Lake Wenatchee: Morels and Spring Kings

So this post is going up late. Late late. Three weeks late. Can't really explain why, just haven't been motivated to write. Which is a bit of a shame, because Spring King season is so short. By the time this gets up these spots will have been completely picked over and spent. Nonetheless it was still a grand day out.

Three weeks ago Meredith, our friend Andy, and I, headed over Stevens Pass to the Lake Wenatchee area. The target: Morels. We'd gone out two weeks earlier and been completely skunked. Hours of walking around forests, up and down hills. We found some nice wildflowers, lots of bear scat, and what used to be an Elk, but no mushrooms. I think most mushroom hunters would agree that Morels can be aggravating and difficult to find. Unless you are on, in which case they are everywhere you look.

They fruit in the Spring, usually in May and June, generally starting at lower elevations and moving higher as the seasons turn and the world warms up. They can be found on our side of the mountains, even in Seattle if you know where and when to look. They sometimes can be found growing on wood chips. But your best bet is the other side of the Cascades. It's drier and warmer, and the conifer forests tend to be more open-floored. They grow around rivers as well, Cle Elum is noted for that. They also like areas that have had recent wildfires, and really big burns will be blanketed with mushroomers when the time is right. Basically, to paraphrase David Arora, they grow where they damn well feel like it.

It should be mentioned that we are still very new to Morel hunting. Last year we were graduating, moving, working on theses, and so on, during May and June and we missed the season. So this was only our second morel trip, and Andy's first mushroom trip ever. We'd waited eagerly for months as Winter slowly plugged along. Watching the weather, waiting expectantly for Spring to give us a flush of fun before Summer bakes the mushrooms off until Fall. We had high hopes, little experience, and only a vague idea of where to go.

The weather was cold and crappy on this side of the mountains. We had freezing rain in the pass. But on the other side the sun broke through and the day turned warm (for May anyway), dry and breezy. But clouds on the horizon warned of thunderstorms to come.

We got lost several times. I'd never been to Lake Wenatchee before, and my GPS is not overly fond of forest roads. We accidentally took a scenic tour of Leavenworth, the quaintest Bavarian village outside a Leni Riefenstahl movie. Eventually we found the lake, then got lost again. As usual we started with a plan, but ended up just pulling over whenever anything looked promising.

The first stop was a trail to an old fire lookout on the North side of the lake. In all honesty we stopped there because we got lost and decided to stretch our legs and just dive right into the woods. Soon we were off trail, heading up a steep slope, keeping an eye out for tiny brown lumps on a brown forest floor.


Nothing. Not a thing. Despite the views and pretty flowers we were a bit dispirited and it was clear that we had to move on. So down the hill we went. Back in the car, a quick look on the GPS, and we headed over to the Eastern side of the lake, where we'd originally intended on starting anyway.

Picking a spot to stop is mostly about luck. We just pulled over on the side of the road at an open and pleasant looking forest. A couple hundred yards of valley floor gave way to a hill which went up another 600' or so. Elevation looked promising for early in the season, starting around 2000' and going up to 2600'. Doug Fir and Ponderosa Pine nicely spaced apart. Signs that it had been logged, then burned to clear the brush and allow the surviving cones to sprout. Criss-crossed by random logging roads too. Promising.

Parked the car and began to walk toward the hill. Within five minutes Meredith spotted the first mushroom. And it wasn't a morel. It was much, much more exciting.

A Spring King.

Meet Boletus rex-veris: the Spring Porcini. Until a couple years ago it was thought to be sub-species of the supremely awesome King Bolete, Boletus edulis, but it has been established as a species in its own right. We began to look around the area and started finding them left and right. Usually you could spot them breaking through the pine duff, and of course the biggest ones were the easiest to spot.

Unfortunately, Spring Kings share the common traits of all boletes. They are putrescent, meaning once picked you have to keep them cold or they turn to goo, and they are prone to larval infestation from various mushroom flies. The bigger they are, the more at risk of nastiness they are. So you have to do some immediate field dressing of any promising looking mushrooms. Cut them in half or in quarters. Look for bugs. Grimace. Trim nasty bits or toss the mushroom if it's too far gone. Better it stays there shedding spores on the forest floor than shedding worms on your counter, I say. We probably lost as many or more boletes than we kept. C'est la vie.

We wandered around for an hour or so, finding many more Kings and unfortunately discarding just as many. I am happy to say that the biggest and best was found by yours truly. But the majority were found by my companions... My Mushroom Blindness kicks in. Anyhow, the majority of the Kings were on the valley floor at around 2000 feet. Once we began to climb the hill they were gone by 2100 feet. We had still not found any morels, so we decided that we'd summit the hill and see what was up on top.

For several hundred vertical feet we found bupkis. Suddenly as Andy and I were climbing the hill, talking about the apparent lack of mushrooms, he said "Hey, isn't that a morel?"


And what a morel. The largest we found the whole day. If it was a snake it would have jumped out and bit us. In retrospect, it was good that it wasn't a snake. There are rattlesnakes on that side of the mountains.

We began to look around. Much, much more carefully this time. Soon we began to find them. Ones and twos, growing in little clusters right out in the open. Hinting that their more bashful friends were in the area, hiding just out of sight. Making you work for them.


I can't remember whether it was Andy or I that dubbed them "Stupid Mushrooms", but soon we were calling them that. Stupid, because that is how you feel when you find one, don't see any others, and then a friend finds one right smack in the middle of the spot you spent two whole minutes staring it. We went around shouting "Durrrrrrr" every time we spent a while looking at the ground, only to finally see one right there in front of us.

But the feeling, the excitement of being on a good flush is really superb. It was a nice day, we were finding mushrooms left and right, life is good.

There certainly is an art to spotting them. Here's an example of one next to it's best friend (and the mushroomer's natural enemy), the pine cone.

