i hope you eat good food, grow beautiful things, and have more love than you know what to do with.
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 …
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 these super fresh crabs. Kani miso, also known as crab tomalley, crab brains, or crab guts is the hepatopancreas of the animal, and is often thrown away in western cuisine. If you’ve ever opened up an intact streamed or boiled crab/lobster, the yellowish green paste is the much coveted kani miso.
Being someone who absolutely loves the slightly sweet, creamy, with a touch of bitterness that enhances the flavor of the ocean it brings, I couldn’t waste it while picking out the meat.
Kani miso, which is popular in Japan, is traditionally grilled in the shell, with a little sake and some scallions to bring out the full flavor. Here, I didn’t grill it because I threw away the shells before realizing what I wanted to do with them, and served it with scorched crispy rice. I also put some of the crab salad I made with the meat over it (but it’s really unnecessary.) Instead of scallions, I used minced shiso, but I’m sure scallions would have been amazing too.
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 …
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 of the ground. I collected about 2 pounds of them along with a handful of chanterelles. At first I was put off by the sickly sweet smell they were giving off–while some claim they smell like apricots, I would amend that description to “fruity chlorine”. I dried the larger ones in my dehydrator and kept the small ones for fresh use.
Black trumpets are an extremely easy to identify mushroom, with no toxic look alikes (although Satan’s Urn looks somewhat similar, it is bowl shaped with the edges curling in, instead of a trumpet flaring out.) They are also called, rather unappetizingly, “trumpet of the dead” due to the fact that there is some folklore surrounding them being trumpets played by the dead and buried. Their scientific name is kinder, Craterellus cornucopioides–cornucopia also known as the horn of plenty in Greek mythology which provides whatever food or drink requested of it.
I completely understand the fanaticism (and high price) of them now that I’ve made a simple cream sauce–they are said to take on truffle-like notes, but I would argue that they mimic truffles well enough that some people might even be confused.
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. 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 …
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 been wanting to cut down the oaks in my front lawn because other than dropping large quantities of acorns, leaves, and tree sperm which basically means a lot of yardwork without any reward, I didn’t think they provided anything as far as an edible landscape went–I wanted space, lots of it, to put in more fruit trees, berry bushes, and other edibles and they were in the way. I’ve been wanting to cut them down since I moved in, but now I’m glad I didn’t have the finances or time to because they’ve been hiding something amazing in their root network underground: Bolete mushrooms.
The prized porcini mushrooms are part of the boletus group–with strong mushroom flavor, almost bordering on truffle-like, there’s no surprise that it fetches a hefty price in the culinary market. The boletes I get on my lawn are also very fragrant, and I could understand why they’re considered choice mushrooms for even the experienced mushroom hunter.
Unlike other mushrooms, the collective boletus mushrooms have pores instead of gills, and therefore are quite easy to identify as part of that group. Not all boletus are edible though, and a few are toxic enough to warrant exercising caution. I stay away from any, and I mean any that bruises blue/slate and any that have red or orange pores/spores.
One of the main issues with boletes is that maggots love them, and any of the bigger ones will have been infested by the time you get to them. Nothing is worse than picking up a beautiful bolete only to have it collapse into a mass of tiny wiggling grubs. Some people shrug and say it’s extra protein, but I’m not that hard up for them that I would eat them. Once I realized I had them on my lawn, I do periodic sweeps throughout the day to beat the maggots and collect them as soon as they pop up out of the ground. This means many of them are small, but if I’m not using them immediately, I freeze them just in case any eggs had been laid in their stems–the maggots seem to work from the bottom up and even if you think you collected one maggot free, if kept longer than a few hours, there might be unwelcomed guests munching down on them. You can usually tell if it’s been infested by maggots just by the feel of them–if they feel spongy, you’ll inevitably open them up to find a network of tunnels throughout them, and if you follow the tunnels you’ll find the perpetrators happily digging in. If they’re firm with very little give, you’ve got a good one!
The one issue I find with mushrooms of this sort is that they all call for rich and creamy carb heavy recipes–while they do wonderfully in pasta, risotto, arancini, julienne, polenta, cream stews, I do wish there was something more I could create. Alas, my waistline will suffer as I try and discover other ways to play with them…
Anyway, the moral of this story is that even something that seems like a nuisance (my oak trees in this case) could actually be a blessing in disguise. I’m hoping that they’ll provide much in the years to come.
My sister (follow her on IG @cibopathy) came over today to help make sense of the boletes popping up on my front lawn. We decided to do a ravioli because she was classically trained in Italian cooking and could teach me how to make pasta …