I love working with truffles, so when a truffle hunter from Hungary and his friend asked me if I’d contribute to a new book on truffles they were writing by sampling Honey truffles (Mattirolomyces terfezioides) fresh from the earth, shipped direct from Hungary, I agreed (and squealed with joy). Shipping mushrooms across the pond is…
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Oven Fried Shrimp of the Woods
Fall is here, and one thing I know I can always count on are aborted entoloma / Entoloma abortivum / shrimp of the woods, no matter how bad the maitake are teasing me. If you have some, oven frying the arboreal crustaceans is a recipe you’re going to want to bookmark. As long as you…
Amanita amerirubescens
I ate my first mushroom from the Amanita amerirubescens group this year, but it wasn’t the first time I’d met them, or collected them. As many of you know, the often-avoided genus has a number of lethally poisonous mushrooms, as well as some very well known edibles in it. I first found them first 3…
Venison Breast / Brisket with Mustard and Breadcrumbs
I eat a lot of meat, but I’m not much of a hunter. I know plenty about butchery and processing animals though, so when I got my first charity deer year, one of the first cuts I knew I would take out was the breast or brisket, which I’ve never, if rarely seen people mention…
Candied Black Trumpets
Candied mushrooms? Like, with sugar?? Hard pass. Candied mushrooms are the sort of frou-frou B.S. I’d expect 15 year old me to try making, or a young cook still trying to figure out what a palette is. Honestly, I found the idea so annoying it was nearly offensive. These are mushrooms we’re talking about, I…
Wild Plum Leather (Tklapi)
Wild plums (Prunus americana) are in season, and they’re a puzzle. The flesh is rich and sweet, the perfume so deeply floral it will make your toes curl, but the skins, the skins are tough, and tannic enough to make you feel like you drank a few cups of chianti straight. The two aforementioned reasons are…
The Black Staining Polypore
A number of years ago I got an envelope in the mail, ground dried powder of Meripilus sumstinei, the black staining polypore or rooster of the woods. it the first time someone sent me mushrooms in the mail I’d never met, which, is now a pretty regular occurrence (currently I’m waiting on honey truffles to…
Simple Black Trumpet-Potato Gratin
Potatoes are a perfect partner for mushrooms since they won’t overpower them. They let the mushroom take center stage, which is exactly what I want after I spent half of the day on my hands and knees with a scissors cutting black trumpets off of the ground. One of the easiest, and tastiest things I…
Fried Milkweed Pods
Late summer is good for a lot of things. Mushrooms are here, parading around in all kinds of shapes and sizes, fruit harvests are well underway, and the getting is good. Greens plants are getting slim though. The watercress has started to come back, and is a few inches tall, but most others, unless they…
Woodchuck Stew with Garden Vegetables
The giant, beautiful gardens on the farm are home to all kinds of plants and vegetables, and they attract the attention of plenty of critters. If you have a garden that’s ever been visited by a woodchuck, you know they can be very disruptive. How I approach woodchucks is a good example of my approach…