We wandered around the crest of the hill, finding Morels scattered throughout. Elevation was probably around 2500'. Here's a photo of the forest floor:

Not the prettiest forest, I'll admit. But it was full of tasty mushrooms, encouraged by the open floor and fairly recent burn. And this style of logging is vastly more sustainable and aesthetically pleasing than clear cutting. So it's ok in my book.

As we crested the hill it began to grow colder, and the wind picked up. Seeing the incoming clouds we decided to call it a day rather than act as lightening rods. Down we went to tally the haul.


Not bad for a day out. All told we brought in over six pounds of Spring Kings and seventy-six Morels, about a pound and a quarter. Once home we got to down to rough cleaning and trimming. Cleaned off the worst parts, and then stuck the mushrooms in the fridge.

Kings don't last very long while fresh. So we ended up drying about four pounds of the Kings with a friend's borrowed dehydrator, which came out to about four ounces of dried porcinis. Yeah, mushrooms are mostly water.

We cooked a variety of things with the mushrooms. Frankly the Kings don't need much other than some oil or butter and a hot pan, but I'll cover all that in future posts. My laptop's running out of juice.

Finally, I'm not a professional mycologist, but I am a lawyer so here's the Disclaimer. Get yourself a good guidebook, or talk to some friends who know what they're doing, before you ever eat a mushroom you have found. I recommend that you join a local mycology society. Don't eat unidentified mushrooms. Don't eat questionably identified mushrooms. When in doubt, toss it out. There are several things that look like Boletes and Morels that can make you sick, so learn to identify them. There are bold mushroom hunters and there are old mushroom hunters, but there are no old bold mushroom hunters.

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Oven Roasted Clams with Pale Ale, Pancetta, and Chanterelles

Ugh, getting behind on posts I had planned. Truth be told recently I haven't been feeling like writing, or shaving, or getting out of bed. Well, only one way to get back on the horse!

Most of the things I end up cooking follow this Order of Operations:

1. What have I got? What is going to go bad if I don't use it? Can I make something without going to the store?
   
2. What do I feel like eating? What haven't I made in a while? Do I have time or energy to cook something elaborate?
3. Consult the cookbook rack for inspiration if I don't already have something in mind, or consult the books for their take on what I've already got in mind.
4. Return to beginning, reassess. Cooking is an iterative process.
   

Oven Roasted Clams with Pale Ale, Pancetta, and Chanterelles

So this one started with me having some pancetta. And some tomatoes that were on their way out (the last of the tomatoes, picked as the rain and cold came in.) Feeling like shellfish tonight. Ok, recipes in Kathy Casey's Northwest Table and Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen for oven roasted clams, looks good. Casey uses beer and tomatoes, I've got my Fresh Hop Pale Ale on tap and the tomatoes. Douglas uses chanterelles and pancetta, I've got some partly cooked and frozen chanties from earlier Summer foraging, and the tail end of my pancetta. We can make this work.

No clams. No problem. Fresh Fish Co. is a 5 minute walk away. Run out, 2lbs Penn Cove Clams. All alive and healthy. They will not sell you a bad fish. Or um, mollusk.

Get to work.

• 4 slices pancetta, maybe 2 oz, chopped
• olive oil
• 1/3-1/2 lb. Chanterelles, torn or sliced. I froze mine in quart tupperwares, they range between these weights so I just popped one out of the freezer.
• 2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced.
• 2lbs clams. Washed, scrubbed, still alive, etc.
• Red pepper flakes
• Tomatoes. About a cup. I used a mix of cherry and heirloom, sliced in half or diced, big tomatoes seeded.
• Rosemary. A teaspoon chopped and one sprig. Hooray for the rosemary bush.
  
• 1/2 a lemon. Quartered. Or, um, eigthed I guess.
• 1/4 cup Pale Ale. I used my own Fresh Hop Pale.
• 2 T butter, cut into small chunks.

Preheat the oven to 500. Toss the clams, some pepper flakes, the tomatoes, and minced rosemary in a bowl. In a large oven-proof-skillet-type-pan cook the pancetta till browned. Then add a couple tablespoons of olive oil, the chanterelles and garlic and cook for a minute or two (they'll finish in the oven). Add the clams and tomatoes, stir around a bit. Squeeze the lemon pieces over the clams and toss them in. Pour the beer in. Scatter the bits of butter around over the top. Stick the Rosemary in the middle somewhere.

Pop it in the oven for 15 minutes or so until the clams are all open. Remove, stir a bit, remove any unopened clams. Serve with crusty bread for the awesome sauce.

All told this recipe is super easy, serves four as a light dinner, is five star delicious, and took maybe a half hour total. And because I grew, made or foraged most of the ingredients it cost maybe $12, most of which was the clams. And you can bet I'll make this next time I go clamming...

Leftovers. We had half leftover, being just the two of us. The next night I took the clams out of their shells, and discarded the lemons, shells and rosemary sprig. Cooked up some penne, heated the clam pan, added the pasta, added two beaten eggs and some parmesan. Stirred until thickened and delicious. 15 minutes. Lemony, creamy but also clammy and mushroomy. Very good for a day-old shellfish dish.

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Matsutakes

This one has been on the back burner for a couple weeks as Matsutake (Pine Mushroom, Trichloma magnivelare) season came and went. These mushrooms are seriously big business in Japan, where they can fetch ridiculous prices. A single good mushroom there can run upwards of $30, and I saw them for sale here at Uwajimaya last week for $50 a pound. Fortunately, we can forage them. Or at least someone can. I didn't find any this year... In the NW they grow under Doug Firs, and the other various pines and firs we have in our conifer forests. I also think they like the volcanic soil more near St. Helens or Rainier and we didn't hunt there this year.

But at least I had the chance to purchase a few from Foraged and Found at the Farmer's Market in mid-October. And such a deal, the grade A matsis (meaning the veil was still fully intact) were $25 a pound and the grade B (just fine, but due to damaged veils less aesthetically pleasing, apparently) were only $15. So I picked up three B's.

