Chanterelle Time!

It has been humid and afternoon thunderstorms have been cropping up in the afternoons once it gets really hot.  I thought that it might be a good idea to mow the lawn before the grass gets too tall.  I had about a two hour window to get it done before the potential rainfall was to start.  We aren't the kind of folks that have a manicured lawn.  Sometimes we put the cows in the yard and let them mow the grass for us.  It would embarrass the kids when they were younger for us to have cow patties in the yard.

Before I mowed, I had to do a little reconnaissance.  I don't want to mow over and ruin a precious commodity that grows in our yard from time to time - Chanterelles!  They grow time after time in a certain part of the yard.  It's our 'honey hole' and we got back to it again and again.  It's like fishing from a stocked pond!  I walked out to the spot and lo and behold...  There they are.  Chanterelles.  Only two, but there will be more to come.

Chanterelles are wild, edible mushrooms that are delicious!  We like to go out and forage for them.  At first we were scared of eating wild mushrooms, but then we just learned about the primary wild edible mushrooms in our area and how to identify them and we leave the rest alone.  In our area, the main wild mushrooms to enjoy are oyster mushrooms and chanterelles.

Here's how you spot chanterelles.  First, they are bright orange.  They WANT you to find them.  Next, they are shaped like a funnel or a flute.  Then, they grow directly out of the ground - NOT out of wood.  Finally they don't have true gills - they have folds that run down the cap toward the base.  One other characteristic is that when cut, they smell like apricots.

I clipped these off with some clippers.  I didn't want to pull the mycelium.  Mycelium is the root-like structure (threads) of the mushroom.  The mushroom itself is the "fruit," but the mycelium spreads out and helps decompose organic matter, absorbing nutrients from the environment.  The chanterelles will continue to produce in this area and I'll come back time and time again and pick them.

You don't want to store the chanterelles in plastic.  It's best to store them in a paper bag.  All I had at the moment was a paper towel.  We'll bring these in, wash them up, and sauté them in some butter and garlic and maybe a little cream for a delicious, if not decadent snack.

I'll go ahead and mow the grass now that I've determined that there are no more chanterelles that I'd run over, but now I'll keep my head on a swivel to spot these bright orange delicacies that grow in our yard.

Harvesting Crops You Didn't Plant

Most crops involve a lot of labor.  It's been that way since the Fall in the Garden of Eden.  Man had to toil by the sweat of his brow.  The story continues to this day.  You work the ground, prepare the seed bed, you sow the seeds and water them in, you weed, and you (hopefully) harvest.  It is a painstaking process fraught with difficulty.  When it all comes together, though, it is worth it!

There are other 'crops' that plant themselves, so to speak.  God takes care of the rest.  Today we'll talk about one such crop.  Right outside our kitchen door, if you would walk thirty feet due north in the St. Augustine grass, you would find our "honey hole."  We discovered Chanterelle mushrooms!  The beautiful, delicious mushrooms come up time and again in the same vicinity.  All we have to do is keep our eyes open for them.  We walked out and picked a mess of them in the colander.  We picked even more a few days later.

Chanterelles are a bright yellow/orange color and they really stand out on the forest floor.  They have ridges which are a little different than gills and they run down the stem.  They grow in the dirt - NEVER on wood.  They are abundant after a summer rain.  People say that they have a fruity scent, like apricots, but I can never smell that.  My sense of smell was never very discriminating, and I still haven't completely recovered my ability to smell a lot of things since Covid.

The cap of the chanterelle is irregular.  The coloration is a show-stopper.  It's hard to miss this on the ground.  In the past before I knew what they were, I completely ignored them.  Or I kicked them over.  What was I doing?!  Wild foraged chanterelles go for $25 per pound at farmer's markets, I noticed.

One thing we wanted to make sure of when getting started is that we didn't want to eat any toxic mushrooms or eat any mushrooms that would send us into a hallucinogenic trip.  There is one toxic look alike called the Jack-O'Lantern mushroom.  It is an orange color, but it grows out of wood and has gills instead of ridges.  When you know what NOT to pick and you check and double check the characteristics of the desired mushroom, you can feel confident to enjoy the fruits of your forage.

Enjoy them we did!!  Weekend breakfasts are the best.  We always enjoy fresh-picked eggs, but today's eggs were going to be kicked up a notch or two.  Tricia sauteed the chanterelles with onions and peppers in butter in a cast iron skillet.

Then she added a half dozen eggs to the veggies and chanterelles and buttered some homemade toasted bread.  We ate like I would think kings and queens ate, enjoying every morsel until the plate was clean.

Rain is in the forecast and it is still hot and muggy even if it is almost mid-September.  That means more chanterelles will spring up on their own.  You can count on the fact that we'll be patroling the honey hole where the chanterelles grow.  Harvesting a crop I didn't plant almost makes me feel guilty.

Foraging for Oyster Mushrooms in South Louisiana

It has been raining an awful lot lately around our little homestead, transforming the barnyard area into a muddy mess.  The cows slog through the mud on the way to the barn for milking, and we slosh through it with our rubber boots on.  As soon as it dries up, I'm going to get a couple of loads of dirt delivered so that I can build up the area.  I'll also cut some ditches as well to drain any trapped rainwater toward the westward slope of the land.

