Pictures from outdoor exercise.
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Tuesday, a regular day outside mowing for my part time job. Moving to Fall hours so showed up at my first mow around 9 AM. Three yards in a row. I got the first two done and then started on the largest of the three and guess what I found…
Give up?
A nice cluster of Hen of the Woods (also called Maitake), Grifola frondosa in Latin-speak
Called myself lucky, harvested it and went back to mowing... until I saw another one on a different tree in the same yard.
Jackpot!! Grabbed it too. By the end of the day I had 14.5 lbs, four clusters on three trees in two different yards… and that’s with me leave a few for the wildlife to nibble on. (Something, deer probably, had already been nibbling on the ones I took so don’t feel too bad for them.)
I’ll be splitting these up between family and friends as well as drying some for later.
Nice day.
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That's a good find for sure @d_thomas02.
I will probably go out ~again~ tomorrow to look for boletes, chanterelles, and lobster. One of these days they have to come up. I hope I get there before everyone else in the county....1 -
Cheese tortellini with sauteed maitake mushrooms, sun dried tomatoes, massaged kale, garlic and garnished with grated parmesan.
YUM!!
(Never thought I'd say "yum" to anything with kale in it.)
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My stepson's time in the military included foraging training and he still practices... I should get him to teach me a bit more about mushrooms etc...3
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Here is where the real exercise comes in from foraging mushrooms. Cleaning and cooking the haul.
I clean a small cluster last night to go with the tortellini, but I only used about half of it. Still have the other half to sauté and freeze.
The discussion below is just for cleaning the largest clump.
The first clump I pictured in my OG post on Maitake is the largest and weighed in at 9 3/4 lbs (4.42 kg). Mind you, this is just one mushroom. These 'srooms can get up to 100 lbs (45 kg). I just finished cleaning this one this morning.
If any are interested, the process I used can be found below (jump to 8:20 in the video).
Here are the results of the cleaning.
Still over 9 lbs after cleaning. 100% this choice mushroom is edible. Nothing is wasted, even the trimmings.
Here are the core(s), the stem(s) if you will, just like on a broccoli.
About 2 lbs (1 kg). These can be sliced into 1/8 - 1/4" thick steaks (3 - 6 mm). The fronds will be sliced into bite sized pieces before cooking and then freezing. Any pieces that are too rough for direct eating can be boiled to make a mushroom broth that can be frozen for later soups and\or stews.
The mycelium in the dirty trimming are still viable and can be returned to nature to propagate new mushrooms. Just mix them into the moist dirt around the trunk of a large oak tree. It is a parasitic fungus, but a large oak should be able to easily support this edible fungus.
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@d_thomas02
Good idea to cook and freeze. I do that with my chanterelles. I have two small bags left from two years ago - I didn't get any last year to speak of. I got a few already, and I will get more. It's much harder now since so many more people are out looking for them.
Chanterelles dehydrate just fine, but they don't rehydrate that well, otherwise drying is an option. One year I dried some and then soaked in vodka; bad idea. I thought they would make a good Bloody Mary. Nope. Just kind of yuck.
If you have some tough chunks, another thing you can do with them, assuming you don't cook 'em first, is to dehydrate them until they are super dry, then make a powder with a coffee grinder (not the one you use for coffee). That powder can add a delicious umami flavor to dishes. It's a good way to preserve some mushrooms that are edible but don't have a good texture when you cook them, like some boletes.
My shiitake logs are "fruiting," but one is growing a turkey tail and the other has some kind of jelly fungus on it. I think the dowels I had weren't viable. Oh well.2 -
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My shiitake logs are "fruiting," but one is growing a turkey tail and the other has some kind of jelly fungus on it. I think the dowels I had weren't viable. Oh well.
If you identified it as the true Turkey Tail, I’d keep it for making a medicinal tea. And if the jelly fungus is Wood Ear, I hear they make a great snack when candied.
The guy in the YouTube below gives a fairly scientific discussion on identifying jelly fungus.