The first hurdle is cleaning them. The tops can be brushed off, but the base is thoroughly crustified with dirt and must be trimmed. Then you can slice them to your heart's content. Many people prefer to tear them by hand, arguing that the uneven cuts increase the dissemination of their flavor into whatever you are cooking.

And these guys are potent. Just smell: pine and cinnamon, and yes, maybe a hint of feet. They are usually sold separately, not just because of their price, but because one is usually enough to flavor most dishes. So here are two dishes I made with these three mushrooms.

Matsutake Gohan

This is a traditional Japanese use for the mushroom. It's basically steamed rice, infused with the matsi aromas and flavor while the rice cooks. There are a couple recipes online, and Lang Cook made one last year. So I started here.

• Wash 2 cups of short-grain rice in the pot of a rice cooker a couple times until the water runs clear. Then add 2 cups water and let sit a half hour.
  
• I added a packet of kokumotsu (15 grain type). It's a collection of grains and beans that comes in little packets you add before steaming the rice to make it more interesting and nutritious.
  
• Add a diced carrot, a shredded matsi, and 4 T soy sauce and 4 T sake, and let 'er rip.
  
• When cooked, mix everything up and let it sit a bit then serve.
  

The Pros: this dish is fast, pretty cheap, a one-pot cleanup, and easy.

The Cons: it's kind of meh. It needs something. The matsutake is there, but it's very subtle, and I'm not sure whether it's supposed to be more pronounced (use two mushrooms?) or whether it's just an instance of Japanese tastes being a bit more subtle than my jaded and burned-out pallet. I had planned on adding some dashi (bonito-flake and seaweed stock) but I lazed out and I now think it needs it. I went simple on this seemingly simple dish, but next time dashi is going in for certain. And frankly, shiitakes would work just fine in this dish, and they are whole lot cheaper.

Matsutakes with Clams and Leeks

From Christina Choi's excellent 2009 Wild Foods Calendar.
This is how matsutakes are done!

• 4 T butter
• 1 leek, white and light green part, split, cleaned, sliced 1/4".
• 1/2 lb Matsutakes (I used my remaining two, maybe 1/3 lb.)
• 2 lbs clams, I got some Penn Cove Manillas.
• 1/2 C water
• 1 Lemon

Sauteed leek in the butter with a bit of salt until softened. Added matsis and cooked a few more minutes. Heat to full, clams in, water in, stir and cover. Turn to simmer when water boils, steam until clams are open. Add a squeeze of lemon and serve.

The matsutake flavor is subtle, but goes very well with the oceany clams. Also, the matsis and clams have nearly the same texture, which is kindof interesting. Big fan. Serve with bread to soak up the delicious clam/matsutake broth!

Poking around in my copy of Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen I noticed that he has a recipe for a matsutake broth, Matsutake Dashi, that I might try next year. Otherwise these guys are being filed under "Good, but $50 good? Nope."

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Brewday: Chanterelle Belgian Golden Ale

Last week I finally got around to brewing my Chanterelle mushroom beer. Wine and Cider occupied most of my time and carboys for October, so it took a while to free one up. The recipe is from Randy Mosher's excellent Radical Brewing. I decided to follow it more or less to the letter, because Chanterelle beer sounds weird and if he says it's good the way he makes it, well then I'll follow his lead. Small changes, for example, include using a bit of Magnum hops to make up for the fact that I use whole hops, not pellets. Fairly uneventful brewday. Gravity suffered a bit again, efficiency maybe 70%. Grrr.

Chanterelle Beer

5.25 gallon, all grain
Est. OG: 1.074, Actual OG: 1.070
Est. FG: 1.019, Actual probably lower
ABV: 7% - 7.5%
90 minute boil

Grain bill:

• 9 1/2 lbs US 2-Row
• 2 lbs Maris Otter
• 1 1/2 lbs Munich
• 1 1/2 lbs Wheat Malt
• 1/2 lb Melanoidin malt

The Mash: Originally I had a triple decoction mash scheduled, (113, 144, 156) but on the day of the brew I was feeling a bit tired and lazy, so I dropped it down to a single decoction. Mashed in at 122 for a protein rest of about 35 minutes. Pulled a decoction of 2 1/4 gallons and raised it (stirring always!) to 154 for a rest of about 10 minutes. Then heated it (really stirring now!) to boiling for about 5 minutes. Back into the mash for a hopefull rest at 154 for a half hour, adjusting with boiling/cold water to reach it. Iodine test showed full conversion at 30 minutes, so a final infusion of about 2 gallons of boiling water brought the whole mash to 168 for knockout.

The Boil:

• 1/2 oz Czech Saaz (3% AA) at 90 minutes
• 1/4 oz Magnum (14% AA) at 90 minutes
• 1 1/2 oz Saaz at 30
• 1 1/2 oz Saaz at 10
• 1/2 oz Cascade at flame out for aroma
  

No finings, it'll be cloudy.

Yeast was two packets of dry Safbrew T-58, their Strong Belgian strain. Rehydrated with a bit of GoFerm in some warm water. Took off like a rocket, blowoff tube came in very handy. It's fermenting upstairs, covered with a blanket. The house is 65 during the day, so it should stay in a nice range. The basement is hanging around 62 and Belgian yeasts sometimes get sluggish that low. Some people ferment their Belgians at crazy high temps, but I have always had better luck in the high 60's. I'll rack it in a day or two, then bottle with the chanterelle extract in another week or so.

The Chanterelle Extract:

Chanterelles have a lovely mushroomy apricoty smell when fresh. To capture the essence of Chanterelle mushrooms you use vodka and make a sort of Schnapps. I used a half pound of chanterelles from the load that we foraged in the Olympics, chopped fine, and covered in Tito's vodka in a mason jar for two weeks. Then I strained it through a couple layers of cheesecloth. It smells and tastes like mushroomy vodka. It's weird. But it's going in at bottling and we'll see how it all turns out.

