Mushrooms

It’s that time of year again.

Yep, that’s me all stinky, sweaty, and dirty, with a whole pile of fresh-harvested wild mushrooms (Thadd’s never forgiven me for that haul, which I proudly say he’s never equaled). Unfortunately, that was my biggest haul ever, by a lot. In addition to the giant puffballs, I also harvested something like 25 lbs. of hen-of-the-woods. Both are yummy, and both freeze like a dream. And, I collected both in MI, not VA.

Yes, you read that right: something MI has VA does not. Or, if it does, I can’t find them. We found normal puffballs last year, but not giants. And, no hen-of-the-woods. What we have found every year are these beauties:

Common chanterelles. Yum.  We’ve harvested a good many, but nothing like the shear poundage of the MI haul. Now, these are more delicate mushrooms, considered more gourmet by many. But, I tend to put them on par with the hen-of-the-woods. And above them both I put the chicken mushroom (also called sulphur mushroom). I don’t have any pictures of those–I am not sure why, actually–but they’re yummy. They taste like chicken! No, really, I mean it.  Not in the “here, try this live toad–I swear it tastes just like chicken!” kind of way, either.

So,  the mushrooms should be back, starting about now. Chicken mushrooms pop in late spring here, and we qualify. I’ve been so busy I’ve stopped hunting wild foods, and I need to start again. Mushrooms, berries, wild onions and lettuces, pawpaws, nuts…there’s so much tasty goodness out there to be had. I need to get back into the woods. I miss it. A lot. It keeps me sane, and I am a little nuts right now with the busy.

This is a new priority for me. Or rather, a renewed priority.

Happy Birthday Berries!

Many of you know I was on hiatus for the last several weeks due to travel, and some of you know I had a birthday while I was gone. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to spend it with Thadd; but, upon my return home, he gave me one of the coolest birthday gifts ever:

Fresh-picked wild blueberries and strawberries.  It was one of the best gifts I’d ever gotten. Not many people would go to so much trouble to get something for their sweetheart (their foodie, wild-foods obsessed sweetheart!!). This morning I topped off my steel cut oats with half the berries, and the other half topped my lunch yogurt. Decadent. Delicious. Sweeter because they were picked with love.

Best. Stroganoff. Ever

I don’t have any pictures of the stroganoff, as we couldn’t wait that long to dig in, but it was made with these:

We got about 5.5lbs of Chicken o’the Woods mushrooms last weekend, and when MJ mentioned she’d seen a recipe for Venison and Chicken Mushroom stroganoof, I think I actually started drooling. A short trip to the grocer and a few hours of thawing out last year’s venison (thanks again to my brother for the wonderful loins and steaks!) later, I was ready to whip something up.

I varied from the recipe a bit, and I also added some shitakes (we’re growing our own for next year!); but, I left in the brandy for the cream sauce.  It is a measure of how much I love UC and my friends that the sauce made it to the table at all. Served over whole wheat pasta and sided with spicy zucchini, it was an amazing dinner if I do say so myself. We’re doing this again very, very soon. And very, very often.

Chestnut Bourbon Butter

Last fall, I stocked up on chestnuts when they were in season. Hours of roasting and shucking later, I was left with something like 10 lbs. Aside from the holidays when I make Chestnut stuffing, I haven’t used them since. This is tragic, and I’ve made a promise to myself to start finding uses for them. There’ll be a soup next week, but yesterday I decided to at least get a start by making a nut butter.

I realize it doesn’t look like mcuh, but it is all that and a bag of chips, without the trans fat. I added some bourbon (because we are sans brandy at the moment)  to deepen the flavor, a bit of Tahitian Vanilla Powder, and then reduced it in the crock pot for several hours. I can’t wait to put this on the banana bread we’re making tonight!

The Market News

The camera is still broken, but I did figure out how to get my webcam to take stills. Forgive the really crappy quality.

Yes, all that is ours. And, that’s not all of it. Included above: grape tomatoes from AntiSEEDant, squash and some peppers from the Nelke Farm, plums and peaches from a local orchard, honey from a local apiary (I am totally forgetting the name at the moment, sorry). Below: heirloom melons from Roundabout Farms.

These are from the Nelke’s also. Amazing for saucing, they’re called “Linguisa,” and contain very little water but a whole lot of flavor. We got 20 pounds, and are in the middle of saucing them now. Mrs. Nelke also gave us her wonderful saucing secret!

These “scratch-and-dent” red peppers are also from Roundabout, seen here roasted and ready for peeling. They’ve got bright, rich, sweet flavors that compliment almost anything, but especially cheese!

And, last but not least, and not at all from the market:

Chicken mushrooms. With Chanetrelle season over, these are our current favorites. They grown in easily-harvetsable abundance on dead tree stumps, making themselves very easy to find with their bright orange and yellow flesh. Cut up and cooked (we saute’ them), they taste a lot like slightly sweet chicken, and have a very similar flavor. These are just a few from today, I am hoping to collect more in the next few weeks.

