Honey Mushroom Goulash / Gulyas has been in the works for years over here, and I’m excited to finally share it with you. It’s without a doubt, one of the best things I’ve had with them, and, it’s pretty traditional, more or less. I know I’ll get some contentious comments about my creative liberties here,…
Soup
Minestrella: Italian Stew of Many Greens
She is the Tuscan queen of weeds. Over the past year I’ve stumbled on a few recipes using wild plants that really inspired me. At the top of the list is la Minestrella, a sort of ultimate foraged greens stew found in Garfagnana (Tuscany) I stumbled on while doing armchair research on the Italian names…
Burdock Flower Stalk and Mushroom Vegetable Soup
Burdock flower stalks have an interesting, grassy flavor that has a tendency to meld into the background–it’s just not as flavor-forward as the roots. For me, the texture is really where this easily harvested part of the vegetable shines, as it’s tender and takes only a few minutes to cook, where burdock roots take digging,…
Roasted Chicken or Hen of the Woods Stock
One of the best parts about hunting mushrooms (and other things) is that, not only do you get to bear witness to the incredible volume of nature’s bounty, you get to take it home, too, and when the mushroom patch is bumpin, or when the blueberries are fruiting heavy, you’ll find yourself, at the end…
Meatball Stew with Pheasant Backs and Campion
Meatball stew with pheasant back mushrooms and campion is a dish I came up with after I’d been reading about campion, and how it, and it’s relatives (mostly Silene vulgaris and Silene inflata) are used widely in Mediterranean cooking. The recipe itself is a sort of hodge-podge of different ingredients you might see in European…
Basic Pheasant Back Broth
After morel season as we get into summer, the pheasant back / dryad saddle / Cerioporus squamosus will still be out, not in the staggering numbers we see during the height of the late spring season, but still out and plentiful. They’re not spring mushrooms though, and finding tender, succulent ones is far more difficult…
Mediterranean Dock Soup with Rice and Lemon
Do you like Greek dishes like avgolemono? Then you’ll like this recipe for dock soup with rice and lemon–they’re basically cousins. Dock, or Rumex species are legion across the United States, and, as much as I would like to tell you that I cooked with curly dock for this recipe, I can’t be exactly certain….
Watercress Soup With Carrots and Ramp Leaves
If you know watercress, you probably know watercress soup. While I enjoy the versions with cream, sometimes I might not have any around, or, I might want a lighter soup, people might be lactose-intolerant, or I might just want a change of pace. My new favorite watercress soup recipe is this simple, rustic one, scented…
Smoked Venison Shank Ramen
A smoked venison shank is an investment that pays dividends in your future. Delicious dividends. During butchery season, sometimes it can get tricky to figure out what to do with bones and oddparts (note that I don’t save venison spines for stock, but I do from lambs I butcher). One trick I’ve kept with…
Turkey Wild Rice Soup with Black Trumpets
As far as food is concerned, the main course for holidays will change here and there. One year it’s a ham for Christmas, the next year we’ll smoke a prime rib. One thing that’s constant is somewhere along the line there’s probably turkey at one of the gatherings I’ll attend, either for my girlfriend’s family…
Coral Mushrooms in Broth with Hominy and Mitsuba
Crown coral mushrooms (Artomyces pyxidatus) are, ok. People might pick them and be unimpressed when the mushrooms hit a pan, deflate, and cook down to an off-grey nothing. Crown corals will always lose a lot of volume sauteed or browned up like most people are used to cooking mushrooms, it’s just what they do. I…
Dried Lactarius Broth
Snow is on the ground, and that means it’s time to start working through the mushroom stash. The first thing in my queue was a simple broth with shrimp dumplings based on an old recipe I used to run as a deep fried fish cake appetizer. The dumplings were just for fun since I was…
Matsutake Miso Soup
I can still taste the first bowl of miso soup I ever had. It was at a higher-ish end Tepanyaki restaurant chain called Benihana, one of those places where they have a cook make the food in front of you on a grill set in the table-it’s a great place to bring dates. Before all…