly series featuring Catskills culture, history, sustainability, local interviews, literature, and the arts. Shows are hosted by Brett Barry and produced by Silver Hollow Audio, in the heart of the Catskills. Subscribe and experience what reviewers have called “delightfully informative” storytelling with “great production quality.” Voted “Best Regional Podcast” three years in a row. Episode archives, transcripts, and a robust search engine at kaatscast.com. Enjoy!
[00:00:00] Heather Houskeeper: It's not uncommon to get the question of, "Well, gosh, how do you think folks ever came to know, like, this plant's good for that?" Or, you know, how many people do you think fell by the wayside for eating the wrong thing? I do not think it was random. I think, like animals, we had an innate knowledge or an instinctual knowledge of what we could and couldn't eat or what might make us feel better or harm us.
[00:00:28] Brett Barry: Heather Houskeeper is an herbalist, long-distance hiker, author, and lover of all things wild. She's counted thousands and thousands of miles through-hiking giants like the Appalachian Trail, the Long Path, the Florida Trail, the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, and the Finger Lakes Trail, where we met up with her at the Cat Hollow Trailhead in the southwestern Catskills. Welcome to "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast." I'm Brett Barry. Today, we're talking plants, foraging, and what the trail reveals when you know what you're looking at.
[00:01:09] Heather Houskeeper: My name's Heather Houskeeper. Folks call me "The Botanical Hiker," and we are on the Finger Lakes Trail in Delaware Wild Forest.
[00:01:22] Brett Barry: Now, Finger Lakes, I'm thinking north of here, but obviously the trail extends quite a bit further south.
[00:01:29] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, the Finger Lakes Trail begins in the western Southern Tier of New York State. It begins in a small town called Salamanca, and then it travels along the Southern Tier, roughly around 500 or so miles into the Catskills, and now finishes on Slide Mountain, but there are six branch trails that branch off of the main Finger Lakes Trail and travel up along the lakes and also to Niagara Falls and down to the Pennsylvania border, so through the Finger Lakes Trail, you can explore a lot of the state.
[00:02:19] Brett Barry: Walking a wet and rocky stretch of the trail, and this being a story on foraging after all, I thought I'd impress Heather and identify a knee-high weedy plant that sprung from the trail, so we're passing some stinging nettle. Uncertainty immediately setting in, right?
[00:02:39] Heather Houskeeper: No, but we could talk about that.
[00:02:41] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:02:41] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, so this is a delightful edible, so this is garlic mustard.
[00:02:48] Brett Barry: Oh, garlic mustard.
[00:02:50] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah...
[00:02:50] Brett Barry: Well, that's embarrassing.
[00:02:51] Heather Houskeeper: ...and if you crush a leaf and give it a sniff, you will get a strong garlicky aroma. Garlic mustard is a non-native. We do consider it an invasive plant. However, I am not interested in demonizing any plants. Garlic mustard is here because at one time we did appreciate it, and it's doing what plants do best.
[00:03:16] Brett Barry: Yeah...
[00:03:16] Heather Houskeeper: Reproduces and spreads.
[00:03:18] Brett Barry: ...and it's native to somewhere.
[00:03:19] Heather Houskeeper: It is. It's native to Asia, and garlic mustard, you know, we do not want to foster its growth, but it's one because it's not integral to our ecosystem. We can also pick very freely, and I encourage you to pick and uproot this plant. Garlic mustard right now is in flower, and we've got four-petaled white flowers located terminally or at the topmost portion of the plant. At least right now they will grow also from the leaf axils, but we can pinch off that uppermost portion and just pop that right in our mouths. It is quite tasty, so great in salads—lovely blanched and then ground as a pesto. I made some fritters of the topmost portions of garlic mustard earlier this week. Delicious!
[00:04:11] Brett Barry: Wow!
[00:04:12] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, the leaves are what I'd use for pesto, but again, you do want to blanch those. They're bitter as the plant matures, so that helps to cut some of the bitter quality and allow that garlic and mustard flavor to really shine.
[00:04:25] Brett Barry: I mean, was I even close? Because stinging nettle has about the same height, a little bit...
[00:04:29] Heather Houskeeper: Yes, same height. This one will not sting you if you touch it.
