On Weather and Mushrooms

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It rained last night. Alas, Seattle didn’t break its record for longest stretch without precip—51 days in the summer of 1951—but we came close at 48 days. Let the mushrooms rejoice.

A professional forager I know likes to stake out contrarian positions on just about every aspect of his profession. Rain, or lack thereof, is one of his favorite topics. When it comes to fungi, he says temperature is more important than moisture for most of the edible species.

This is a nuanced argument, so stay with me here. He concedes that moisture is important for volume, but it doesn’t affect the timing as much as most recreational mushroom hunters believe. Yes, there are individual species that won’t fruit without a timely rain (take a bow, fall mountain porcini), but while many hunters wait for their beloved precipitation, their patches are right on schedule, or at least quality patches in good habitats are on schedule. Marginal patches will always be adversely affected by any number of poor conditions.

The bottom line, he says, is that weather in the Pacific Northwest is more consistent than most people think, despite the usual claims of oddball this-and-that. “We get rain in June and our Septembers are usually nice.” It rarely rains in August and November is always wet.

He proved his theory by taking me to a lobster mushroom patch at the end of August, just when Seattlites started getting an inkling that this dry spell was making a run for the record books. Despite the parched conditions, the lobsters looked prosperous—not as abundant as in some years, but large, bug-free, and delicious. (We also picked white chanterelles, which I’ll post about another day.)

I wrote about lobster mushrooms in my September column for Seattle Magazine. Every season they rise a little more in my estimation, and my own personal appreciation seems to be in parallel with the larger culinary community because you see them on more and more restaurant menus year after year—and their value in the marketplace continues to grow.

Pan-seared Scallops with Lobster Mushrooms, Lobster Sauce & Indian Spices

To make this harvest season dish with its colors of late summer and early fall, plate a trio of pan-seared scallops over a bed of roasted vegetables and fungi—in this case, cubed butternut squash, sliced leeks, and diced lobster mushrooms—and punch it up with a drizzle of lobster sauce—that is, sauce made from the crustacean. With their hint of the sea, I like pairing lobster mushrooms with seafood.

I made a simple lobster sauce with lobster stock I had in the freezer. As a cup of the stock warmed in a pot, I made a quick roux with two tablespoons of melted butter and two tablespoons of flour, whisking until the roux began to darken to a nice golden color. Then I stirred in the stock until it was saucy. This made enough sauce for two. I roasted the squash, leeks, and mushrooms with olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper and a healthy sprinkling of garam masala, baking at 400 degrees until the edges of the leeks and squash browned lightly. A scattering of chopped fresh cilantro completed the dish.

Trout Cakes

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ONE DAY RILEY brought home a rainbow of about thirteen inches and we decided to see how big a meal we could make of it. I suggested Trout Cakes. Most of my family has feasted on my Crab Cakes recipe at one time or another, and this was no different. It’s quick and easy and can be modified to taste. Trout Cakes love a bin of leftover veggies.

1 trout, cleaned
1/2 onion, diced
1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1 egg
1 dollop mayo
1 dollop mustard
1 handful fresh parsley, chopped
breadcrumbs
lemon juice
olive oil
butter
seasoning, such as Old Bay

1. Brush trout all over with olive oil, place on foil in a roasting pan, and broil until barely cooked through. The meat should separate easily from backbone and skin yet still be very tender and moist. Make sure to fetch out all bones. Set meat aside.

2. Saute diced onion and red pepper in butter. Remove to large bowl. Mix together with the trout meat, mayo, mustard, egg, breadcrumbs, parsley, and a squeeze of lemon. Add seasoning and spice to taste.

3. Form into patties or balls or whatever, and fry in butter until cakes are lightly browned on the outside.

Depending on how much filler you add, you can stretch a single pan-sized trout a  long way. We ended up getting three hockey puck-sized cakes out of the first half of the batch before refrigerating it for later. The second half yielded more than a dozen mini cakes that the adults ate as an appetizer that night with a little sriracha sauce dabbed on top.

