When I’m hunting Hen of the Woods, aborted entolomas can get passed up as I scan the trees for a white oak with a giant mushroom at it’s base. It’s a shame to pass them up since aborted entolomas are so easy to hunt and cook, but if every mushroom tasted as good as every…
Fresh Mushroom Recipes
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.
Pan Roasted Honey Mushrooms
A couple years ago I shared a wild mushroom recipe I borrowed from David Arora for cooking honey mushrooms (Armillaria mellea and others) alongside their peeled stems, which is useful when you find a bunch of honeys that have grown to have large or long stems, assuming that the bugs didn’t get to the stems…
Hen of the Woods Steaks
It was a busy Saturday night, and a little more exciting than usual since I had some friends coming in for their anniversary: the husband and wife duo who wrote and photographed the book Tasting Minnesota. I wanted to make a couple fun things for them since I knew they enjoy things like mushrooms and…
Vegetable Confit with Hedgehog Mushrooms
With the restaurant menu that changes all the time and small amounts of cooler space that might have 20 different people go in them a day, one of the most important functions of my job is the careful organization of coolers, and proper delegation to employees of what I want done with things in order…
Lobster Mushroom Pavé
Once again, lobster mushroom season has left me shocked at the amount of fungus a single patch of ground can produce. The years of wandering my patches looking for them has changed the mushrooms I tend to pick though. When I first started picking lobster mushrooms I would pick everything that wasn’t rotten. Mushrooms that…
Wild Mushroom Tartine with Purslane and Pickled Vegetables
It’s the heart of wild mushroom season in the Midwest, the boom time when you can go to your favorite patch and come home with all sorts of different types. Multiple types of chanterelles, chicken and maybe hen of the woods, Aborted Entoloma, Lactifluus, lobster mushrooms, various black trumpets, coral mushrooms/Ramaria, Hygrophorus, all manner of…
Matsutake Mushrooms Baked in Parchment
Wild mushrooms vary so much in their texture, flavor and identities but one thing that’s constant if you really want to taste who they are is the old “less is more” philosophy. This is really true with matsutake, their funky, piney smell doesn’t want to obey the normal mushroom flavor pairings, I don’t like them…
Summer Vegetable Tagine, With Lobster Mushrooms
Lobster mushroooms start to fruit heavy in late summer right when gardens and vegetables are at their peak of production. I don’t have a garden, but I gather from one often, and when the squash, corn, peppers, broccoli, greens, onion, potatoes and all the other good things start to go crazy; they demand to be…