[00:04:33] Brett Barry: ...and we do have lots of this on our property.
[00:04:35] Heather Houskeeper: Okay, that doesn't surprise me.
[00:04:36] Brett Barry: It usually grows with ferns where we are anyway.
[00:04:40] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, and the issue with garlic mustard is that it's not too picky about where it grows, so unlike something like dandelion, you know, we saw that back in the parking lot. You know, that's going to grow typically in disturbed soil or in our yards. Garlic mustard will happily spread into the forest, and then that's where we run into issues with it crowding out our native plants. It can also release chemicals into the soil that will inhibit the growth of other plants around it, so the deer don't like it, so it just ends up proliferating. That's why it's an excellent foraging plant and a great beginner's foraging plant because you've got the scent as a clue, in addition to the visual clues, which right now we have those four-petaled white flowers for, but we're looking for heart-shaped leaves with rounded teeth along the outer edge that are traveling alternately.
[00:05:39] Brett Barry: So I was introduced to you by Ken Posner, whom I've interviewed for this podcast. He is known in some circles as the barefoot hiker...
[00:05:50] Heather Houskeeper: Yes.
[00:05:50] Brett Barry: ...probably in most circles, and he calls you an expert forager, so how did you get into that? What drew you to that level of understanding of the outdoors? Was there some spark in your childhood, and, you know, what's your background?
[00:06:09] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, so I've always had a love for the natural world. I grew up with the forest in my backyard. My grandparents were plant people, and I was in the household with both my parents and my grandparents as well, so they certainly had an influence on me, but what really sparked me to get to know the plants that I could eat and that I could work with medicinally was after I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. I became very aware of, to be honest, kind of what a helpless human I was in the woods without all of our, you know, societal constructs, you know, so it was not easy to get to a grocery store if I needed more food; it was not always easy to get to a pharmacy if I needed some medicine, and, you know, six months on the trail, things come up just like they do six months at home. You get a headache, you get a stomachache, and so after I hiked that trail, I really made it a purpose to get to know the edible and medicinal plants, and so I went to herbal medicine school and purposely chose a program that was in the field and would give me hands-on experience. We would go camping for 10 days at a time and harvest and prepare plants as food and medicine in the backcountry, and so that was an excellent foundation, and after that program, I took that knowledge and continued to long-distance hike and essentially continued to expand my knowledge by harvesting plants along my path and weaving them into backcountry meals and medicines.
[00:08:04] Brett Barry: What or where was that program?
[00:08:06] Heather Houskeeper: That was in Asheville, North Carolina, so that was the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine.
[00:08:11] Brett Barry: Wow!
[00:08:11] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, which at that time was all in person. It's now online, and it's an excellent online program, but...
[00:08:16] Brett Barry: Must be hard online.
[00:08:18] Heather Houskeeper: ...yeah, yeah.
[00:08:19] Brett Barry: We got a little running creek here right through the center of the trail.
[00:08:24] Heather Houskeeper: We sure do. It makes walking a little more challenging, doesn't it? Yeah, so you mentioned stinging nettle before, so we do not have stinging nettle, but we do have a plant that can help to quell the itch from stinging nettle as well as the itch of poison ivy and bug bites, so it's pretty much growing in this runoff area, this wet portion of the trail.
[00:08:50] Brett Barry: Can I guess and redeem myself?
[00:08:52] Heather Houskeeper: Yes.
[00:08:52] Brett Barry: Is it jewelweed?
[00:08:53] Heather Houskeeper: It is.
[00:08:53] Brett Barry: Oh gosh!
[00:08:55] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, so jewelweed—this is a plant that we can use topically. We don't ingest jewelweed, but we can crush the plant up and apply it to our skin if we think we've come in contact with poison ivy, if we've been bitten by an insect, or if we have rubbed up against some stinging nettle by accident. It will quell the itch and the inflammation essentially, at least for a period of time, so you will need to reapply, but jewelweed is a plant that likes it where it's wet. It is native as well, so we do want to be more mindful in how much jewelweed we would harvest, and what's neat about jewelweed is it gets its name from the fact that when it rains or it gets wet, the water will bead right on the leaves, atop the leaves, so it looks like it's wearing jewels.
[00:09:48] Brett Barry: Silvery.