 

Mushroom Hunting in China and Eastern Tibet

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I met a self-proclaimed globetrotter at a barbecue the other day who told me that in a lifetime of traveling he’d never been to the Far East. That’s funny, I said to him, because I just got back from China. He wasn’t impressed. “The Chinese can have it,” he said sourly. “It’s their century anyway.”

The old codger may be right about the 21st century being stamped with Chinese characters, though I’m at a loss to explain how a so-called “lifetime of traveling” translates into such a narrow world view. Maybe if George W. Bush had spent more time on foreign soil—rather than extolling his own provincialism—he might not have made such a mess of things in the White House. There’s one way to gain a better understanding of the world and its people: by crossing borders.

My recent trip took me to southwestern China and the Tibetan Plateau. The lens through which I glimpsed these places was fungi.  Mushroom season is in full swing in the monsoon-soaked highlands and I wanted to see for myself a mushroom hunting scene that has been described as one of the busiest anywhere, with economic implications that stretch far and wide. Daniel Winkler, a member of the Puget Sound Mycological Society and proprietor of Mushroaming, was my cheerful, indefatigable tour guide (besides an encyclopedic knowledge of local custom and natural history, the guy speaks enough Tibetan to hang out with nomadic yak herders).

You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that I survived adventures this July to fill a book—or  at least a lengthy essay. Much of it I’m still trying to process. China is big, jam-packed with people, and not a little overwhelming. I’ve got work ahead to bring into focus my thousands of photos, hours of audio/video, and copious notes. In the meantime, allow me to share a little of the itinerary and some accompanying images.

The trip started in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, where the region’s infatuation with everything fungal was on display, at a price. Local pharmacies showed off wild medicinals such as reishi (pictured above) and Cordyceps sinensis, the caterpillar fungus. Should you seek these time-honored curatives, be prepared to open your wallet. One member of our party paid 480 rmb (about $75 US) for a dozen of the desiccated larvae of the ghost moth with their fungal parasites (called yartsa gunbu in Tibetan, with a reputation for restoring the humors, enhancing sexual prowess, and even producing Olympic Gold Medalists)—and she got a deal!

Mushrooms are widely eaten as food in the Far East, too. Restaurants in big cities and small towns alike routinely include both cultivated and wild varieties on their menus. One of the best meals of the trip was at this tiny restaurant (above) near Ya’an on the road to Kangding, where we dined on wood-ear and oyster mushrooms cooked to order by a wok-master and his wife. One of the many fun (and different) things about eating in China is seeing all the meat and produce on display in the restaurant’s glass-cased cooler; reading the menu for most of us westerners is an impossibility but one can always point.

Our first day out of Chengdu we followed rivers that I’d never heard of, rivers that, to the naked eye, would seem to dwarf the Skagit or even the Sacramento. The Red Basin is famous as the bread-basket of China, and it’s easy to see why when you start counting the major water courses that flow into it, including the 2,000-year-old irrigation diversion at Dujiangyan. There’s an unbelievable amount of water pouring out of mountains that seem to go on forever, especially during monsoon season.

We gained steady elevation, finally topping out at 8,400 feet in Kangding, a smallish city by Chinese standards with about 100,000 souls at the confluence of the Tar and Chen river gorges. Despite its size, Kangding boasted more wild mushroom dealers than I’ve ever seen in one place. Matsutake commanded the highest price, at 80 to 100 rmb per pound for #1 and #2 buttons, while the local varieties of Caesar’s amanita (Amanita hemibapha) and king bolete (Boletus sp.) were going for as much as 25 rmb for prime specimens, such as these amanita eggs below.

Other species for sale included the Himalayan gypsy (Cortinarius emodensis, below); hawk’s wing (Sarcodon sp., below); Leccinum versipelle; Catathelasma imperialis; various boletes, russulas, and chanterelles; and a Tricholoma similar to man-on-horseback.

