Wild Mushrooms & Truly Seeing
Fresh tagliolini pasta with black trumpets and hen of the woods
Let’s talk about the weather! Nah, we’re going deep with this post.
Even though we’re in a drought it thankfully rained for the past couple of days. So my hubby and I decided to go for a walk in the woods to forage. It was magical like always, the sun was pushing through the silhouetted trees and illuminated this opalescent spider web, I actually saw the spider stitching her creation! Such a tiny creature creating magnificence, happens in nature all the time I bet, we just need to slow down to see it.
A shiny new web
This reminds me of seeing, I bet most of us do not see at all. We’re too distracted by flashes of movement and color, scrolling until we glimpse something that tickles our crocodilian brain. Sad!
Take this test this weekend, go out in the woods and wait until your eyes really work, and your nose, your ears and your skin. When it works you will know because everything comes alive - it takes time, but when you can finally see it’s electric. You need these “eyes” to see mushrooms.
At first we didn’t think we would harvest anything, since the fungi we did find were dead or too far gone. Then my hubby and I always remind ourselves its just great to be in nature, we don’t need anything more. But we did find something, a hen of the woods! it was pristine. I can’t tell you how it feels, kind of like winning the lottery? What a crass metaphor! I’ve never won the lottery but I’ve found a lot of beautiful mushrooms, there’s nothing like it.
And upon closer inspection we also found black trumpets. With those, you can smell them before you see them, almost like stumbling upon a field of fresh apricots Dorothy-style!
Our harvest: grifola frondosa and craterellus cornucopioides
After getting home and looking at the only photo I took of the beautiful hen mushroom, it looks as if Treebeard is peering around the base of the tree trunk with his skinny leg and boot propped over the root presenting to us, this lovely shroom. Can you see it? HAHAH! I never saw an ENT before in the woods, but maybe he/she was in front of me the entire time and I just was too preoccupied to actually SEE!
It is always so peaceful and reinvigorating to take a walk in the woods, but even nicer when nature provides fresh mushrooms for a yummy dinner. We are really careful about being respectful of nature, so we always leave at least a third of the mushroom intact in situ.
And please whatever you do, DO NOT touch a mushroom that you don’t know is 100% safe. Seriously, you could end up dead or killing someone! We are experts in only 3 types of mushrooms and we never harvest anything unfamiliar, unless its to take a spore print.
With our finds I made homemade fresh pasta, and sauteed up the mushrooms with some shallot, butter, heavy cream, fresh thyme, peas and ham and finished it off with some piave vecchio and evoo. Molto delicioso! Thank you Treebeard for opening my eyes!