In other news, I plan on going to Richmond on the 11th to take part in the VICFA effort to stop NAIS for goats and sheep. If you’ll be there, let me know and maybe we can meet up!

There is more regarding the restaurant, the prepared meals, etc.; but, being so busy makes it difficult to keep up with it here. Check back soon for more updates!

Stuffed Pasta and Amazing Salad

First, it looks like a camera may happen in the relatively near future, so keep checking. I miss pictures, but thanks for all of you who are sticking with me through the Food Porn dry spell!

Last night’s dinner was spectacular: Jumbo pasta shells stuffed with ricotta, spices, heirloom tomatoes, and garlic, topped with a vodka sauce and chicken-of-the-woods mushrooms. We had planned to use UC’s homemade sauce, but he forgot and put all of in the freezer earlier in the day. Thank goodness for TJ’s Organic! Served with a salad of mixed local, organic greens, fresh & unpasteurized chevre, and bacon-wrapped figs, and a side of fresh, homemade ciabatta. The figs were the first of the season here, and the season is so short we pretty much gorge on them for these few short weeks. In good news, it was also a very inexpensive meal that gave us plenty of leftovers for lunch today.

The dinner was simple, beautiful, and scrumptious. I am pretty sure that if I can get a camera before figs go out of season, I’m going to make this whole meal again just for the sake of having pictures.

Where Did the Frugal Go?

My weekly grocery and meal plan frugal posts have been missing. This is because, simply, I have been missing. I was gone for the better part of July, and then had family visiting until just yesterday, which unfortunately left no time for blogging.

You can expect those posts to start up again next week. This week is playing catch-up from all the time I haven’t been living as I normally do: grocery shopping, house cleaning, car stuff, business stuff…the list is endless, really.

I ate a lot of things I normally don’t during this hiatus, and my body is really starting to rebel. Don’t get me wrong, the foods was spectacular; but, a month of it wasn’t necessarily the best thing for me. So, starting this coming Monday, I’ll be off processed sugars totally again, and cutting severely down on “white” foods, such as potatoes, white rice, etc. Normally, we don’t eat a lot of those types of foods anyway, but when traveling so extensively without kitchen access, they become pretty difficult to avoid.

We were able to do a meal plan this week, for the first time in over a month, and while I can’t list all the groceries and prices (because I haven’t done the shopping yet), I can tell you what’s On The Menu:

-Tonight is local HH Farms spicy Italian saugage & lentil soup (made in the crock pot). Served with homemade cornbread & local honey.

-Friday. BLTs, on UC’s homemade, whole-grain bread! It’s so nice to have bread again. The tomatoes are local from Waterpenny Farms. The bacon isn’t local this time, because we’re out and didn’t get a chance to order more, but the lettuce is also from one of my producers.

-Saturday. Fish (TBD) with quinoa risotto &  fresh vegetables. This is market day, so while we have a plan for the general meal, we usually keep it general enough to insert whatever looks best to us at the time.

-Sunday. Baked stuffed shells with vodka sauce, served with homemade ciabatta. This is our baking day, and we do pretty much everything we can to maximize the use of the oven. Stuffed shells are a great way for us to use up leftovers, like small bit of meat and veggies that didn’t get turned into lunches. Just run them through the meat grinder, mix with cheese, stuff into shells, cover with sauce, and bake. I use a variety, depending on went into the grinder, but it almost always includes ricotta or cream cheese. If things work out right, it’ll be cheese I made myself. The sauce will be homemade, as we’re putting up a decent bit of it again this year from scratch-and-dents from a few of the farmers I know.

-Monday. Spicy orange stir fry over lemon-scented brown rice. This is a fantastic way for us to use up any delicate veggies, such as squash, before they go bad. We’ll also be using some freshly made tofu from the Twin Oaks Commune here in VA. This is the best tofu I’ve ever had, made from bean to bar (so to speak) right on the commune. As far as I have been able to investigate, I should be able to have this tofu without interference to my  thyroid medication. Since I love tofu, this makes me very, very happy. And, it allows me to support a great local business and way of life. Also, at $2/lb, it’s hard to beat.

-Tuesday. Beef and barley stew, with homemade bread. Pannill’s Gate produces the best grass-fed beef I’ve had thus far, and we’re buying a good bit from them these days. I was lucky enough to spend some time on the farm with Patty, one of the owners, and got to take a serious look at their operation. They’re one of the cleanest I’ve ever seen. Their cows are happy and healthy, and the farm does what it says it does: 100% pastured, grass-fed beef, no hormones, no antibiotics. Beyond organic. I’d give you the website, but they’re still working on it. In the meantime, if you’d like to talk with them about their beef, just email me and I’ll get you their contact information.

