Yesterday we joined up with some members of the NY Mycological Society in Rockland County for some morel hunting. Before we started, 2 members hosted a breakfast at their nearby home. It was a lovely spread and it was nice to put some faces to names.
After breakfast, we drove in a caravan to nearby woods. At one point in time it was an apple orchard, but now it was overgrown with trees, brambles and a fair amount of poison ivy. We gave a ride to Dorota, who had gone the year before and had come home without any morels. I was trying to brace myself for similar disappointment and just enjoy the glorious, sunny day. It seemed as though conditions were good for mushrooms. Insane amount of rain followed by sun, right?
After a while, I found my first morel. It was really exciting. Neil found another one almost immediately thereafter. It’s very hard to mistake a morel with any other mushroom. There are mushrooms called false morels, which Neil also found. The false morels (seen below) don’t have hollow stems like true morels have. I found one more morel right along the path where the group had all passed. That made me really proud, because there are some real experts in the group.
False Morels
Hollow Stems of True Morels
We searched around for a while longer to no avail, so we decided to eat our picnic lunch. My friend Victoria came with her son Theo, who is Lindsay’s age. He wandered away from our picnic to play nearby. We looked up to his shriek of “MUSHROOMS!”, although we didn’t give it a whole lot of thought because he and Lindsay had shrieked with the same amount of glee at finding dandelions on our walk. However as he came running over to us, we joked that he found morels. Then when he came closer, we saw he had something largish in both hands. And, yes indeed, Theo had found a patch of morels. They must have gotten about 8. I got a couple more and Dorota got a couple.
The 2 new ones (on the right in the photo) look slightly different from the esculenta variety I found in the woods. I’ll need the help of my new mushroom friends to see what kind of morel it is. Update: they are esculentas as well.
Now I have to decide how to cook them! I think I might just stick to sautéing them in a very good butter and putting them on toast. I really want to taste their mushroom flavor without it competing with other flavors.
We found a few other types of mushrooms. Here are some photos.