UPDATE 12/01/09

Popped a 12oz bottle. Nice yeast cake at the bottom. Fairly well carbonated for only a week. It will no doubt pick up a bit more in the weeks to come. As for the Chanterelles. Well. It tastes like a Belgian. A good Belgian. But nothing spectacular. Which is a bit weird, the vodka was certainly mushroomy. Oh well. Tastes good. Problem will be entering it in competitions. It's not noticeably mushroomy but is noticeably delicious. But a judge might have a mushroom allergy so I can't enter it as just "Belgian Golden". Also the color is a bit muddy, I'd drop the melanoidin by half next time and make it a bit lighter.

UPDATE: Gold and BEST IN SHOW at 2010 Cascade Brewers Cup!

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Barlow Pass Mushroom Hunt / Wild Mushroom, Soft Egg, and Dandelion Green Pizza

Last weekend we headed up for another hunt in the Cascades. Our trip to Monte Cristo had been fun, but we didn't really have much of a chance to hunt for mushrooms. But they'd been there, we'd seen them in passing and there were other people obviously there on the hunt. So we went up on Saturday and did a search around the Barlow Pass area on the Mountain Loop Highway.

We began in the area around the parking lot where we'd spotted the giant bolete a month back, and wandered the woods there for a good two hours or so. There's a huge boulder there that actually forms a sort of cliff, a good 75 foot drop, which I discovered when I was trying to come back down it. Otherwise the area is pretty open, second growth Doug Firs, moss, etc. Loads of mushrooms everywhere. Loads, thousands, everywhere you look, of tiny little guys. They were quite pretty actually, but very little edible. It's been cold, and I think boletes are pretty much done there. We found a few very old ones, and a few Suillus. Did manage to find one Boletus mirabilis, that we brought back. There were a few late season Chanterelles around too.

We found these guys, which we believe are Angel's Wings, Pleurocybella porrigens. In 2004 these caused the deaths of 14 elderly people in Japan, though they're commonly collected as perfectly edible member of the Oyster Mushroom family. No poisonings have been reported in the US, but we left them there just the same.

The big find for me, and for once I was the one to find them, were two Hedgehog Mushrooms, Hydnum repandum, which we hadn't found before. These are edible and delicious, and sometimes you can find them in the markets. I think Foraged and Found had them once this Summer, and I was disappointed when they were sold out before I got there. These guys are suspected to be related to chanterelles, and have little spiky protrusions on the underside instead of gills.

Meredith found this healthy crop of Ramaria, which we think is rubripermanens. These guys are considered somewhat edible, and there was certainly a large bunch of it, but it has a laxative effect on some people and we decided that we weren't really hungry enough to play Russian Roulette with a night on the John as the stakes.

We wandered a bit more around the area but called it quits after finding nothing else for a while. So we hopped in the car intending to find another location that looked promising. Here's where we were faced with a choice, and made the wrong decision.

Barlow Pass is where the pavement ends on the highway, from there it's 27 miles of dirt road to the mountain town of Darrington. We'd never been down that way and decided to take a look. Well the road follows the Sauk River, and it's just a fancy graded version of the old wagon road from the Skagit Valley to Monte Cristo. It's reasonably well paved, some bad potholes here and there, but we made a good 20-25 mph. For almost all of the run it's bordered by river and low-lying scrub, Alders, Maples, Devil's Club. In short: not good mushrooming territory. There were some forest roads and certainly old mines there, but that will have to be another day's exploration. After a while it was pointless to turn back. So we had a scenic hour long dirt road drive to Darrington. From there we drove the rest of the highway to Arlington, and were home in a total of maybe 2 1/2 hours. Grumpy and disappointed. So I got cooking.

Wild Mushroom, Soft Egg, and Dandelion Greens Pizza

This one came out of my deep desire for a) not getting in the car again to go to the grocery store and b) pizza! The base recipe comes from Chef Gray Brooks of the Tom Douglas restaurant Serious Pie. I've not been there yet, but I do plan to go tomorrow night and I must say I'm pretty excited. The recipe is printed in the Summer 09 Beer Northwest, if you care to find a copy it's a good interview. Gray uses chanterelles and arugula, but I didn't have enough chanterelles and no arugula, so I went out back and picked some dandelion greens from my lawn instead. Boom. Bitter greens, free, ready to go, no pesticides or anything because I don't take as good care of the lawn as I probably should and, most importantly, no trip to the store.

Beer Pizza Dough

I really, really like his pizza dough recipe and it's going to become my new staple.

• 1/4 C pilsner (I just used my Oktoberfest Maerzen because it's on tap downstairs, easy to pour 1/4 C without opening a whole beer. Though I did that too...)
• 3/4 C warm water
• 1 packet yeast
• 1 T honey
• 1 t salt
• 1 1/2 T olive oil
• 3 C flour. (I used 1 C bread flour, 2 C all purpose)

Combine the beer, water, and yeast. Then in goes the honey, salt and a tablespoon of the olive oil. One cup of the flour, mix in with a big spoon. Then 1 3/4 cups more, mix for a couple minutes till mostly incorporated. Use the rest of the flour for the counter and knead the dough for 6 to 8 minutes. Use the last of the oil to coat a bowl, plop the dough down in there, roll it around and over to coat and cover with a towel to rise for 45 minutes. This will make two pizzas.

Pizza!

The recipe calls for (at least!) 1/4 cup chanterelles per pizza. I didn't have that. So I used a combo of the chanterelles, hedeghogs and the mirabilis we found. Clean em up, chop em up, toss with a little olive oil, salt and pepper and roast in the oven for 10 minutes at 350. They won't be done, just par-cooked.

Now assemble the pizza.