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It started outdoors with little exercise and end indoors with a lot of exercise. Enough for me to work up a good sweat after three nonstop hours of cooking.
Maitake steaks on the left and sautéed Maitake fronds and stems on the right (chef knife for scale). Now cooling before being placed in quart freezer ziplocks.
Still on the stove is the mushroom stock.
I’ll drain and then squeeze the mushrooms to get as much stock as I can and then freeze the stock in quart ziplocks. The leftover wrung out mushrooms will go in the dehydrator (along with another dozen or so shiitakes in the top trays) for a day before being powdered.3 -
I wasn't sure my shoulder would put up with it, but I went paddling.
Disc golf two days in a row after not playing a long time caused me some pain that still hasn't resolved. That shoulder is probably also still not healed from some bicycle crashes, and probably never will be. I was so glad that putting the boat on my car (51 pounds) didn't hurt, and I didn't drop it. I was even more glad that paddling didn't hurt! Because of my concern, we just did a 12-mile trip instead of the 18-mile paddle we usually do from this particular launch. Water level was up, so making miles was easy. Even without paddling hard, it was about 2.5 hours.
It was a cool and very foggy day. Very foggy. Forecast was for the fog to clear and for it to be sunny and warm. Well, the sun tried to come out. Eventually, after we got off the water and ran shuttle back to the put-in, we did see the sun. It was warm by the time I got home after making a side trip to the city I was close to because my SCUBA drysuit repairs were complete.
Even with the fog, we did get a few nice reflections.
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Yes, our once thriving and active group has definitely dwindled in participation.
I got out to the forest yesterday. It was great! I have a spot I like to hunt for chanterelle mushrooms. I went once about a month ago or so, and I didn't find any. It's farther than I'd normally drive just to stomp around the forest, so I usually go when I'm on my way home from my volunteer shift at the aquarium. It only adds about 30 miles to my commute. Trouble is, that's after a couple dives, and I'm tired. Other trouble is that my shift is on a Monday. That means other people who have weekends off likely have just been out picking. When I find mushrooms, I always find that the area has been picked over.
Weather here in the valley was foggy. It was supposed to clear up and get sunny. I am told it never did. As I drove over the saddle, though, and down into the valley of the river that runs out to the coast, it was a bluebird day. Just gorgeous. Fall colors were also really popping. There was very little traffic. I had picked up some CDs at the thrift shop a couple weeks ago, so I got to listen to them the first time. The 50 mile drive didn't even feel that long!
I have been out several times to different places this year without finding very many mushrooms. There should be more out this year than there are. Maybe it was just too hot all summer. I have told friends that even if I don't find much (or any), it's still nice to quietly go through the forest paying close attention to everything around. Birds. Trees. Shrubs. Various mushrooms that I can even identify but am not collecting. I wear a very old leaky raincoat because all the thorns would destroy a good one. I have beefy rain pants that can put up with the thorns. So let me tell you that it is so much nicer when the sun is out. I didn't have to wear rain pants! My legs were much lighter. I still got pretty wet from the brush, but not soaking wet. Having the sun out also helps me keep aware of where I am. Normally when it's just generally light but no real shadows, you have to be really careful to not get lost. I got turned around one time about 20 years ago, and it wasn't fun. I found my way back out in less than an hour, so I wasn't "lost," but I was nervous. Knowing where the sun is helps. There was just a mushroom hunter rescued after spending a couple nights out. She was hypothermic. The Coast Guard had a helicopter, but it was too foggy to get her out. One of the SAR folks stabilized her and stayed with her overnight until they could get her out and to a hospital. The areas I was in yesterday are places I know pretty good, and I stay close to the road. One is bowl-shaped, so as long as you start by going up and don't cross any ridges, you'll always come back to the road near your car if you come back down.