One very positive thing that the rain brings forth is mushrooms.  In South Louisiana we have a couple of different types mushrooms that grow wild and we've learned to forage for them, identify them and then cook and devour them.  I found this painting on the Internet that I've credited the artist below.  I think it is a beautiful painting.  It shows people out foraging in the woods for those delectable mushrooms.

Franciszek Kostrzewski

After a rain the conditions are right for mushrooms to 'bloom'.  Mushrooms are the fruiting body of the fungus.  Just open your eyes as you walk through the woods. They are all around you.  The first thing you'll as is, "Is this one edible?"  Well, an old Czech quote says, "Every mushroom is edible, but some only once." That sounds ominous, and it's true.  Some mushrooms are toxic and can kill you or cause serious damage to you.  That's why we are careful to stick to eating only those that we can positively identify - for us, that's chanterelles and oyster mushrooms. In THIS PREVIOUS POST we showed you how we foraged for chanterelles, today we'll talk about oysters.

Yesterday Russ went walking in the small patch of woods behind the house and discovered a nice stash of oyster mushrooms growing in their favorite habitat - on the trunk of several dead willow trees.  Oyster mushrooms' scientific name is Pleurotus ostreatus.  We really like to eat these!

Oyster mushrooms have gills on the underneath side and are a whitish-light brown or grey color. Unlike many other types of mushrooms, they don't have much of a stalk at all.  They have a nice, "woodsy" scent to them.  We collect them in paper bags and then store them in paper bags in the fridge.  You want to preserve the moisture in the mushroom without introducing a lot of excess moisture.  They'll store well like that, but we seldom store them for long.  They don't last.  We eat them too fast.

They seem to grow in communities, with layers and layers of oysters all together, almost piling on top of each other.  They are a parasite and help to break down a tree.  Since we only remove the fruiting body, the mycelia (the vegetative part of the mushroom that is threadlike) is left in the decaying tree and will continue to produce mushrooms.  

When you've found where they are growing, you can continue to return time and time again to collect additional mushrooms.  Russ took many pictures of the immense quantity of mushrooms he harvested.  We tried, unsuccessfully, to inoculate an area in these woods with Chanterelle spores, but up to this point, we've been unsuccessful in getting Chanterelles to grow.  The oysters are doing just fine, though.  The trick is to make sure you check 'your spot' often, because some of these, like the ones on the bottom at the center right of the photo below are past their prime.  Russ just picked the ones that were in good condition.  We didn't weigh them, but he had a nice harvest.  (You can see our red barn in the background.) 

Russ brought them inside and cleaned them up.  Since they are in the woods, they'll have some sticks, leaves, and small bugs on them that you want to clean up before eating.  

Oysters ready for the skillet

Then he put them on a cutting board and cut them all up.

He promptly heated up a cast iron skillet and dropped some butter, garlic, onions, cream and some of our chopped fall tomatoes in and then added the fresh chopped up Oyster Mushrooms.  He ate the entire skillet by himself!  I didn't get to eat a single one!  Tricia made another batch for us tonight, though.

Freshly foraged Oyster mushrooms cooking

While the mushrooms were cooking, Tricia made some homemade pasta.  It is so much better!  When the mushrooms were done, the creamy mushrooms were spooned on top of the fresh pasta, with a side of some of the last green beans of the season until spring.  We thanked the Good Lord for providing great food for us to eat.  What a meal!

In yesterday's post, we talked about eating 'tuna' from a cactus and today we're eating oysters off of a tree!  "Seafood" from dry land!  It is so interesting how there are lots of edible goodies all around us - delicious treats right under our feet, just waiting to be found and eaten.  It's a garden you never have to water or weed.  How cool is that? 

Foraging for Chanterelle Mushrooms in South Louisiana

A good friend of ours has some land just east of our home that is on Bayou Nezpique. Since it sits on the bayou, it is obviously low-lying acreage, but the land has a gradual rise and a heavily wooded property thickly populated with old growth oak, cypress, tupelo gum trees and palmetto.  It just so happens that it is a perfect area for chanterelle mushrooms!  Our friend allows us to go foraging for mushrooms on his land and we happened to go out earlier this week on our first foray for chanterelles. The friend is part of a mycological society and is knowledgeable on what to look for and was eager to pass along some knowledge.

Honestly, mushrooms always have scared me as some are indeed deadly, but our friend taught us to just be able to positively identify the two main edible mushrooms that grow in our area - Chanterelles and Oyster Mushrooms.  Today we'll show you how we foraged for chanterelles.  We drove the short 5 minute drive to his land and arrived around 7:30 pm after the milking was done and things had started to cool off a little.  We had to rush since the sun was quickly going down.  Since we were walking in the woods under a thick canopy of leaves, it was dark, so please forgive the quality of my pictures.

