The Morels Have Returned
Mar 4th, 2009 | By | Category: Foraging, The Garden | Comments | 11 Comments |
While I am not nearly the caliber of mushroom hunter as my friend Lang is, I am dearly hoping to travel up to the Sierra foothills in the coming weeks to enjoy the fruits of all this rain we’ve been getting.
Meanwhile, I received a little present this morning: The first morel mushroom of the year. Two summers ago, Holly and I tore up our Bermuda grass-infested lawn and replaced it with wood chips. Those chips were full of morel mushroom spores, and we harvested a bunch a year ago.
Now from what I’ve heard “mulch morels” don’t always return. So every morning for the past month, as I walked out to my truck, I scanned the chips, most of which are covered in a swath of poppies and other wildflowers (they should look spectacular in a few weeks). Nothing. Until this morning, when I spotted the little tan one above, still unfolding.
I asked Holly to go out and take a picture of this little morel, and when she did she found another! Definitely a good sign.
Hopefully there will be lots of morels this year, as they are one of my all-time favorite mushrooms, and are essential to any wild game cook. My venison with morel sauce is one of my favorite springtime recipes.
What do you do with morels?
That’s great! Every so often we get much-appreciated care packages of dried morels from relatives in Washington who forage for them. How wonderful to have them growing right there in front of your house.
We used to pick them by the cooler-full when I worked as a seasonal bird biologist in the Missouri bottomlands. There was a guy from Iowa I worked with who hit a pheasant one day on his way to the study site. We breasted out the pheasant, battered it up and deep fried the breasts. Took a hanful of morels and did the same thing. Then we threw everything onto cheap, grocery store burger buns and glugged ketchup on it. I do not recommend this treatment for pheasant or morels, but the memory of that sandwich does please me greatly.
We just got another foot of snow, and won’t see morels until May, but I did make a bomber mushroom sauce this weekend. I had about a pint of cream left from last week’s milk share, so I reconstituted a few big handfuls of dried morels and dried porcini, and about half a pint of pickled oyster mushrooms from last spring (rinsed). I sauteed an onion, added the mushrooms and juice, reduced it, added a slug of sherry and my pint of delicious local Jersey cream, and cooked it down into a nice thick cream of mushroom sauce. It was delicious on the pork chop (raised by the same lady I get the milk from) and I had about a pint left over to go in the fridge. Last night, after a brutal day at work, it was lovely over some linguine and asparagus — a dinner that took 2 minutes to put together.
I love mushroom hunting — I wrote a piece for Culinate about how mushroom hunting saved me during grad school.
Wait you can get morels on purpose? Where can we get these amazing woodchips? I hate lawns anyway! Beautiful pictures!
Morels in your yard? My dad would say, by golly, you’re sitting on top of a gold mine. Indeed!
Lucky you! We’ve got several weeks to go up here before they start popping. Consider emailing your find to the Morel Mushroom Hunting Club; they track the progression of morels across the continent. California usually weighs in first, around late Feb, but this year morels were found in December, which seems really early, and Georgia had a sighting as early as Feb 26, also early. That’s morels for you–the fungal equivalent of a can of snakes! Enjoy your personal patch, Hank.
oh man! at least another month before we start seeing them here in the Virginia Piedmont. Foraged, not grown for us. Last year they were cooked with cream and served with wide noodles, fricasse with chicken, on top of pizza… we love morels!
What do I do with them? Hmm, honestly, never tried them. I think I should pick up some dried ones. =)
Sometimes a local farmer’s market gets a wild mushroom vendor, have to look in May.
Wow, we don’t get morels until May here in Illinois!
For some reason eggs and mushrooms go so well. I make a light omelet.