Inspired by the apricot-y flavor of chanterelles, twisted up with traditional Middle Eastern flavors.
Wild rice, wild morels, (wild) pinenuts... Wild!
A great appetizer using a plentiful & flavorful mushroom.
A traditional Eastern European dish, with a meaty mushroom.
A healthy and traditional Italian soup (pasta and beans), with mushrooms.
Here is a great recipe with a bit of a tropical Thai twist. It is not hot, but savory, salty and slightly sweet and meaty all at once.
Mushrooms with coconut milk might not sound very good, but the soup is wonderful. We ran across a very immature chicken mushroom (Laetiporus sulphureus) this week, and brought home about 15 pounds of it to cook with. Much will be frozen, but some will be made into something tasty right now. The mushroom was growing on a dying deciduous tree, rather high up. Robert cut off a large portion and carted it home in a grocery shopping bag. It was so fresh, it soaked through the bag onto the floor of the car, and gave off a lot of moisture when cut and sautéed. Lambs\'s quarters (Chenopodium berlandieri) is an abundant weed probably growing in your yard or an open field area, but you could substitute spinach.
We came across a surprising bounty of black trumpets (Craterellus fallax) in September. Surprising because we were searching for hen-of-the-woods, and because we are still novice mushroom hunters and this is our true first season of searching.
According to the message boards on Yahoo, this has been a great year for trumpets in New England. Our next task was to find a way to cook with them beyond a cream-based puréed soup. I put some on top of a pizza with goat cheese with fantastic results, Robert ate the whole thing himself. This recipe is for a Dauphinoise, or scalloped potato casserole rich with black trumpets and cream layered with a milk Monterey Jack cheese.
At a recent weekend mushroom foray with CVMS, Robert was lucky to find a small, fresh sulphur shelf, or chicken mushroom (Laetiporous sulphureus). This is a common autumn polypore found growing on dead trees and stumps.
When fresh, the colors are bright orange with a bright yellow underside on each shelf. This specimen was fresh and quite wet. We brought it home and decided to make a stuffed braided bread. Sulphur shelf is a firm, meaty mushroom, and I made a substantial filling along with sautéed onions and brie. We shared some the next day at another foray. I usually make a standard pizza dough with a bit of whole wheat flour, but you could use pizza dough from the grocery store. To make it easier to dice the brie, I freeze a chunk of it first and then toss the diced brie in a pinch of flour once cut. If you don't want to make the filled braid, you could also make a stuffed pocket or calzone with the filling.
Autumn weather brings out the honey mushrooms (Armillaria mellea) here in the northeast. We have found them in the past, and it is one of the few gilled mushrooms we are comfortable eating.
There are some reports of lower gastrointestinal upset with honeys, so Robert likes to give them a very quick boil before cooking with them. None of us have ever had an adverse reaction to a honey mushroom. We have found several clusters of them on different trees this past month. Robert dehydrated many, and spore printed some caps. After we got the white spore confirmation, he cooked up a pile to serve in a Hungarian paprikas, which is usually a tomato and paprika based sauce, and served either over egg noodles or small egg dumplings and a dollop of sour cream.
This past weekend while picking nectarines at the local orchard, Gillian spied a large purple-spored puffball (Calvatia cyanthiformus) under a nearby pear tree, and promptly collected her bounty. We took it home, read up on ID information, and sliced it thinly to make Puffball Piccata, using the capers we made from milkweed flower bud capers earlier this summer. The texture of each puffball filet was tender with a bit of a crispy exterior, and the sauce was tart and briny. The puffball we found was about 4" wide, so your servings will be based on the size of the puffball. I got about 10 filets from the mushroom, each slice was 1/4" thick. Well be happily looking for more puffballs to eat this one again.
Hen-of-the-Woods (Grifola frondosa) is an autumn mushroom we love. We received our first Hen from Russ Cohen in a trade for some jellies made from foraged wild foods, after we took a walk with him last year.
Since then, we have been dreaming about the hen season. Joining the Connecticut Valley Mycological Society has taught us a lot about how to look for this beautiful polypore, such as preferred habitat, correct timing, and how to determine a desirable specimen vs. a too old or too young specimen. When cleaning the mushroom and separating the parts for drying, freezing, and eating fresh, we usually end up with a lot of very solid stems from the cores of the mushrooms. These solid cores form the base of a spread that is highly flavorful and almost meaty. We like to make a grilled cheese sandwich with a heavy layer of tapenade, or eat it just spread on crackers.