Preheat the oven to 500, with a pizza stone if you've got it. We do.
For one pizza you'll need:

• 1 clove garlic, chopped
• olive oil
• chile flakes
• the mushrooms
• 2 eggs (broken into separate cups, yolks intact.)
• 1 1/2 C arugula (or well washed Dandelion Greens)
• 1/4 C Parmesan
• 1 T Lemon Juice
  

I doubled this and made two pizzas, using all of the dough (and making a tasty breakfast too).

Now do as I say and not as I do... Sprinkle corn meal over the underside of a cookie sheet, then shape out your pizza, vaguely rectangular is good, or oval, and plop it on there. Drizzle a little olive oil over it, sprinkle with garlic and chile flakes. Spread the mushrooms evenly around. Now slide it off the cookie sheet onto the stone (which has also had cornmeal spread all over it).

If you're like me and like me, an idiot, you will spread the pizza on your counter, where it will then a) be impossible to slide onto the searing hot stone and b) stick like a total bastard. That's what I get for being tired and not thinking first. So my pizzas were a bit...wonky.

In goes the pizza for 4 minutes. Then, using the bottom of a ladle, make a small indent on the two ends of the pizza and pour the eggs slowly into them so they don't run everywhere. Then back into the oven for another 4-5 minutes until the egg is soft-set and the crust brown.

Take it out and slide onto a cutting board. In a bowl dress the greens with a little olive oil, salt and lemon juice. Sprinkle all but a tablespoon of the Parmesan on the pizza, then place the greens on it, then sprinkle with the rest of the Parmesan.

Serve 'er up!

How was it? Awesome. Like a Caesar Salad Pizza. The mushrooms were good but the lemon juice is a bit overpowering. More mushrooms next time! The crust is excellent. The egg quickly goos all over and makes it rich, so you don't miss the mozzarella at all. The mirabilis was edible and ok, but not my favorite mushroom. I'll do something with it alone, if I find any more this year, to see if I really do or don't like it.

Serious Pie makes a version of this pizza with guanciale, and since I'm fresh out of my own I look forward to trying it tomorrow night!

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Mushrooms: Tom Kha Soup with Chanterelles and Boletes

The mushroom fest continues. Yesterday I went for a walk down to Golden Gardens to see if I could find a madrona tree that was currently shedding its bark. No dice. (Hopefully it will be a future post, however.) But on the way I couldn't help noticing that there were mushrooms everywhere.

I've lived in Seattle for years but until I started seriously foraging mushrooms this year I never really noticed them. Now it's like I have The Sight, and I see them everywhere. Just a couple blocks walk and it's "Oh, Fairy Ring mushrooms. Yep, there's some more. And some more." Yes they're edible (and I like them) but I'm not sure what's been sprayed on that median strip. Also, this is where we walk Ase (and everyone else walks their dogs too...) I kept walking and found some small boletes popping up out of someone's alleyside. Not sure which kind. Further on, I swear there's a huge crop of Augustus popping up in another yard. Only two were past the fence line, obviously growing on the roots of a huge Doug Fir on the corner of their property. They were still late-button stage, in a day or two I'll check again (and possibly abscond with them). Further on in someone's lawn there are some large white mushrooms similar to my A. nivescens from earlier, maybe campestris (Meadow Mushroom).

I guess what I'm saying is, it's amazing that all these edible and delicious things are popping up all over the place, and the only thing that keeps people from eating them is ignorance and fear. And I think that's what I love most about foraging. It's the thrill of discovery, like an Easter Egg hunt, coupled with learning more about your environment and a hint of 'You dead yet? Nope. Ok, have some more.'

On to a recipe for a cold rainy Fall day.

Tom Kha Gai with Chanterelles and Boletes

Tom Kha is, without any doubt or reservation, my favorite soup. Maybe there is some soup made in the highlands of Papua New Guinea that I would like more, but until I try it Tom Kha reigns supreme. Normally you use chicken breast and button or straw mushrooms. Well I decided to make my recipe using a chicken thigh we had and some Chanterelles and the mystery bolete from our last expedition. The base of this recipe is from Quick and Easy Thai Cuisine Lemon Grass Cookbook. It's short, it's cheap, it has lots of pictures, and minimal ingredients or fuss. And I have not made a bad thing out of it. I have made many different recipes from many cookbooks for this soup, this is how I make it now.

• 1 can coconut milk, we like Chao Koh.
• 1/2 lb chicken, sliced thin. Easier if it's frozen a bit first.
• 5 slices of galangal. Either fresh, dried or frozen. It's a rhizome similar to ginger but essential to this soup. Ginger won't be the same. If you use fresh you can slice it and then freeze it before it all goes bad. Frozen it is almost impossible to slice without a bandsaw...
• 1 stalk of lemongrass. Cut the dry ends off, slice into 2" pieces, then bruise a bit with the back of your knife or a mallet.
• Five Kaffir lime leaves, bruised a bit too.
  
• Mix together: 3 T Fish Sauce, 3 T Lime Juice, 1 T palm sugar. (or brown sugar)
• 1/2 cup sliced mushrooms. I used Chanterelles and a bolete for this, but you could use many kinds of mushrooms. You could also skip the chicken, which would make this vegetarian (unless you're uppity about fish sauce), and increase the mushrooms. The soup would then be Tom Kha Het.
• Cilantro and "Rooster Sauce" (Sriracha, we use the one with a Rooster on it.)
  

In a pan cook the coconut milk, chicken, galangal, lemongrass, and kaffir lime leaves until the chicken is almost done. In goes the mushrooms and fish sauce/lime/sugar. Bring back to a boil a minute or two and serve. Garnish with cilantro and add burn to your heart's content with Rooster Sauce. It's really good, but it is Thai and I wouldn't use any really delicately flavored mushrooms here, they'll get spiced out. I think one of the almondy agarics would go very well with this.

