Since living in the wilderness, I have gotten really excited about foraging for food, especially wild edible mushrooms. And now I am happy to report that we have eaten all of the "fool-proof four" mushrooms as identified by David Arora in his book Mushrooms Demystified. These fungi, according to Arora, are the easiest to identify.
Now, of course I've eaten Morels, as does much of the Midwest. It is practically a hunting season when these mushrooms are popping up in the woods. Everyone goes nuts for them and for good reason: they are delicious and easy to identify. The False Morel, looks very little like the actual Morel. Here's this year's take in our forest.
The second type of wild edible mushroom I tried was the Giant Puffball. As a kid, I frequently found them in the woods, but generally after they had dried up and you could go stomp on them and release a puff of magic smoke. Super cool but I had no idea you could eat them. In recent years I've heard my uncle brag that they ate them when he was growing up in Iowa. He's lived in Southern California for most of his adult life and I think he tells the Puffball story just to prove that he used to be a hick. So when I saw a few of them popping up, seemingly overnight, at The Gentry Joint, I picked them immediately and then got on the internet to find out what in the world to do with them.
They are easy to identify because they look like giant, well, puffballs! You can see them from a great distance because their near-white coloring stands out against the other colors on the forest floor.
Here I am with a big one we found.
Okay, so I put the mushroom closer to the camera to make it appear bigger than it really was but the one pictured below is truly large. It is the most gigantic one I've found to date—literally the size of a big watermelon.
What to do with a Giant Puffball, you ask? The best advise I found was to prepare it as you would an eggplant. Since I love eggplant, this was no problem. The best recipe was to prepare it like eggplant parmesan (and I bake instead of fry it so it doesn't fall apart while cooking). It was a fluffier parmesan with a melt-in-your-mouth texture. One the first batch I made, we ate the whole pan. I also found you can slice it, grill it, then top your slice like a pizza and finish it off in the oven. That was incredible (and a gluten-free recipe if that's what you're looking for).
Then, I heard someone waxing poetically about the great mushroom they'd eaten called the Chicken of the Woods, or Laetiporus sulphureus in scientific terms. So when I saw one this summer, I snatched it and tried it. It was huge. Check out this picture.
This is a really beautiful mushroom with a gorgeous orange coloring, which makes it easy to spot amidst the trees. The grow as a shelf mushroom out of dead trees. This one was coming off an oak log on the ground. The texture is more like meat, which is why it is known as the Chicken of the Woods. I simply sauteed it up the first night and we enjoyed it. With the left-overs I used a fancy recipe for lobster mushrooms, which layered it with kale mashed potatoes. It was out-of-this-world. Definitely our favorite wild mushroom so far.
Then, a few days ago we spotted a number of shaggy mushrooms springing up in my garden. After a bit of research, we found out they are called Shaggy Manes.
I picked some and cut them in half. I heard they have an extremely short shelf life so I prepared them immediately after harvesting. Here's how they looked on the cutting board.
They have a tremendous amount of moisture so it took a while to cook them down. Here are a couple of process shots.
I later read that you can drain some of that liquid off to save cooking time. Here's the final meal, served with a pumpkin pasta dish.
It was a very interesting taste: light and noodle-like, not like a button mushroom you buy in the store. I'm going to pick some more and try breading them. It is exciting to find free food just outside your door.
I hope this helps interest you in foraging wild edible mushrooms, especially the Fool-Proof Four, or the Fabulous Four as I like to call them! Be careful and check the internet or your mushroom field guide to make sure your finds are safe before eating them.
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