Well, as nice as it is to walk around in the forest when the weather is mild and it's sunny, I was reminded it is also nice to find mushrooms! Yesterday was perfect not only because it was the best weather day (rain comes back today), but it being Wednesday meant there was time for a new flush after weekend hunters had come through. For sure there was evidence that the site had been picked several days ago, but there was a new flush.
This forest doesn't require a permit if you are collecting for personal use. You can pick up to one gallon, and I got almost my gallon. You can only collect six matsutake, but I didn't find any of those. I weighed them when I got home, and it's about three pounds.
I'll be cleaning them and cooking some. I might cook a whole bunch, then freeze and vacuum seal for use later in the year, but I'll probably just use most of them a few at a time over the next week for lots of tasty mushroom dishes. Oh I do love mushrooms.
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I got another flush of shiitake mushrooms off my dozen inoculated logs that I was not expecting. Over a pound. Since I wasn’t expecting another flush this year I hadn’t been checking them regularly. As a result about a third had started drying out. No worries though. I ran them all through my dehydrator and they’ll be just fine.
I’m planning on making two mushroom dishes for my extended family gathering on Thanksgiving. One with rehydrate shiitakes and the other with the hen-of-the-woods that I sautéed and froze a month or so back.
Good times.2 -
I had ONE shiitake on one of my logs a couple weeks ago. One. Just one.
But last week I was stomping around looking for chanterelles, and I did find a 1.25 pound Sparassis!
A couple days later, I went up to the peak and hiked around the top. Pretty short hike. The air up above the clouds was clear, and the Cascade volcanoes were very evident.
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I walked into town to get my mail today. It's less than three miles round-trip. We've got an atmospheric inversion, and along with that we had some ice fog. Oh joy.
Sure is pretty though.
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This is not the usual thing for this thread, but it was a fun part of my walk with a friend today.
There's a house on the trail that always has a big plastic box with multi-colored fat sticks of sidewalk chalk in it, and an invitation written on the box to make sidewalk art. (Yup, people do.)
For this season, there's a second box, as shown below:
. . . and one of two nearby trees:
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No downside to celebrating Christmas as far as I'm concerned!!
I found two bucks in our side yard in Texas... and yes, our yard is very "natural" so to speak.
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They're beautiful, @UncleMac!
I only super rarely see bucks with mature racks here at my place, and nothing of that scale. Occasionally, there have been spikehorns or other young bucks, but most of the traffic here appears to be does with the current year's young, or other does. (Sometimes it's hard to tell from a distance when it isn't antler season.)
I don't have a great photo like yours, only what I can get with my cell phone from my second-floor kitchen window, so they're tiny/fuzzy photos. I seem to be on a regular daily route for these three (or sometimes a couple more).
This is just suburb, as is probably obvious. But off beyond the photo, to the right, there's a creek bottom that (of course) is a wildlife highway. There's a house directly behind mine well past my lot line, but otherwise no houses behind mine or the North (right side) neighbors', all the way to the creek. It's an easy route for them, with lots of bird feeders and in season apple trees, hostas, and other tasty things.
They seem to look pretty robust this Fall, which is good . . . there's been chronic wasting disease among other issues, in my county and around the state (Michigan).
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@AnnPT77, we have a number of deer who pass through here regularly and throughout the neighbourhood. At least a dozen or so. There are a few bucks but mostly does. I think our area is a "no shoot" zone... they know where it's safe, I suppose.
While washing windows today (I bought a 12' expandable pole and squeegee for such), I noticed a flowering bush. It seems odd to be flowering this time of year but I didn't argue the point.
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@unclemac: Nice! Lantana, maybe? Very pretty. As you might guess, we have pretty much nothing flowering outdoors here now.
That stonework is beautiful, too!
Thank you. Here's the view from the opposite side. As you can see, the property slopes significantly. The house is only one level so the lower part of the stonework from the previous picture is covering a retaining/foundation wall. There are no basements in Texas... the house is on a slab but the retaining/foundation wall was necessary to create a level spot.
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Beautiful home Wayne. Is that a lake or salt water?1
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