One night we taste-tested the gypsy side by side with the mystery Tricholoma (below). The latter was favored by some, though I must say I preferred the gypsy for both taste and texture and will be looking for this mushroom more in the future. The Chinese are known for their nose-to-tail eating habits, and this catholic taste spills over into their use of fungi. Species that I don’t usually associate with the marketplace in the U.S. (e.g. Catathelasma imperialis, various russulas, and hawk’s wings) are routinely sold and eaten in China. This is in keeping with the agricultural strategy; virtually every square inch of arable land is under cultivation. With 1.4 billion inhabitants, even a nation as geographically large as China must continually think about food production.

A few days (and hard miles) later, while our drivers played cards, we investigated a likely slice of matsutake habitat in the oak forests above Yajiang with the help of a young Tibetan and his aunt (pictured below).

Fresh divots in the forest floor told the story: we were too late. Matsutake is intensively hunted on the Tibetan Plateau and represents a significant source of income for many Tibetans. The only species more important is the caterpillar fungus. Later we came upon some successful hunters in the woods. As in the U.S. and elsewhere, the pressure to find matsutake leads to a market overflowing with tiny buttons (called peanuts in the Pacific Northwest). This is compounded by the Japanese preference for unopened caps. If the pickers allowed the mushrooms to grow even a little bit, they’d make more money, but competition is so stiff that the buttons are exhumed as soon as they’re spotted. Even a seasoned matsutake hunter from North America would find the level of competition fierce. On this particular day we ran into pickers everywhere, many of them charging up and down the rough mountain roads on motorcycles.

While waiting for a landslide to be cleared—one of the many monsoon-induced road closures that would plague our journey—we met a matsutake buyer who couldn’t contain himself. Though he spoke no English, he must have understood the gist of our conversation as we all waited impatiently beside the muddy jeep track. He grabbed hold of my sleeve and ushered me back to his minivan. As he yanked open the sliding door, I imagined jack-booted authorities jumping out to arrest me, but instead I found myself staring at a carload of mostly #1 matsutake buttons, maybe 500 pounds in all.

Our high point in terms of elevation was the town of Lithang, birthplace of two Dalai Lamas. At 4,014 meters (or more than 13,000 feet above sea level), it’s one of the highest towns in the world, though it wasn’t a high point for morale. Sleep and appetite suffered in the thin air. Outside the tourist town of Yading we caught a miraculous glimpse of Mt. Chenresig, the sacred Buddhist peak of compassion (6,032 meters), normally shrouded in cloud cover.

The drive from Daocheng to Shangri-la in Yunnan Province passed through miles of awe-inspiring territory. We came across a guy selling a basketful of matsutake out in the middle of nowhere. (Or, more likely, he was waiting for his usual buyer to motor by.) This was a signal to keep our eyes peeled, and sure enough, we rounded a bend and saw a mushroom camp in the distance.

According to the people running the makeshift local store, about forty pickers plus their families had set up the camp in the past week. Some were still moving in.

The temporary settlement, with its simple tents constructed from tarps and wooden stringers cut on site, reminded me of the matsutake camp near Chemult, Oregon. There was a lot of activity as the inhabitants collected wood, shored up their domiciles with brush, and laid in supplies.

Unfortunately there was no time to linger. We had to press on to Shangri-la, a dingy city in Yunnan Province that has appropriated the famous name from Lost Horizon for itself. Yunnan is well known for its wild mushroom trade. Not surprisingly, Shangri-la had a corner of real estate devoted to the buying and selling of precious fungi.

Over the course of the trip, our group had a chance to sample many species of local edible mushrooms that we found along the way, including boletes, blewetts, a beautiful sulfur shelf, and others. We brought them to little family restaurants where there was never a question as to whether the mushrooms were safe to eat. The people know their mushrooms. Only once did a cook remind us that the responsibility was all ours.

Though our trip was built around the foraging and commerce of mushrooms, we also spent welcome time identifying mountain flora, visiting towns along the route, and exploring Buddhist monasteries. Outside Shangri-la I had one last opportunity to hunt mushrooms in China before flying back to Chengdu—on the grounds of a monastery where, among a roving band of pigs, chickens, and goats, I found a pair of  perfect Amanita hemibapha eggs and a beautiful Amanita from the vaginata group in the shadow of Tibetan prayer flags, a fitting end to an exciting and educational mushroom hunt.