[00:09:49] Heather Houskeeper: Yes, and we've got two different species we could encounter. There's a yellow jewelweed, which we call Impatiens pallida, and then there is a jewelweed that's orange with a spotted throat that we call Impatiens capensis.
[00:10:06] Brett Barry: And that one, when it goes to seed, pops, right?
[00:10:10] Heather Houskeeper: Yes, yeah, so that leads to the other name for jewelweed, which is touch-me-not.
[00:10:14] Brett Barry: Oh.
[00:10:15] Heather Houskeeper: Because it'll surprise you when, you know, the seeds are wrapped up in, like, a coiled seed pod.
[00:10:21] Brett Barry: Uh-huh.
[00:10:22] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, it's like a spring when you touch it.
[00:10:24] Brett Barry: Yeah, it's amazing. So what attracted you to hiking?
[00:10:28] Heather Houskeeper: Oh gosh!
[00:10:29] Brett Barry: Because you've done your share.
[00:10:30] Heather Houskeeper: Again, you know, growing up with the forest in my backyard with woods all around, hiking was what I always did, whether that was for recreation or solace or out of boredom, and my father brought home a book when I was 16 years old called "A Walk Across America," and it was about a young man who walked the length of the United States. He did not walk the AT, but he walked country roads, and I think he did go on and off of some trails, and he had his dog with him, and I basically decided then that was what I wanted to do when I grew up, so I got the idea of the Appalachian Trail in my head. You know, near to Milford, the Appalachian Trail is very close, about 15 to 20 minutes away in New Jersey, and so I'd sometimes see hikers too crossing the road or at the nearby deli, and I just thought that they were fascinating, fascinating people, so the first opportunity I had after I graduated college, I hopped on the Appalachian Trail, thinking that it was going to be, you know, something I'd check off on my life list, but it just ignited a passion for hiking, and yeah, I haven't stopped since.
[00:11:56] Brett Barry: Tell me a little bit about your life as a hiker. How significant is it to your life? What have you learned, and, you know, going into now with this additional education in plant identification and plants as medicine, how much does that knowledge add to the experience?
[00:12:17] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, being a hiker is, I'd say, integral to my life and who I am. I can't imagine not hiking. I've basically built my work even around hiking. Every year, I take off and do some kind of long, long trail, and these days that long trail is not thousands of miles long. It's usually hundreds of miles long, so it could be three to six weeks, somewhere in there, but it directly ties into what I do professionally and essentially what does light me up. Knowing what I do now about the plants, it has enriched every single mile I walk on any path. When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, a big draw for me was to, like, deepen a connection to the natural world, and sure, I did. I was out there for six months, but I still felt like a human moving through a landscape that I didn't belong to. I don't feel that way. Now, I feel like I belong here, as each one of us does. We just believe, or we've come to feel, as if we are separate, and that creates a sense of belonging and community that wasn't there before, and I never experience a moment of boredom now on the trail because there's always another plant to see or to meet or to get to know.
[00:14:02] Brett Barry: And your career, your work path, has paralleled this from the beginning?
[00:14:09] Heather Houskeeper: Almost, almost—yeah, let's see. After I finished herbal medicine school, I set out on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, which is North Carolina's long-distance trail that goes from the Smokies to the Outer Banks. It's about 1,200 miles, and I set out with the intention of writing a book about the edible and medicinal plants that I encountered and experimented with and thinking, well, this could be an avenue for earning an income as well as sharing my knowledge and inspiring other people, and that was successful, so after I hiked that trail, it took me a couple years, but I did publish that book, and that led to a variety of speaking engagements and guided walks where people wanted to learn how to do what I was doing themselves. Eventually that led to my creating my business, The Botanical Hiker, in which I take folks out for guided plant walks and DIY herbal medicine programs and seminars, and that has also now transformed into the School of Plant and Place Connection, which is located in Milford, Pennsylvania, and it's a full-fledged herbal medicine school.
[00:15:31] Brett Barry: There's a post on Heather Houskeeper's blog, "The Botanical Hiker," about her School of Plant and Place Connection, where she alludes to organoleptic or sensory knowledge. It's how she writes: "People came to know plants' properties before we had labs to identify constituents. To work with the plants, one had to know them as individuals, one had to create relationship."
