i hope you eat good food, grow beautiful things, and have more love than you know what to do with.
I’m an absolute fiend for uni (sea urchin roe) but the creamy, briney, full of ocean flavor disappears far too quickly when I eat it sushi or sashimi style. As a pasta sauce, I can savor it for longer and feel full, rather than regretting …
You all knew this one was coming–one can’t find a windfall of maitake and not make tempura with it. Maitake mushrooms, once what moisture was within it evaporates during the frying process, holds the crunch of the panko very well. It also retains its texture …
Fall is here and that means maitake mushrooms are out in full force! I finally crossed it off the bucket list of mushrooms that I wanted to find and eat this week when I came across several clusters nestled at the base of an oak on our way to pick up some propane for a family dinner at my brother-in-law’s.
Even before finding one, I had been thinking up recipes for when I finally (hopefully) did since the mushroom hunting subreddit I’m a part of were full of them. This one was always at the top of the list.
The miso garlic marinade and the citrus scallion sauce were two flavors that I had desperately wanted to recreate from our honeymoon in Japan. A tiny yakiniku (Japanese barbecue) shop nestled in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo haunted my dreams for years, a flavor I couldn’t mimic due to having paid not enough attention to the ingredients, and all the attention to enjoying the flavor.
This marinade, if you’re doing it with meat, should be used with a well marbled, fatty piece of beef, but it’s also perfect for the fronds of the maitake mushroom.
Maitake, interestingly enough, seems to lack the strong mushroom flavor that its polypore cousins like chicken-of-the-woods does, it’s taste much more delicate to work with. My original idea of using it for pasta therefore will most likely be scrapped since I had expected a much deeper, earthier profile in line with portabello or boletes, but instead it’s closer to a young oyster or some nice chanterelles.
Crab season is at its height here on Long Island, and the kids and I caught quite a few blue claws at the local docks. While I often love them plain with just a little butter and lemon, I wanted to do something special with …
I’m getting my bathroom renovated and the construction company is comprised of a group of hard working Polish immigrants and I’ve been giving them bags of produce to take home from my garden, where my tomatoes have exploded and I haven’t been able to keep …
On my bucket list of mushrooms to find, I knocked off chanterelles this year. I only have oysters and maitake left. I found the chanterelles quite by accident, when we went to my mother-in-laws for a swim in her pool, and again when I decided to take my kids to the local park. They were brightly colored under the shade of oaks, and I took home close to 5 pounds. It looks like August is the season in the northeast for these prized mushrooms.
I don’t know how anyone could mistaken the false gills of the chanterelles, because they certainly are very different from true gills of both the false chants and the toxic jack-o-lanterns.
Their distinctly fruity chlorine smell is also hard to mistaken. While lots of people claim they smell like apricots, I can’t get away from the smell of stone fruits mixed with bleach. It’s not a pleasant smell to me when they’re raw, but once cooked, it disappears and the result is a delicate mushroom with a wonderful texture, not overpowering the way boletes can sometimes be.
We went over to my mother-in-laws for a swim and I took a short walk through her woodsy backyard. Had it not been for my little daughter who excitedly shouted she found mushrooms, I would have completely missed the mass of black trumpets growing out …
I was getting a bit overwhelmed with the amount of mushrooms I had collected that were sitting in the freezer. I had about 2 pounds of various boletes and five pounds of trimmed chicken of the woods. A julienne seemed to be a great way …
Warning: This post contains descriptions of processing live backyard quail for consumption.Â
I hadn’t imagined I was going to be making this post any time soon, and rather believed it would have been much later in the year (or even the next) as my quail reach the end of their lifespan. However, yesterday one of my remaining two quails had escaped their cage, and when I put it back, the one that hadn’t ended up aggressively trying to cannibalize it, unbeknownst to me. I woke up this morning to the poor thing bleeding and struggling, so after a long internal debate, decided to process both since if I were to try and raise another batch this year, I wouldn’t have a free cage to do so if I kept the uninjured one.
While I had processed two of my ducks this winter due to them being badly frost-bitten, and have been fishing for the better part of this year, for some reason I just couldn’t do it with the quail. Using the knife on them terrified me so I went back inside and announced to my husband that I was instead planning on letting them go in the woods behind my house since they’re good for tick control, despite knowing the uncomfortable truth that they will, eventually, be eaten by a predator.
My husband chose instead to look up ways to process quail that did not involve using sharp objects, and found that either helium, or an air rifle into the head would suffice. He had an air rifle, and with me holding the quail, we put them down together.
The rest of the process, compared to ducks, was easy and clean. I scalded the bodies in boiling water and the feathers came off quickly. Gutting them was a little tricky because the body cavity is much smaller, but they were eventually done.
I decided to roast them and pair with a mushroom cream made with the boletes I collected from my backyard.
Eating them was a little tricky as the meat was fresh and these weren’t young birds, so they were a little firmer than I expected. I also didn’t allow them to pass rigor and instead cooked them immediately, but perhaps a brining process would make them much more tender, or should I choose to cook them so fresh, a long braise might do better.
However, the flavor was delicious and the hesitation at possibly raising more for protein consumption disappeared out the window. I also served it with some leftover polenta, blistered tomatoes, and sauteed kale. This is where the boletes truly shine as an intensely fragrant and mushroom-y cream sauce.
Ingredients for the Quail
Ingredients for Wild Mushroom Cream
Disclaimer: The number 1 rule of foraging–don’t eat anything you’re not 200% sure in identification. If you can’t be sure, it might as well be fatally toxic. I’ll get into how I identified these but make sure you do your own research as well. I’ve …