Yesterday was what mushroom forager's dreams are made of. We found good quantities of old favorites, a special treat we've never tried, and a torrent - yes, a torrent - of precious black trumpets cascading down a creek bank and pooling up against rocks and tree trunks at the bottom.
Clockwise from just-past-noon, above: flame-colored chanterelle (not a true chanterelle, but choice nonetheless, and glowing like sunset in the right light), black trumpies (poor-man's truffles), candy caps (they smell strongly of brown sugar and burnt soy sauce), hedgehogs (surely destined for pizza this week), oysters, trumpies again, and fish milk-caps (Matt's all-time favorite mushroom, for the way it fries up crunchy and golden and elevates his daily omelet to the level of manna-from-heaven).
A day of fall weather in late summer, following our sightlines through the woods, ducking spiderwebs, under brush, back and forth across the creek... letting go of anxiety in order to appreciate pure magic. Getting wet, then watching the rain from the back porch, bundled in wool for the first time in months. Mushrooms for our bellies, and the free, wild sustenance of connecting with the forest, for our hearts.
6 comments:
My belly would love to sit on your back porch after a feed of your mushrooms. Feeling the rain, the coolness of the evening..ah! I am there.
Oh my! What a wonderful bounty! With no rain here in 3 months, our mushrooms are a little scarce, but once the rains return, I'm hoping our black trumpets do too! Yum!
Pure poetry. Thanks for that, Zoe!
Wow! What a nice share. Thanks a lot for the great read.
What an excellent harvest, congratulations. After being away for almost 3 weeks, I was thrilled to find masses of black trumpets in their usual spot, as well as some hedgehogs and one large and lonely fish milk cap. But candy caps??!! I've never found those; didn't know they grew around here. I'm more than a little jealous.
We think the candy caps we found are Lactarius camphoratus, though it sounds like it's a little difficult to tell for sure. They are strong smelling! But they look so much like so many other small brown lactarius that *don't* have any smell, so it's disconcerting to have to sort through by nose alone... We dried 'em, but not sure we'll eat any.
Everything else was delicious!
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