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Mushroom Show / Pumpkin Gnocchi with Agaricus

Mushroom season is slowly winding down and while there is probably another month left, the peak is over. Nevertheless we have been eating a lot of mushrooms recently, and I think it would be best if I posted several separate posts about some of the last two weeks dinners rather than one huge one.

First up, we went to the Puget Sound Mycological Society (PSMS) annual Wild Mushroom Show last Sunday! And despite a pounding post-bar-passage-party headache, I had more fun than you'd think possible at a Mushroom Show. Certainly the many trays of different mushroom species was informative and interesting. I was doubly happy that each tray featured the sort of plants and habitat the particular mushrooms can be found in. I hear that the presentations were excellent (Lang Cook of Fat of the Land and Christina Choi of Foraged and Found) but I didn't make either of them, unfortunately.

Some gripes: parking. By 1:00 there were lots of people, and the dirt road they had us parking on became The Somme, with confused one-lane traffic. Also barbed wire and sporadic shell fire. OK not really. Second, the ID table.

One of the main reasons we ended up going was the Identification Table. PSMS experts will sit and identify any mushrooms you wish to bring in. Well a day or two prior Meredith had found a bunch of large white mushrooms growing on campus. Our best efforts had it nailed down (obviously) to an Agaricus. The question was which one? Some are ridiculously delicious. The A. Augustus from earlier in the Summer, for example. Some are poisonous and will make you curse the Porcelain God. So ID is important. But it's a good species, if it's edible. After all, common supermarket button mushrooms are A. bisporus. We had it narrowed down to possibly A. Campestris, but ours were growing under a large pine tree and not in an open grassy field. It didn't stain yellow quickly, or smell like benzene or anything (no A. xanthodermis), it just smelled a bit like marzipan, so we were pretty confident that it was edible but not 100% sure.

Well people brought in mushrooms to ID by the truck full. And it took us about 45 minutes to get to the table, while two people ahead of us had every mushroom in the book identified. I appreciate that you don't know much about mushrooms, and yes, I agree, they're very interesting. But seriously people, limit it to two, maybe three mushrooms and let the rest of us in.

Fortunately it took all of 10 seconds for the PSMS guys to ID ours, and announce to the crowd of onlookers (most of whom had brought inedible species in) that we'd found Agaricus Nivescens and that it was ultra-delicious. w00t! Our ID problem had merely been that Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest did not list nivescens, as there are many species of Agaricus in the NW. Looks like it's time to get an additional book!

Anyhow, we went to campus and picked the rest that were ripe. Then got them home and pondered cooking them. I had a spare pie pumpkin sitting around from the pumpkin beer, I'd only roasted three of the four. So dinner became:

Pumpkin Gnocchi with Sage and Agaricus

I made a pumpkin gnocchi recipe from a pasta book I have, which frankly was a bit of a failure and not worth the listing here. Search the net and I'm sure there's a better one. Mine was a bit vague on the amount of pumpkin and flour, and also I only had bread flour. So they were super sticky and didn't take shape very well. Also I'd never made gnocchi before and the first, mmmm, three dozen were kindof tragic. Fortunately they tasted ok, if a bit chewy. The agaricus was cleaned and sliced up, then sauteed in butter with salt, pepper, and about two tablespoons of fresh chopped sage at the end. Gnocchi was tossed with it. Actually, despite its various aesthetic and structural faults, the gnocchi were pretty good. The agaricus was deeeeeeelicious. Like an almondy button mushroom on crack.

Finally a word on the species. Wild Agarics are known to bio-accumulate heavy metals, like lead and cadmium, so don't eat too much of them. Button mushrooms are pretty much fine though, being grown indoors on fresh compost.

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Cascade Chanterelles & Circassian Chicken

Saturday we headed back up into the Cascade foothills, outside of North Bend near Snoqualmie Pass to check out the FS Road 9030 area again. Our first outing in late-August was… less than successful. Still a fun day out, but no mushrooms. This time however we had much better luck. On top of that, the Weather Gods were smiling on us, and though it was forecast to be snow-flurries as low as 3000 feet, at 2200 it was dry, sunny, and fairly cold in the ample shade. So with hat, jacket and long-johns we went into the woods.

We started finding Chanterelles almost immediately. Most were in this size range. Unfortunately it rapidly became obvious that it has been cold in the mountains and the Chanterelles were showing signs of being on the way out. Many had the darker, mushier areas of old or partly frozen mushrooms. Not nearly as good as they were two weeks ago in the Olympic foothills. Still, there were some that were freshly up or that were protected under the undergrowth and leaf duff, so there's still some hunting left yet.

Time for an exercise. We're getting slowly but steadily better at this. In the photo to the right there is a Chanterelle "show". Can you find it?

OK, not too difficult. It's in the lower left corner. Here it is up close.

And here it is dug up. Not a bad find at all!

There were also a fair number of false Chanterelles around. These look similar from a distance but up close are easily identifiable by the gills, which are bladelike and not the sortof raised-bump-coral of chanterelle gills.

Here's the full days' haul. About 4lbs of Pacific Golden Chanterelles. Not bad for a six-hour outing. We also managed a few small boletes of various kinds, including one lone possible King Bolete (or more probably a Boletus fibrillosus). It's going into soup tonight.

If there was a downside to the day it was that, though the Weather Gods smiled, the Traffic Gods were vengeful. Some sort of charity walk (The "Walk Against Annoying Charity Walks" maybe? It's probably for Lupus or Children's Radioactive Hyper-Ebola or something. Obviously I am going to Hell.) occupied the Viaduct all the way to the Stadiums and we got a scenic tour of the Port and Sodo while looking for the onramp to I-90. Then on the way back we missed the exit to Snoqualmie (no Snoqualmie Brewery pint!). Then Issaquah Salmon Days wrecked our Issaquah Brewhouse plans (No Rogue!). Then Meredith got lost and took us back to the I-90/Viaduct mess. It was an Odyssey to get home. Complete with the part where my loyal crew were all turned into pigs. Also we escaped a giant cyclops by hiding under some sheep. Good times.