[00:15:59] Heather Houskeeper: Yes, yes, so organoleptic knowledge is essentially knowledge that we glean through our senses or our sensory organs, and this is how people would have come to understand their landscape and specifically plants since people and plants began to interact, so well before we had, say, laboratories in order to test the chemical constituents that are within plants, so it's not uncommon to get the question of, "Well, gosh, how do you think folks ever came to know, like, this plant's good for that?" Or, you know, how many people do you think fell by the wayside for eating the wrong thing? I do not think it was random. I think, like animals, we had an instinct that was likely, you know, strengthened through that organoleptic knowledge, so we have an innate knowledge or an instinctual knowledge of what we could and couldn't eat or what might make us feel better or harm us.
[00:17:02] Brett Barry: Is that innateness gone for most people?
[00:17:05] Heather Houskeeper: I think it's dormant.
[00:17:06] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:17:07] Heather Houskeeper: I think we are domesticated humans, you know, so just like our domesticated animals, like dogs or cats or cattle, they can make really foolish choices sometimes. You know, they can eat plants that will make them sick. The wild animals generally don't. We don't stumble upon a deer passed in the forest because it ate the wrong plant. I think that knowledge is absolutely within us, and I think once we begin to tap into our senses and we begin to utilize that awareness, it will awaken that innate knowledge. Now, we always want to bolster our actions with education, right? So we don't want to just go out and feel right off the bat if a plant is edible or not edible and consume it, but I have noticed as I've awoken that sensory part of myself and spent a lot of time with the plants that you will notice plants much more readily. You will see those that are edible much more readily. You'll get a sense of, "Okay, I think I'm, you know, think I'm going to see some garlic mustard soon" or "I think I'm going to see some ramps soon" based upon that sensory knowledge of taking in clues from my landscape, essentially kind of putting all the pieces of the puzzle together.
[00:18:31] Brett Barry: And I would imagine that the more time you spend on trails, the more that becomes second nature because you see patterns.
[00:18:38] Heather Houskeeper: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, yeah, it's not just going out and hoping that I'm going to find some morels today and walking into a random patch of woods. You know, with something like morels. You know, you know that they like to grow beneath sycamores or aged apple trees, you know, in loamy soil, and that they grow at a certain time of year, you know, when our spring ephemerals are popping and when temps are around 60 during the day and 40 around night, and so, you know, that is all experience-based, and yeah, you come to know the patterns, so it becomes much easier to recognize the plants that we want—plants and fungi—that we want to be consuming.
[00:19:27] Brett Barry: So what do you recommend for people who want to know more? This is something that you teach. What's your range, I guess, for people to get connected with you, and what kind of offerings do you have? And I know that there's a big kind of multi-month workshop that you're also leading, and so if you could tell me about that kind of thing as well.
[00:19:45] Heather Houskeeper: Sure, yeah, so folks can find me through my websites: thebotanicalhiker.com or schoolofplantandplaceconnection.com. At the School of Plant and Place Connection, which is located on my family land in Milford, Pennsylvania, we also utilize the Milford Experimental Forest, which is right next door, and that's privately owned by the Pinchot family, and the Pinchots are descendants of Gifford Pinchot, the father of conservation, so that's a 1,400-acre forest that we can appreciate. All of our classes are outside [in-person]. The immersion program formally began on May 1st. We will be meeting two consecutive days every month, so it turns out to be 10 full-day in-person sessions, and then we'll have Zoom meetups as well to keep us connected and keep us learning, and then we've got two seasonal plant walks that are afternoon plant walks, and they bookend the programs, but this is a program that is intended to give you all the skills you would need to work with plants as food and medicine, so participants learn basic botany, plant ID, how to key out a plant and a tree, and an introduction to mushroom identification. They learn how to make tinctures and teas and decoctions and salves, a whole array of herbal medicines. We also dig into how to cultivate our own herbs at home, and the core of the program is about cultivating kinship with the natural world, so there are a variety of nature connection practices that we move through, so Sit Spot is a core practice that we will continue for the entire four months that we are together.