Dockweed Dolmas

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I LOVE DOLMAS, those miraculous pouches of gustatory goodness. Traditional dolmas use steamed grape leaves to wrap the other ingredients

Dolmas are great for using up leftovers. And if you don’t happen to have grape leaves on hand, go outside and pick some large dock leaves and give them a quick blanching. Dock is a common weed just about everywhere, and very nutritious. You’ve seen it before. Genus Rumex. Lots of different species, such as curly dock and broad-leaved dock.

Roll up the leaves with rice, fresh herbs, spices, maybe some chopped nuts or fruit, sometimes meat, whatever you have.

 

1 dozen large dock
2 – 3 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for drizzling
1/2 yellow onion, diced
2 – 3 cloves garlic, diced
2 cups cooked rice
1 large lemon, juiced
1 large handful mint & parsley, chopped
salt and pepper

1. Blanche dock leaves in boiling water, one or two at a time, for 30 seconds. Remove to paper towels.

2. In a skillet over medium heat, Sweat onions and garlic in olive oil.

3. Add rice to skillet, stirring. Lower heat. Squeeze large lemon, about 1/4 cup juice, and add to skillet. Add herbs and any other chopped ingredients such as dried fruit, nuts, or leftover meat. Season with salt and pepper, plus more olive oil if necessary. Stir well and remove from heat.

4. Wrap dock leaves with rice mixture. Use burrito technique, folding over two spoonfuls of rice and tucking corners before rolling up.

5. Arrange dolmas on plate. Drizzle with olive oil and a sprinkling of course sea salt. 

Save Bristol Bay

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Now is the time to stand up for salmon, grizzly bears, the 10,000-year-old cultures of Native Alaskans, and one of North America’s signature ecosystems.

Please, if you enjoy this blog and what it means to savor our wild places, take a moment to add your name to the many who are trying to save Bristol Bay and stop Pebble Mine.

The proposed mine would be in the headwaters of the greatest salmon-producing watershed in the world, a place of unparalleled natural value and unbroken ecological processes. The rivers that empty into Bristol Bay, Alaska, nurture more salmon than anywhere else on Earth. All five species of Pacific salmon spawn in the system, as well as trout and char. Bears, moose, caribou, and a host of other large mammals thrive here. It’s a landscape of stunning beauty.

Ten billion tons of toxic mine tailings are not compatible with this ecosystem.

Tailings dams bigger than Grand Coulee Dam in the Bristol Bay headwaters, an active seismic zone, are not compatible with this ecosystem.

The EPA recently released its draft assessment, suggesting that environmental degradation, should the mine proceed, is likely, even imminent. The EPA has the authority under 404(c) of the Clean Water Act to put a stop to this nonsense. Pebble Mine supporters are on the ropes. It’s time to knock them out for good. Tell the EPA and your elected officials NO PEBBLE MINE. Time is running out for public input. This is the final week to let your voice be heard.

For more information:

In late May I attended the first public hearing on the issue, held in Seattle. The room was packed, and then the overflow room was packed. In all, I counted more than 400 people in attendance, and according to this summary, more than 80 percent of the speakers supported the EPA and its draft assessment. (More than 90% in the Bristol Bay regional hearings were in support.)

The comment period (2 minutes per person) included testimonies from Native American subsistence fishermen, commercial fishermen from Washington State and Alaska, local businesses and tour operators, and those who simply love our last wild places and want to protect them. The few speakers in favor of the mine could only summon feeble arguments based on speculative profits that don’t take into account the endless years of publicly-funded cleanup associated with the usual mega-mine boondoggles.

It’s time to say NO to greed, environmental devastation, and bowing down at the material altar. Sign this petition to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and U.S. President Barack Obama. If you’re an angler, you can sign this Trout Unlimited petition and let your voice be heard. Haven’t you had enough of these business-as-usual scams already?

