Shroomapalooza '05

My neighbor Tamalynne called. "Do you want some chanterelles?"

"Yes, please!"

A few hours later, she showed up on my doorstep with an entire cooler full of wild mushrooms from her parents' property in southwest Washington. I feel like I won the mushroom lottery.

Thirty pounds (give or take a bit) of chanterelles fill my kitchen sink ...

Big mushrooms - some as big as my hand.

I spent a couple of hours sorting, cleaning, trimming and spreading them out to dry (chanterelles are very wet mushrooms, and letting them dry overnight on paper towels and a couple of layers of newspaper makes them easier to handle and less likely to rot before you can eat them all). After covering every available surface in the kitchen, I'd managed to process a little over half the mushrooms. The sink was full of pine needles and duff, and the kitchen smelled like a forest floor.

A few pounds of cleaned mushroom trimmings screaming "eat me first!"

Sauteeing a sample (with butter, a splash of wine and a hearty shake of Garlic Lovers' Garlic. Chanterelles give up a good deal of liquid in cooking, so I wound up with a garlicky, buttery, mushroomy broth. You can cook them down further to reduce the broth, drain it off and save it to make soup - or enjoy it!

Mmmmmmm, wild mushrooms!

Safety note: Chanterelles, along with morels, are one of two wild mushrooms I feel confident enough to eat by visual identification. I was trained to identify them by an expert mycologist. Before eating any of these, I picked through the entire bunch, one by one, and discarded any that were questionable or too small to positively identify. Don't fuck around with wild mushrooms unless you know what you're doing; you could wind up with a bellyache - or dead.