[00:21:45] Brett Barry: That [Sit Spot] refers to a mindfulness practice of visiting the same spot repeatedly, observing the environment over time. The famous Catskills naturalist John Burroughs may not have called it a sit spot, but the idea holds. In 1886, he writes, "The place to observe nature is where you are; the walk to take today is the walk you took yesterday. You will not find just the same things: both the observed and the observer have changed."
[00:22:20] Heather Houskeeper: We've got Ken Posner, the barefoot hiker, so he'll be coming and doing some barefooting with us. We'll be learning a little bit of tracking, and I really want to inspire folks to essentially create lifelong connections with the plants, and the plants are a gateway to connection with all of the living world.
[00:23:01] Brett Barry: How much knowledge is just enough to get you into trouble, and where is the threshold to be a confident person in terms of foraging for food or medicine?
[00:23:12] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, so start with one plant. Increase from there to two, three, four, five... Don't feel like you have to know all the plants right off the bat. If you know one really well, that's a great start, and once you know one really well, you can then compare and contrast. You know, notice what makes that plant different or similar to another plant. It will get easier to discern plants. They'll begin to become individuals and get to know that one plant through the seasons, so you don't just meet a plant once and pop it in your mouth. Meet it in its shoot stage, in its flowering stage, and in its seed stage because it will exhibit different characteristics and now you've had, you know, several months or perhaps even several seasons. You've had that much more time to meet other plants and notice, you know, are there look-alikes for this plant that I need to be aware of? So again, I think creating relationships with the plants that we consume before we consume them is one of the safest things we can do.
[00:24:27] Brett Barry: You say relationships, and you speak in your writing in terms of plants and trees and wildlife as being kind of other people, right?
[00:24:41] Heather Houskeeper: Mm-hmm, yeah.
[00:24:42] Brett Barry: Do you feel a give and take?
[00:24:44] Heather Houskeeper: Absolutely, yeah, and I would hope that when you do forage, and this is what I do when I forage, it is a reciprocal relationship, so we're not just taking from the forest or the meadow or the yard. You know, that is not there for us. You know, these plants, these trees, these mushrooms—they have inherent value and innate purpose unto themselves, so there's a lot of different ways in which we can give back when we forage, giving our attention and our awareness, being mindful—that is, showing a form of gratitude, a reverence—and that's going to foster positive behavior in the natural environment going forward for yourself and in your peers, but we could also even do more practical things, so perhaps if we're harvesting the seeds from a plant, we take some seeds for ourselves, and then we take some and we tuck them in the soil so that plant's got a little head start, or we take some berries for ourselves, ensuring that we leave plenty of berries on the shrub for the birds or the bear or the deer, and that too is a form of giving back. It's very important that we forage ethically because the Earth needs us. The Earth needs us. It does not require us to go forward, but it certainly would benefit from our support and protection.
[00:26:23] Brett Barry: How much do you incorporate foraged plants in your own daily life diet and whatnot?
[00:26:29] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, so really every day foraged plants are not the only food on my plate by any means, but every day I like to eat something wild, and that may be as a tea, that may be as a seasoning, or that may be as a primary vegetable, so right now I'm enjoying lots of stinging nettle—stinging nettle in our scrambled eggs in the morning, stinging nettle in our stir-fries, in our pasta sauces, and stinging nettle in tea.
[00:27:03] Brett Barry: And stinging until cooked, right?
[00:27:05] Heather Houskeeper: Until cooked, yes, yes, or pulverized very well, but yes, cooked is generally how I'm eating it—chickweed is abundant right now and garlic mustard, so those two are lovely in salads. The garlic mustard in stir-fries—yeah, spring is wild-greens season, so with our cool, damp weather, all of our leafy plants are really going to be abundant, yeah.
[00:27:33] Brett Barry: Walking back to the trailhead, we passed some young ferns, and Rebecca Barry, Kaatscast's own literary correspondent and quality control manager, who had, it turned out, been hiking with us from the very beginning, seeded the conversation with a question about fiddleheads.
[00:27:51] Rebecca Barry: Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at these and I'm wondering, are these fiddleheads, and are these the type of fiddlehead that's an edible fiddlehead?