Photo at top: Ben Knight

Dept. of Horn-tooting

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of introducing national NPR correspondent Martin Kaste to the woods—and all the possibilities for nourishment that await within. The segment was part of a week-long series devoted to “West Coast Innovators.”Short radio interviews can be tricky, but I think Martin did an excellent job of capturing the many levels of awareness that go into foraging, from the sheer visceral pleasure of it to the culinary to the cautionary.

Listen to my NPR interview:

The following week, while in the Cascades hunting spring porcini, I took a break on the edge of cell range to speak with James Beard Award-winning food writer and personality Anthony Dias Blue. Listen to our conversation on “Blue Lifestyle” (starts around 18 minute mark).

Strawberry Shortcake with Elderflower Whipped Cream

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THESE JAUNTY Independence Day colors seem appropriate for a July Fourth post—with a dash of green added to the red, white, and blue because we all know that true patriots are environmentalists trying to conserve the nation’s resources and wild places. Right?

Make your favorite strawberry shortcake and then take it up a notch with elderflower whipped cream. Just immerse a dozen or so flowerheads in a bowl with a pint or two of heavy cream, either overnight or all day. Make sure you remove as much of the stem as possible, since most of the elderberry tree is toxic. Cover with plastic wrap. The cream should be suitably floral after several hours of infusion. Strain (you’ll need to give the soggy flowers a good squeeze), add a spoonful of sugar, and whip just before serving.

Spring Kings: Another Season, Another Lesson

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It’s getting a little late in the season to talk about spring kings, but it seems that every year I learn a little bit more about these tantalizing members of the bolete family that are so emblematic of the Kingdom of Fungi in general. For instance, even though it only received species designation in 2008, Boletus rex-veris has been picked and eaten by Italian-Americans for a hundred years. You can read the many spring porcini posts on this blog—from my first post to my experiments with freezing buttons to taxonomic clarity—as a record of my own progress.

Much of my understanding about how to cook and care for the the “little pigs” has been won through trial and error. There just isn’t an operating manuel. As you might recall, I started “field dressing” my porcini a couple years ago in an effort to keep them clean and to combat the bugs that are as boletivoracious as us. Boletus rex-veris, in contrast to B. edulis, does much of its growing underground, so it can be quite a dirty mushroom. Dirt and duff-covered mushrooms piled together in a basket or bucket will share their dirt like STDs, making for a difficult cleaning proposition at home, particularly with the pores under the cap. Wherever I happen to find them, I clean them up and check for insect infestations, taking precautions to cover up the scene of the capture when I’m finished.

Field dressing consists of trimming the stem of any dirt, cleaning the cap as thoroughly as possible, and finally slicing the mushroom in half to check for worms. Even seemingly pristine #1 buttons can have fly larvae in them that will make a mess in no time. If I see any bug activity (as in the image at right and a closeup below, showing the culprit), I slice it out with my knife. This often takes care of localized infestations and saves a mushroom that would otherwise be ruined before dinnertime.

And don’t be fooled. Bolete fly larvae can riddle a mushroom with their hungry tunneling in the time that it takes to drive your haul home from the mountains. As they warm up, the larvae become more active. Unless you crank your air conditioner, the temperature in your car will cause the bugs to stir. This isn’t too much of a problem provided you don’t dilly-dally along the way—and you get the mushrooms in the refrigerator asap.

Sometimes I’ll camp in the woods and spread my mushroom hunting over a couple days or more. Usually, when multiple species are fruiting at the height of the spring season, I’ll try to do my morel hunting at the beginning and save my porcini hunting for last. A load of porcini hanging around camp unrefrigerated is an invitation to disaster. A couple weeks ago I came home with several pounds of #1 and #2 buttons. It was cold and drizzly in Seattle and I was exhausted, so I left my basket of mushrooms on the front stoop overnight. Bad call. Even temps in the low-40’s aren’t cool enough. Plus, humidity is a killer. About half the load was beyond repair by the next day. Even a cold fridge doesn’t completely stop the worms in their tracks; it just slows them down (though I suspect a really cold fridge can prevent additional larvae from hatching).