And, that’s where we left off. We’ll do more planning on Saturday after the market and our trip to SNP to help clear a blow down.

This week, we’re hoping to gather some more Chicken of the Woods mushrooms. We got about 4 lbs. last week, and they’re just fantastic. Unless it rains sometime in the near future, though, I am not holding out much hope. We’ll be cooking down more tomatoes, of course, for sauce. Baking day will include: ciabatta, sandwich bread, roasted garlic, The Best Oatmeal and Raisin Cookies In the History of the World, So Hippy it Hurts muffins, and possibly some other things.

It’ll be a busy week, but I am really looking forward to it.

No Clever Title, Just a Lot of Mushrooms

Chanetrelle season is here, and I went out scouring some local woods last week. UC and I collected about 3/4 lb of cynnabar chanetrelles one day. They’re small, so this is actually pretty good. The following day, I went out and garnered 3 lbs. of “common chanetrelles,” which are considered some of the best edibles anywhere.

Above: Three pounds of common and cynnabar chanetrelles (2.75 lbs or so was the common, which is far larger and has better flavor, but isn’t nearly as vibrant). Below: The largest common chanetrelle I found on this hunt.

Above: The perfect chanetrelle trumpet. The shape is gorgeous, and the color was a yolk-yellow. I did find two white mushrooms that were even bigger that I am fairly sure were a white variety of chanetrelle, but since I couldn’t 100% positively ID them because they’re only briefly mentioned in one of our two books, they were tossed instead of eaten. Below: Cynnabar chanetrelles, rinsed and trimmed.

So, what did we do with all of these lovely mushrooms? Well, some were quick-cooked and frozen. The rest were used for dinner the following night. Above: Heritage varieties of turnips and beets, ready for trimming. Below: Blue potatoes. I love these for their creamy texture, and also for the vibrant color that sticks with them through baking (though not so much through boiling). All of these are from local farms.

The beets, turnips, potatoes, and some local onions  were laid into a bed (pictured above) for the chicken, which is pictured below. The chicken (pasture raised, organic, from Double H farms) was rubbed with Amish butter, then sprinkled with paprika, hickory sea salt, fresh cracked pepper, and rosemary. Mushrooms were laid in the bottom bed, and arranged on top.

I unfortunately don’t have a good picture of the finished product because it got too dark in the house to get a decent shot; but, trust me when I say it was really, really tasty. The remainder of the chicken is being used tonight for chicken fajitas, along with fresh local bell peppers. Dessert will be a layered parfait of Greek yogurt and fresh, local heritage peaches that just came into season. They’re so full of flavor!

Below, for those that haven’t visited us yet, is a picture of one wall of our kitchen. To the left is a salvaged farm window, which we use to write out our weekly menu, grocery lists, notes to each other, and anything else food or kitchen related that strikes our fancy. It’s also where I leave UC 2-dimensional flowers once in a while, as you can see here (he brings me real wildflowers a lot, so these are often representations of what he’s given to me). The plaque above it is an Aztec calendar, which makes far more sense in a kitchen once you’ve seen me de-bone a chicken and smash the bones for stock, I guess. The little white door you see is a built-in ironing board! I’ve mentioned we have a historic apartment, and this is one of those odd little quirks. We use it as a cooling rack. In the midst of the various utensils (including my favorite cleaver) you see a garlic braid UC finished a couple weeks back. Stellar, isn’t it? Below that is his family bread mixing bowl, which is sitting on my great grandmother’s cupboard.

Some day soon, I’ll post more kitchen pics. We have, I think, made the most of our space and are quite proud of how it’s turned out. We’re comfortable in the kitchen we’ve created together, and it says a lot about who we are.

Fresh, Fresh, Fresh

It’s been a while since I’ve posted dinner pictures, in large part because I’ve been gone a lot these last few weeks. This isn’t the most artistic of my photos, but it’s worth posting for the flavors anyway:

I prefer to roast fish in parchment, but I was out, and foil works almost as well. Underneath all the toppings is a nice slab of salmon; but, what you see here are fresh-harvested mushrooms from our hike earlier in the day, onion, bay leaf, white wine, butter, and lemon. This technique for cooking fish is pretty much fool-proof. The fish turns out moist and flavorful every single time.

This is the complete dinner: the fish dish from above, served with beer-battered eggplant and fingerling gold & baby blue potatoes, both from a local farm. I roasted the potatoes with Herbs de Provence and smoked sea salt, and the earthy scents blended with the mushroom-tomato fish as well as the tastes did. It was fantastic!

Wild Blackberries

The wild blackberries are finally ripe–it feels like I’ve been waiting for weeks–and I spent an hour or so on Friday on the first picking.

As a surprise for my SO, I made a fresh, light, simple desert:

Wild blackberries topped with rose-infused cream. Garnished with friend cinnamon-sugar English muffins and orange mint leaves.

I love summer