Category Archives: foraging for wild edibles

Close Doesn’t Count With Mushrooms

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Ever since I went morel hunting, I have been bitten by the mushroom hunting bug. There are so many things I love about it. I love walking in the woods. I love the treasure hunt aspect of it. I love looking so carefully at nature that you notice things you never would have from a mountain bike. I love photographing the amazing variety of shapes and colors. And of course I love eating mushrooms.

The last one is a bit problematic because I am still soaking wet behind the ears. The only mushroom I am able to identify with certainty is a morel. I have a great book which concentrates on a few easily identifiable delicious mushrooms (See my reading list). Every time I go out into the woods I hope to find some of them.

This weekend I was so determined to find some of these choice edibles that I was practically willing the mushrooms I found to be the ones I wanted them to be. That is not a very smart thing to do with mushrooms. Here are some examples:

Chicken mushrooms. They are bright orange mushrooms that grow up the sides of trees like shelves. They are so bright that you wouldn’t be able to miss them. I was so excited when I found this one! You can see the top and the bottom of the same mushroom.

Turns out this is a Ling Chih (Ganoderma lucidum). Here is what a chicken mushroom looks like for comparison.
Chicken Mushroom Chicken Mushroom

I was also on the lookout for oyster mushrooms, which look like this.
Oyster mushrooms at the Mushroom Tunnel, Mittagong
What I thought were oysters at first turned out not to be. These have hexagonal shapes under the caps, not the straight gills that true oysters have.

My heart almost stopped when I saw these guys. Chanterelles!!!

Holy cow. We were having friends over for dinner the next night and I was already dreaming of the possible recipes I could make with them. Neil asked me to double check with my mushroom group (New York Mycological Society). I posted photos on their facebook page and within 30 minutes got an answer. Yes, they were chanterelles. No, they weren’t good to eat. In fact 1/4 of the people who eat them get upset stomachs. I was so disappointed. This is what the tasty kind look like.
Chanterelles

And now looking at my photos I think I’ve come to a sickening realization. I think these guys are……..

baby oyster mushrooms! Gah.

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Endless Morels

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After getting hit hard with morel fever, I started to wonder about something. Perhaps you’ve heard of endless summer, where surfers travel around the globe chasing summer. I started to wonder if you could do that with morels. I figured that the Berkshires were a few weeks behind us here in NYC weather-wise, so the morels would probably be still coming up when ours were done.

I couldn’t go the weekend I thought they would be best, but we all went up Memorial Day weekend. I joined the Berkshire Mycological Society’s hike that Sunday and sure enough there were morels! Most of them were past their prime, but we still managed to find enough to make a delicious morel scrambled egg breakfast the next morning.

This group is much smaller than the one here, and in fact only one member went that day. My mother-in-law and I felt as though we had a personal guided tour. I am definitely going to join them again when I’m up visiting.

I’ll post photos of the mushrooms I found up there on that hike. I’m just trying to identify some of them, which I’m not great at.

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More Morel Hunting

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I admit it. I have morel fever. This past Saturday I went by myself to go morel hunting with the New York Mycological Society. We went to the same place as last week. It was another gorgeous day, and very peaceful not having a bored, hungry kid to appease.

I found 2 morels and many things that had nothing to do with morels. I saw an oriole, which was gorgeous and a deer bounding across the path in front of me. The deer bones I found, I jokingly (sort of) refer to as the bones of the last mushroom hunter who told others about this prime morel picking spot. When I showed the bones to my daughter, she asked me if I was going to put them into the soup I was making. She was not joking.

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Hunting Morels

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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.

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Foraging for Wild Ramps

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A couple of weekends ago, we went up to my in-laws in the Berkshires to celebrate Passover. It was still a little cold and wet to go on a big hike, so my mother-in-law took me down their road to a spot where loads of wild ramps grow. We dug some up to transplant in both of our yards, and used some in the braised brisket they made that evening.

If you are unfamiliar with ramps, they are considered a wild leek. They are very strongly flavored, and make a great addition to many recipes. To me they are more of a cross between scallions and a garlic. Last year my in-laws made ramp butter, which was delicious and the ramp flavor was amazingly strong.

Ramps came back into the spotlight a few years ago thanks to Martha Stewart writing about them. Since then, you can sometimes find them in restaurants specializing in local ingredients. They were over-harvested in many areas, so aren’t too common, but when you find an area where they grow, they are abundant. The stems have a red tint to them and the whole plant has a decidedly oniony smell. Once the leaves have grown about 6″, you can dig them up and use the bulb as well. The ones we dug up weren’t quite that size, so the bulb isn’t fully developed yet.

This is the time to look for them. Here’s an article (without photos!) that helps you identify them. As with any foraging, please harvest responsibly. Don’t dig up all the plants! Leave some to regenerate for future generations.

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