And if that made no sense to you, then like Handy from The Tick I say: "Read a book!"

And if that made no sense to you then god I am seriously out of touch. Onward with a recipe!

Circassian Chicken with Chanterelles

Credit for this one comes from a brief email exchange with Christina Choi of Foraged and Found. We were talking about using chanterelles in salads, she suggested pairing walnuts and chanterelles and I immediately thought up this recipe. Circassian Chicken is a classic Ottoman Turkish dish in which steamed chicken is covered with a walnut sauce and served cold, garnished with walnut oil. I first had it in Egypt at a restaurant in Cairo and it completely floored me. Since then I've made it every now and then at home. It's similar to other garlic + ground nuts or starch = tasty dip dishes from the region. In Greece and Cyprus for example, it's Skordalia, where it's ground walnuts (or often almonds in Cyprus) or leftover bread or potatoes mixed with lots of garlic and vinegar. Lower the garlic, lose the vinegar, pour it on chicken and you've got Circassian Chicken. So I figured why not add mushrooms? The base recipe comes from Tess Mallos' excellent The Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook.

Ingredients

• 1 whole Chicken, about 3lbs. Mine was six pounds, so I trimmed off the thigh quarters and wings and didn't use them. Gizzards and guts stayed though, personal preference.
  
• 1 onion, quartered
  
• 1 carrot, quartered
  
• 2 sprigs parsley
  
• 3 cups cold water
  
• Salt/pepper
  

Stick all ingredients in a snug pot on the stove. Heat to boiling, then down to simmer. Simmer covered for an hour and a half to two hours till chicken is cooked. Steam it, don't boil it. When done, take the chicken out, cool a bit, and take the meat off the bones. Chop meat to 2" chunks, into a bowl with a couple tablespoons of the stock, and into the fridge. Return bones and skin to pot, bring to high boil and reduce by half to make a stock of about 2 cups, adding water if necessary.

Sauce

• 3 slices stale bread, crusts removed. I didn't have any bread so I used a cup of Panko, which was probably too much.
  
• 1 ½ cups walnuts
  
• ½ t paprika
  
• 1 clove garlic
  
• ½ pound chanterelles, crappy bits chopped, appealing garnishy bits sliced for presentation. I would actually go up to a pound if I had it to do again.
  

Walnuts into the Cuisinart. Blitz fine. In goes the bread (or panko) and a little of the stock to wet it. Blitz. In goes the paprika and garlic. Blitz. Add stock and blitz till reasonably thick (but not chunky) consistency. Cook the unphotogenic chanterelle bits in some walnut oil until liquid has been released and mostly boiled off. Then into the food processor. Blitz. Salt and pepper to taste. Blitz. When you're happy with it (no big chunkies but still a thick sauce) stick it in the fridge. Cook up the rest of the pretty chanterelles in a pan with walnut oil. Cool.

Putting it together.

The hard part of this dish is plating. It is a lot like chicken salad, and has the same problem: it looks like gray vomit. So color is important here. Combine ½ t paprika with a tablespoon of walnut oil and let sit at least 10 minutes. Cook up some wild rice, long grain rice, bulgur or other grainy starch to plate on. (Or don't if this isn't going to be the whole meal, it would be great as a meze course.) I used a wild rice mix. Mix about a third of the walnut sauce with the chicken. Serve portions in a nest in the rice. Add more sauce over the top. Garnish with cooked photogenic chanterelles, pomegranate seeds, parsley, and the now red stained paprika walnut oil. This should easily serve six. The chicken is more dense than you'd think and is pretty filling. It's usually served cold, but I like it warm too. It actually has a lot in common with chicken salad and goes just as well in a sandwich.

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One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor: Monte Cristo Ghost Town and the Mystery #3 Mine

After the success of the last mine/mushroom hike we decided to head out and explore another mine and see if the boletes were up in the high Cascades. The destination was the Mystery #3 Mine outside of the abandoned mining town of Monte Cristo in the Mt. Baker National Forest.

In the 1890's the town was the center of a major gold and silver mining operation, and boasted a population of around 2,000. There was even a railroad that ran loads of ore down to Everett for processing. But apparently the financial turmoil of the times and the cost/benefit ratio of the mines worked against the town. Active mining was effectively done by WWI and by the 1930's the place was a ghost town. Even still it lived on as a summer recreation destination and is to this day. The town is on a mountain stream, which is one of several tributaries to the South Fork of the Sauk River. A few years back the road to the town, which follows the old railroad bed, was washed out. Since then it's been a four mile hike/bike to get to the town. Fortunately the place is maintained by a volunteer organization, the Monte Cristo Preservation Association. The trailhead is on the Mountain Loop Highway, outside of Granite Falls. Near Barlow Pass you'll see the gate across the road to Monte Cristo. You can park outside but need to display a pass. There's a ranger station at Verlot where you can buy one.

From the trailhead it's four miles to town. Many people were hiking and biking the trail that day. For time reasons we opted for mountain bikes. The trail is very easy. Except where it isn't. The problem is washouts, and there are several, but the only really bad one is where the Sauk washed out the bridge. Here you have to cross either on one of these logs, go around a ways, or just get your feet wet. Not really a big problem on this day, but my friend was up a few weeks back and the river was raging.

One of the goals was to look for mushrooms and see if the boletes were up yet in that part of the Cascades. Unfortunately, trying not to wipe out on the bike limited my off-trail mushroom spotting. But we did see a wide variety of mushrooms, I bet a more thorough investigation would find plenty of edibles. We did find this big monster bolete right at the parking lot. Didn't pick it (it was pretty old) but definitely a promising sign.