I’ve been paying close attention to a recent batch. A few mushrooms that got field dressed and looked absolutely spotless before the drive home ended up having some noticeable tunneling within three hours of picking. Others that still looked perfect got sliced in half again (i.e. quartered) in my kitchen. This revealed minor bug activity that required immediate action. Finally, even mushrooms that passed with flying colors required checking after a day or two in the fridge, and some of these showed minor infestation. The point is, if you want to pick and eat porcini and not cook up a panful of maggots, you need to be vigilant.

The bolete below has the appearance of a #1 button. It was firm and didn’t show any signs of infestation when I trimmed the stem. I decided to keep it whole. After a week in the fridge, this is what it looked like. Look closely and you’ll see that the worms attacked via the cap, not the stem. If I had cut the mushroom in half when I picked it, I might have been able to isolate the infestation and save it.

If this is all too much for some folks, who don’t even want to think about extra protein in their food…well, mushroom hunting probably isn’t your cup of beef.

P.S. If you’re in British Columbia, I’d like to know whether you find B. rex-veris, and if so, how far north.

Porcini Bap

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IN 1998 I SPENT six months working in the UK, living in a flat in the dingy London suburb Slough (rhymes with cow) made famous by The Office (and, before that, by the poet laureate John Betjeman).

 

I watched—along with everyone else—BBC episodes of Delia Cooks, Ready Steady Cook, Two Fat Ladies, Nigel Slater, and ate extraordinary Indian food. On Sundays I would ride my bike through the countryside, pulling over for a pint every so often and eventually stopping to sup on afternoon roast before wobbling back home.

One of my favorite quick meals was a hot vegetarian sandwich that Nigel Slater calls a Bap. He roasts the caps of large field mushrooms with garlic butter and parsley. This simple sandwich is excellent. Besides the usual portobello, try it with a haul of wild porcini mushrooms.

To make the sandwich, pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. Chop together some garlic and parsley and mix into a large dollop of softened butter with a generous sprinkling of salt. Slather each inverted mushroom cap with the garlic butter and roast for about 20 minutes. When the mushrooms are cooked and starting to brown a little at the edges, you can melt some cheese such as provolone or mozzarella as a finishing touch.

Make sure to use good bread. When it’s time to assemble the sandwich, rub the cut ends of the bread in the pan juices. Nigel says a good Bap should drip down your hands and arms when you eat it. I concur.

Thick and Creamy New England Clam Chowder

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FOR CHOWDER, I usually turn to my grandmother Mimi’s recipe, which you can find in Fat of the Land. Her specialty was Cod Chowder, a New England-style soup, which we ate every summer at their home on Cape Cod. It uses salt pork, and it’s relatively thin.

But I also understand the appeal of the sort of thick and creamy chowders that we’ve all had at the clam shack. The recipe below is one of those chowders, based on a recipe developed by the local Seattle fish ‘n’ chips house, Ivar’s. It’s a piscatarian chowder, which is to say it doesn’t rely on bacon or salt pork. A couple limits of manilas will make this chowder.


80 manila clams
1 cup white wine
3 – 4 cloves garlic, smashed
several sprigs parsley
1 1/2 cups clam meat
2 – 3 cups clam broth
2 cups peeled and diced potatoes
1 cup diced onion
1 cup diced celery
3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup flour
4 cups half and half, warmed
salt and pepper
dash red pepper flakes

1. Steam 80 manila clams in wine, garlic, and parsley. When clams have opened, strain broth through fine mesh sieve and save; you should have at least 2 cups. Remove meat from shells and roughly chop; you should have between 1 – 2 cups.

2. In a medium saucepan, simmer onions, celery, and potato in clam broth until potatoes are tender, about 20 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, in a heavy-bottomed pot, melt butter over medium heat. Slowly add flour, whisking, to make a roux. When roux is golden, slowly pour in warmed half and half while continuing to whisk. Add clam broth and vegetables and continue to stir. If chowder is still too thick, add more warm milk or half and half (or warm water, chicken stock, or clam juice).

4. Season with salt, black pepper, and red pepper. Garnish with oyster crackers. Wear your lobster bib.