Many recipes on this website are drawn from my study of wild food traditions from around the world. Sesame Baked Chicken of the Woods isn’t. The recipe is from an old family cookbook my Grandma Phyllis put together-you know, the kind of homestyle, church basement arrangement of pages held with plastic bindings. Sesame Baked Chicken…
Recipes for Fresh Wild Mushrooms
Fresh mushrooms work in two basic ways: as the main ingredient in a recipe, or as a supporting character working in the background. Here you'll find a little bit of everything.
Morel Escargot
I’ve gotten plenty of comments/request this year about what I do with big morels, you know, the giants, honkers, pigs and behemoths that come up at the end of the season. Seasoning them in a method similar to escargot is a fun treatment, and something you should try if you’re lucky enough to get a…
Morilles à la Crème (Morels with Cream)
I make all kinds of things with my morels, some of them take a bit of preparation, like roasted chicken with morels, morel quiche, or morels stuffed with morel sauce. But, when I come back fresh from a good hunt, my legs sore, and my little mushroom hunters heart excited to share the days finds…
Pheasant Back-Spring Vegetable Soup
Here’s a great recipe to celebrate some of the young growing plants of spring: a simple, brothy soup made from green garlic or wild onions, pheasant back mushrooms, a spring shoot/vegetable of your choice (I used fiddleheads and elm samaras) wild rice or another grain, and a little meat broth or whatever you have on…
White Wine Pheasant Backs
My old chef and I were out morel hunting in a new spot in Wisconsin this week, and, unfortunately, we got skunked. Thankfully there were a few old-timers on the same patch of land who hunt it every year who came up empty handed too, so I didn’t feel too bad. As is pretty common…
Crispy Gyromitra
I finally got to eat my first Gyromitra caroliniana, also known as the “Big Red”. Where I live on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin we have a number of Gyromitra that I’ve eaten, well two species to be exact (Gyromitra korfii and Gyromitra Brunnea) and they’re ok. Gyromitra caroliniana is special in a number…
Fried Yellowfoot Chanterelles
Yellowfoot chanterelles are a great, underused cousin compared to golden chanterelles and black trumpets, and while many of them are small, sometimes the ones sold out of the Pacific Northwest can be just as large, if not larger than some of the golden chanterelles and black trumpets I harvest in the Midwest. I made these…
Fermented Mushroom Pierogi
Fermented mushroom pierogi, along with a few different sauces I’ve made (dryad saddle shoyu/soy sauce) are the most delicious things I’ve made with fermented mushrooms yet. Fermented mushrooms are a concentrate, they’re not something I’m going to go and just eat out of a jar, especially if they’ve been long-fermented and have turned soft. The…
Wild Mushroom Chowder
A good, simple chowder made with wild mushrooms has been a reader request for a while here that I finally got around to posting. It comes together in just under an hour, and is a good way to use some fresh or dried wild mushrooms if you need a bowl of comfort food. A soup…
Wild Rice-Mushroom Dolmas
Stuffed grape leaves are one of Nature’s perfect foods, and stuffing them with a mushroom and natural wild rice filling is a great variation on the classic, more well-known version with lamb, known as dolmas or dolmades. Vegetarian stuffed grape leaves are nothing new, but most of the time they use a filling relying on…
Crab Stuffed Morels
Stuffed morels filled with crab meat napped with melted butter, a dusting of breadcrumbs and baked to a golden brown are a classic, and make for a great appetizer made with both fresh or dried mushrooms. With the end of winter coming, I thought it was about time I start really using up the previous…
Sesame Enoki Pancakes
As most of you know, I will make cakes and fritters out of just about anything. Wild enoki and sesame pancakes (cultivated are fine too) are a great variation on that theme, but they’re also a good example of how you can steer lots of dishes in different directions by carefully choosing your ingredients. Here’s…
Fish Sauce Pickled Enoki
I love a good mushroom pickle. If I feel like it, or if I think the species would take particularly well to it, I may go with a different flavor profile than the pickled mushroom conserve I usually make by the gallon. These enoki preserved in a pickle liquid made with fish sauce are a…