Here’s my in-between season/end of Winter dish for this year: a goat shoulder rubbed with wild herbs, braised until tender, then served with it’s broth and a few different winter vegetables, finished with the first nettle tips of the year. I discussed the reason I like to make things like this at the end of…
Soup
Ischnoderma Resinosum Broth
Ischnoderma resinosum, the underused polypore mushroom with a certain beefy qaulity to them and lots of trim that could go into a great stock. A while back one of my friends from the local mycological society mentioned making broth from them, which sounded like a great way to use all their trim. I made sure…
Dried Morel Bisque
It was Spring 2016 at The Salt Cellar. The restaurant was slow and the outlook was grim. Even so, I tried to stay focused on keeping things as seasonal as possible, changing the menu to engage the cooks and help keep morale up. When morel season came around, I knew I couldn’t afford to buy…
Baby Bok Choy In Lactarius Broth With Quail Eggs
Here’s a recipe I created to use dried Lactarius salmoneus, donated to the Cascade Mycological Society for their cookbook. When powdered and made into a broth, you’d be hard pressed to say it isn’t chicken stock. From my experience, different dried Lactarius resembling deliciosus, rubrilactus, and sanguifluus will give similar results. The recipe is designed…
Black Trumpet-Peacock Dumplings in Broth, With Sweet Corn and Amaranth
When I was butchering my peacock, I knew that working with the thighs and legs would probably be the easy part. The bird was over four years old so the breasts, even with the skin on would be temper mental and challenging to cook well. Poultry meat from an older bird is going to be…
Dryad Saddle Ramen
It was a bad year for morels for me. There’s a couple kids speaking an Eastern European language that raid the patch in the morning, looking for the”smorchki”. If having children with 1000 generations of mushroom hunting in their veins picking my favorite patch wasn’t bad enough, there’s a groundskeeper that’s found that patch too…
Winter Watercress
Midwest winters can be long and cold. There’s something to be said for them though, since the absence of the growing season makes you value it more. When Spring comes around, the first green vegetable tastes that much sweeter. Last year, just when I thought winter couldn’t get any colder my friends at Bubbling Spring…
Black Trumpet-Shell Pea Soup, With Purslane
The black trumpets are out now. After I found the first flush of the year, I remembered some frustration I had working with them a while back. I was playing with a big batch of them, testing out a creamy trumpet soup recipe for a cookout I was making an appearance at. It was going…
Bison-Black Barley Stew, With Fried Chicken Mushrooms
When I brought my first fried chicken mushrooms home from the coop, after the basic “fry in pan with butter until brown and add salt” method, this is what I made, It’s simple, and a good example of my style of cooking: interesting, high quality ingredients, cooked with classical technique. I remembered my foraging buddy…
Matsutake Ramen
They have a smell and taste like nothing else. They’re matsutake; one of the most interesting things I’ve cooked with. They have a flavor that’s difficult to describe. Other mushrooms like Boletes, and their cousins Leccinums, Suillus, and Tylopilus, all have a sort of taste/aroma, and you could make other comparisons with chanterelles, trumpets, and…
Northern Pike Dumplings in Yellowfoot Chanterelle Consomme
Here’s a refined, elegant recipe for using nothern pike and yellowfoot chanterelles together. The Lyon region of France is famous for a recipe using pike made into fish mousse dumplings, called quenelles de brochet. Since pike is filled with tiny bones, fileting it out to be boneless results in very thin pieces of fish that…
Lobster Mushroom-Entoloma Manhattan Clam Chowder
Lobster mushrooms are a joy to work with in the kitchen. I have cooked many varieties of mushrooms, and have plenty of favorites, but there’s just something awesome about lobsters. They have what you could describe as a “mushroomy” flavor, but there is something more, something oceanic, it’s subtle, but it’s there. Their texture sets…
Sweet and Sour Venison-Honey Mushroom Soup
Hot and sour soup! Is it Asian food? Nope. Asian cuisine is not the only one to take advantage of the awesome combination of sweet and sour. There is another locale that values the combo of sweet and sour, and it’s Eastern Europe. Just thinking about a bowl of sour, sweet, meaty soup makes my…