[00:27:57] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, so these are definitely fiddleheads, so any fern that is immature and the frond is still coiled up tightly like a fiddlehead, we'd call a fiddlehead, but we generally do not eat just any fiddlehead fern, so the fiddlehead that I was taught is safe for consumption is ostrich fern, and ostrich fern will have papery scales similar to this one, but it will have a deep groove down the center of the stalk as well. Ostrich fern will never have fuzzy hairs on the outside, so I will often see folks mistake something like a cinnamon fern or those that have the more fuzzy, fuzzy quality as ostrich, but know that you're looking for papery scales and a deep groove down the center of the stalk.
[00:28:54] Brett Barry: And finally, nearly back to our cars, we stumbled into another edible plant that even I feel confident identifying, and I'd bet you know it pretty well too.
[00:29:05] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah, so dandelion, another excellent beginning forager's plant, dandelion, we could learn a thing or two from by its Latin name alone, so its Latin name is Taraxacum officinale, and Taraxacum is the combination of two root words that mean "disorder remedy," so back when we named this plant, we considered it the remedy for our disorders, and officinale, the species name, denotes a medicinal plant, so there's a variety of plants that are the species officinale or officinalis, and that typically means that this was a plant that was used by physicians, that it was in apothecaries or listed in pharmacopeias, and this plant is not native to North America, despite the fact it's in our yards and popping up in our gardens, so likely folks purposely brought this here from Europe because they did value it as a food and medicine, so our ancestors planted it, and it spread. Our ancestors would be thrilled to have dandelions popping up in the yard, but dandelions—nearly every part is edible. We generally don't eat the stem just because it's filled with latex and it's not so palatable, but the flowers—we can pinch off the top of the plant. I wouldn't recommend just popping them in your mouth. They're kind of bitter. They're a strange texture, but you can grab hold of that green cup on the back of the flower and simply pull the florets out, and now you've got a lovely garnish that's rich in lutein, which can benefit the eyes, so you could sprinkle these on salads. You could toss them in crepe batter or shortbread cookie dough along with my garlic mustard fritters I made last week. I did some dandelion fritters as well, so then you're just taking the whole flowering head and dipping that in a savory batter and pan-frying it. The leaves are rich in vitamins and minerals. We can eat those raw, we could sauté them, we could throw them in a soup, or we could steep them and have them as a tea, and the root too is edible, and when I harvest my dandelions, I harvest those that are popping up in the garden generally because the soil's nice and loose so you can just pop those right up, and your roots, prepare them like a root vegetable, so I'll generally sauté them with some olive oil, garlic, and tamari. They have a nice earthy flavor, and they are supportive of the liver.
[00:31:40] Brett Barry: Wow!
[00:31:40] Heather Houskeeper: Yeah.
[00:31:41] Brett Barry: Going to have to give this a shot. This could be our starter plant, Rebecca.
[00:31:45] Heather Houskeeper: Yes, dandelion was the first wild plant I ever ate.
[00:31:49] Rebecca Barry: Can't go wrong, right?
[00:31:50] Heather Houskeeper: You can't.
[00:31:51] Rebecca Barry: There's no look-alike dandelion.
[00:31:52] Heather Houskeeper: So there are look-alikes...
[00:31:54] Rebecca Barry: Okay.
[00:31:55] Heather Houskeeper: ...but the look-alikes are non-toxic. What I tell folks about dandelions is you're going to have one flower to one stalk. You may have multiple stalks arising from the base of the plant, but that stalk will not branch, and then you'll have only a basal rosette of leaves, so your leaves only come from the base of the plant, not along the stem.
[00:32:20] Brett Barry: For more fascinating and possibly life-preserving knowledge, you can find Heather Houskeeper at thebotanicalhiker.com. Her school is listed at schoolofplantandplaceconnection.com, and for all things Catskills, you can find us at kaatscast.com and wherever you get your podcasts. We're also broadcasting live every Saturday at WJFF Radio Catskill. I'm your host Brett Barry. Quality control by Rebecca Barry. Fresh ears after my hours of editing. And transcription by a human. Jerome Kazlauskas is the name, and his meticulous work appears on each episode page for deep searching or just following along. If you love "Kaatscast," please tell your friends about us and be sure you're subscribed. Rate and review on the podcast platform of your choice. It really does help listeners find us. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.
[00:33:22] Audio Clip: [SONG: "STICK WITH ME"]