September 25, 2011
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Helvella crispa #mushrooms

We walked through a forest with many Helvella crispa, the white Elfin Saddle, on the ground. Too bad these are not considered to be safe edibles because there were a lot of them, more than I’ve ever seen together.

September 25, 2011
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Mushrooms in a Fairy Ring

I found a group of mushrooms this morning in a spruce forest that were growing in a large fairy ring. You can see part of the arc of the ring in the lower photo above. I thought perhaps it was a ring of Lepista irina, a tasty edible that fruits in fairy rings in woods. However, the gill attachment isn’t the same as photos of L. irina in my field guide, and also, at the best of times, I have no confidence in my ability to identify this mushroom with certainty. So…whatever that ring of mushrooms is, it’s still there in the woods for the next mushroom hound to figure out. I think in this game it’s good to know your limitations.

September 23, 2011
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Fall begins and the sky is falling

Here it is the first day of fall as we wait to see who loses the space junk lottery. Listening to the radio this morning, we were advised not to worry, the space junk was going to fall into the ocean somewhere off the coast of Chile.  The odds of getting smashed by a chunk of space debris are apparently very low indeed.

To help get our collective minds away from space debris, let’s listen to some fiddle music. Here’s a fantastic performance my brother Salvelinas flipped over to me. It’s Jean Carignan playing The Devil’s Dream. I think I could listen to this one 100 times in a row and never get tired of it.

M. Carignan was a Quebecois fiddler. He was born in 1916, and passed in 1988. In 1974 he was made a Member of the Order of Canada as “the greatest fiddler in North America”. Yet, if I poll the first 20 people I see today, I suspect few if any of them are familiar with his name.  Something is way wrong with that. Let’s celebrate this great Canadian musician!

September 22, 2011
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Anchovy Dream #salty

Somebody landed on this blog after entering “Anchovy Dream” into a search engine. Salty sure, but maybe it’s about being crammed together in a can with the lights out? I hardly think of anchovys prior to canning. I do think about trout from time to time, though.

September 21, 2011
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A damp and dark day

It seems more like October than September to me. As I look out the window, the sky is a dirty yellow, telling me the rain is not done yet. On the good news front, maybe that will trigger a fruiting of tasty edible wild mushrooms.

For me the mushroom season will be over soon. Sure there are honey mushrooms and aborted entoloma but that doesn’t get me very excited. As the leaves fall, it gets harder to find mushrooms on the ground. And when hunting season is underway, I don’t want to be in the woods with a dog who bears more than a passing resemblance to a bear. Of course I might change my tune if I find a good spot for kings or a couple good hens of the woods, and I reserve the right to do that.  Yet, as the season progresses, more and more mushroom hunters can be seen in the woods.

This season, I spent far more time in the woods than on the stream. I did enjoy a few days of fly fishing on the Delaware this year, but I ignored my old haunts on local trout streams in favour of wandering the woods with my dogs, chasing mushrooms. Could it be true that some mushrooms see you coming and pop back underground? Or does it just sometimes seem that way.

I can’t complain about the mushroom season, even if our hot July made it a poor year for chanterelles. Salvelinas and I found plenty of morels. And, there were lots of lobsters, and milk caps and puffballs and a smattering of boletes.  Now if I can end the season stumbling upon a nice fruiting of kings, I’ll be ready for the winter.

September 20, 2011
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Soup from dried wild mushrooms

Most of the regular readers of this blog know that over the past few years I’ve become a mushroom hunter. When mushrooms are fruiting well, I’ll often collect quite a number of them and then dry them in a dehydrator to eat later. From time to time I’m asked how I use these dried mushrooms. The other day I made a very tasty soup and here’s how I went about it.

I started by soaking about a cup of assorted dried mushrooms in water for half an hour to reconstitute them. My assortment consisted of lobster mushrooms, saffron milk caps, hedgehogs and two  varieties of boletes.

Then I added some good olive oil to a heavy-bottom pan, heated it up and added a chopped up onion. I let the onion cook for about 10 minutes, adding some salt along the way. Five minutes in, I added a chopped up clove of garlic. Then I removed the mushrooms from the water, chopped them up and added them to the onions and garlic. I found a piece of kielbassa in the fridge so I diced it and tossed it in as well.

If you’ve cleaned your mushrooms well before drying them, carefully removing all dirt and grit, reserve the soaking water and add it to the soup later. I chopped up and added a zucchini, and since I had some swiss chard growing in the garden, I added some chard as well, and a handful of cherry tomatoes cut in half. After a few minutes I added a litre of stock and then let the whole business simmer for another twenty minutes. When it was almost ready, I chopped up plenty of fresh oregano and parsley from the garden and tossed it in. Just before serving, I poured in a good splash of milk and stirred the whole business.

Serve it with toast or some home-made croutons and a cold ale.