Today, my colleague and I walked across the street to get a FourBucks. On the way, we spied some shaggy mane mushrooms – Coprinus comatus – on the grass. This left me no choice but to plan a mushroom soup for dinner.

For mushrooms I used the shaggies + I rehydrated some honey mushrooms and some slippery jacks and some lobster mushrooms from earlier this season + I chopped up some grocery store white mushrooms just because I had them. The shaggies are the heart of this soup.

This is a simple soup made special by the great mushrooms that give it wonderful body.

I started the soup by heating up a little splash of vegetable oil in a heavy pot. I tossed in half an onion, chopped up and let it cook for a few minutes with about a teaspoon of dried thyme leaves. While that was happening, I parboiled the honey mushrooms and the slippery jacks for a couple minutes (both these mushrooms can cause stomach upset in some people and a bit of parboiling apparently helps). These mushrooms don’t bother me, but I parboil them in any case because I might just share my soup.

I roughly cut up some deboned chicken thighs and tossed them into the pot and let the chicken cook with the onions for a few minutes, then added all the mushrooms and let it all cook together for several minutes before adding chicken stock. I let the soup simmer until the chicken was done. I tempered about a cup of milk and added that in, and cooked the soup another couple minutes. There is nothing fancy about the way this soup is seasoned – thyme, salt and pepper. I didn’t want to overpower the mushrooms. A nice option is to add a few slices of smoked sausage.

What a great celebration of autumn.