When we got to the town and got off the bikes we had more time to look. And boy did we find mushrooms! Everywhere. The problem was that they were Amanitas. Loads and loads of them, including this happy little Mario mushroom here. Amanita muscaria, the Fly Agaric. Really cool looking. Potentially deadly freaking poisonous. Wildly hallucinogenic. No wonder Super Mario is so weird. These guys, and their relatives (we saw some A. Smithiana), were everywhere.

I should mention that they recently did some sampling of the soil in the area and it proved to be thoroughly tainted with heavy metals, including arsenic, from all the mining. Maybe this amanita is double-deadly?

Here's another crop of amanitas. You can see that they are more mature that the button up above, and have taken a sortof olive-yellow color. The little white warts are still there. These mushrooms can range in color from the classic red to yellow-green to white even. So once again, perfect example of don't eat any mushroom unless you know exactly what it is!

As for edibles, we didn't really find much. We found some Chicken of the Woods, but since it was growing on an old cedar log it was probably L. Conifericola and we weren't too keen on eating it. We did find this Gomphus kauffmanii, a relative of the Wooly Chanterelle G. floccosus, but didn't pick it. Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest advises against eating both, though some people do, and we bow to superior knowledge.

So after 4 miles of biking we were in the town. I must admit I haven't been mountain biking in years and my butt hurt something fierce and I was exhausted. Turns out my rear brake was rubbing on my tire. Joy. But we chained up the bikes and looked around the place. Many of the buildings have fallen apart or burned down over the years but there are still a few in place. Most are in the town center but there are random shacks out in the woods all over. The coolest thing in the town center is an old railroad turntable, where the engine and cars would be rotated around for the return trip down the mountain.

It still rotates, albeit with an amazing, ear-piercing wail.

We set off on the Glacier Basin trail and went about a mile along it. Again, loads of mushrooms and some cool old buildings and mining detritus. The area used to have a large boardwalk with several stores, and a tram that ran the miners up to the mines. Oh what I would have given to have that tram still work...

We reached the bottom of a boulder field that ran up the side of the nearby mountain, Mystery Hill. Here I have to add that I was never really told the full plan for this hike by my friend, and wasn't quite prepared for the climb to come.


You see, we'd reached the hidden stairway into Mordor.

And one does not simply walk into Mordor.

One slowly and painfully spends over two hours scrambling up boulders and through brush into Mordor.

One of the problems I've had trying to take photos of the trip was to capture a good impression of the slopes and altitude involved. The mind makes far off things look 2-D, and both at the base and the top of the climb you don't really get a good idea of the elevation gain. So here's a topo map from the GPS we had. In about a quarter mile it climbs from 3300 feet to 4200. A 900 foot elevation gain. Some parts were nearly a 60 degree slope of sliding rock. I was freaking exhausted by the end. I admit I am seriously out of shape and kind of hate exercise. It's not that I hate the idea of exercise, it's just that I don't like being sweaty. Or tired. And I was currently both of those. This had been the most strenuous outing I'd been on in some time. And it was only half over.

But we made it to the top! Actually the others made it there a fair ways before me. What can I say, I obviously need a Stairmaster or something. But we sat down to the best damn sandwich ever eaten by Man and a bottle of wine we'd packed in. By this point it was actually quite pleasant out. There was a nice view. There was lots of random crap strewn around, from old mining equipment to random camping equipment. And, creepily, shoes. Several pairs of old shoes. I kept thinking: "Please don't let there be a foot inside... Please don't let there be a foot inside."

We heard a weird scuttling noise from a nearby rock pile. Turned out to be this little guy, an American Pika. Apparently they're one of those creatures whose sole defense is cuteness, because they are currently under consideration for EPA Endangered Species protection. We kept hearing their weird high pitched alarm call, and hoping that it was just us freaking them out. You see, we'd been snacking on huckleberries the whole climb up the hill and well, bears like huckleberries too.

But it was time to enter the mine! We geared up for the coming exploration. Apparently back in the 1890's this mine was a model of mining progress. They even made a scale model and toured it around the country, showcasing the future of the mining arts.

Well, it's seen better days.

To be fair, this is just one entrance to an entire interlinked mining complex. Like most mines around here it's got a steady stream running out the mouth of it. This one happened to be very orangy and muddy.

We soon found out why.

Al was the first inside. He'd heard that the mud was there, but that it was shallow and you'd be quickly past it. He'd also heard that it was waste deep and impassible. Today appeared to be the later. It was pretty deep. Probing with a conveniently abandoned tent pole indicated that it only got deeper.

It was like a whole factory of Oompa Loompas had melted.

It was horrible.

I think that's what a group of Oompa Loompas is called, a "factory". If not it should be.

No really, it wasn't that bad. We could have waded in. Waste deep in neon-orange arsenic mud. We had changes of clothes. But it was getting late and discretion is the better part of valor. Al got his entrenching tool out and cleared up the stream a bit, so at least the mine might drain a bit better. Then we headed back down the boulder field, covering in about half an hour what had taken us two hours to climb. From there it was back to town, onto the bikes and back to the car. Again, fraction of the time it took to get there. The bikes are a pain riding up, but that coast the whole way down is sweet.

It was fun. It was thoroughly exhausting. The town is cool, I'll probably go back to look for more mushrooms sometime. But it will be a cold day in Mordor before I climb Satan's Stairmaster again...

Finally, again Disclaimer. Don't be an idiot. Don't go on sweet mountain bike adventures over raging rivers. Don't eat poisonous mushrooms because Mario told you to. Don't go into abandoned mines. Use some common sense, or if you don't have any, borrow someone else's for a bit. I'm not an expert on anything posted here, just an increasingly fat bloke who needs some more exercise and has strange friends and a supportive and patient spouse.

Editor's Note: Wow, this is post #101! Crazy. A proper blogstone, and I also think I recently passed my blogoversary. Blog blog blog.

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