We first made sure to wear boots as there are snakes in the area.  We also each broke off a stick and waved it in front of us as we walked as Banana spiders weave huge webs that I don't want to walk into and certainly don't want one of those big fellas to fall on me.  There are numerous wild hogs out there and we crossed trails that they had made through the undergrowth.  Russ chased an armadillo that was rooting around for grubs.  We also heard owls hooting.  Tricia wasn't particularly thrilled to be trekking through the woods with all these critters, but she's a trooper and stuck with it.

I guess the first thing that amazed me is the fact that we have delicacies all around us that we literally walk past every day without realizing the worth.  I've spent lots of time in the woods and have seen chanterelles and walked right past them or maybe even kicked them over.  All that changed today.  I'll not walk past them again.  It didn't take long before we spotted some!

Chanterelles!

Chanterelles grow in the dirt - never in wood, so you should walk around slowly, with your eyes sweeping the forest floor.  (Good protection against stepping on snakes, too.)  The chanterelles range in color from light yellow to orange and rather than having a toadstool appearance, they are fluted, having a trumpet shape. You can also see on the ground an unripe, green muscadine that has fallen out of the tree.  These wild grapes grow like crazy out here and I assume squirrels or birds have knocked them off the vine prematurely. Chanterelles most often appear from July - September and normally right after a rain, so we are in the prime season for them.

Chanterelle and muscadines

Mushrooms are a fungi and we learned that the mushroom itself is the "fruit."  The actual fruit is produced by the mycelium.  The mycelium is the vegetative part of the fungi that is like tiny threads, or roots that you can't see.  So what you want to do when you see one is to cut it instead of pulling it so that you leave the mycelium intact to grow more.  Also, when you see one, look around closely, because there will be more, hiding under leaves.  You want to be real careful to not step on them or compact the soil.  Remember where you found them and check back in a few weeks for more.  Below is a most beautiful chanterelle and is exactly the color of homemade butter made from grass-fed Jersey cows on new growth grass in Springtime!

Just like Butter!

The best way to store mushrooms is in a paper bag.  If you store them in plastic they won't be able to breathe.  When we got home, we took showers to get rid of the itching from the mosquito bites and spider webs in our hair and we opened the bag to admire our harvest.

Bag of goodies!

We weighed them and found that we had picked right over a pound of chanterelles.  A quick search showed the market value of chanterelles being anywhere between $26 - $40 per pound.  I assume that the price for them is so high because they are very hard to cultivate and are most often just found in the wild.  We're not going to try to sell any of these though.  We're gonna eat them!

A little over a pound

And here are the spoils of victory from our first forage for Chanterelle mushrooms all laid out on the counter:

Admiring our golden treasure.

You can see the trumpet shape of the chanterelle below:

And here is a very good illustration of another identifying mark of a chanterelle - they don't have gills like other mushrooms.  They have wrinkles instead, or ridges.  I'm told that chanterelles have a fruity fragrance, like that of apricots, but my sense of smell must be lacking as I only pick up an "earthy" scent.

Wrinkles of the chanterelle

And here are a couple of twin chanterelles, promising to be double good.

We brushed these off to clean them up and then we'll saute them in a cast iron skillet with some butter, sea salt and a splash of red wine.

Into the skillet

And they'll nicely pair with some pot roast with new potatoes, rice & gravy, sauerkraut and gingered carrots.

Supper time

Here's a close-up of some nice sauteed chanterelle mushrooms, just picked from the forest floor just west of the Bayou Nezpique:

Chanterelles for supper

These were simply delicious!  We also cook them with pasta and fresh vegetables, and I'm thinking they'll be outstanding in an omelet made with fresh picked eggs from our hens. In summary, we learned a lot and found a real 'honey hole' full of nice chanterelles that will provide us a few good meals that we will savor and enjoy. We also forage for Oyster Mushrooms in our area.  Check out THIS POST to see how we harvest the oysters.

Foraging for Mushrooms

Subtitled: There's a fungus among us

Saturday afternoon we decided to go for a walk in the woods.  I have a friend who has been going on mushroom forays with some mycologists in South Louisiana and he was over at the house visiting.

Factoid: Mycologist: a person who studies fungi.  I learned a new vocabulary word.

The mycologists walk around in the woods and try to find as many different types of mushrooms as possible, naming their genus and species.  Since we like to eat them, we'd only be interested in learning to identify which ones are edible, or more specifically, which ones are poisonous.  My buddy explained it this way - in Louisiana there are many snakes.  You learn how to identify the poisonous ones, the cottonmouths, the copperheads, the coral snakes and a couple of types of rattlesnakes and you stay far away from those.  Same thing with mushrooms. 

So he asked if we've ever foraged for mushrooms in the woods behind our house and we had to reply, "No."  But we love mushrooms and it seems to be interesting, albeit a little mysterious, so we headed off for the woods.  We all spread out in the woods and were told to just look around.  It is funny how you overlook things until you are looking specifically for them.  Well, it didn't take long before we discovered... Oyster Mushrooms!  These are edible and there are many different types of oyster mushrooms.


Oyster Mushrooms

These tend to grow at the base of rotting trees, feeding on dead and decaying matter in logs.  They particularly like willow trees.


Photo from underneath

The interesting thing about mushrooms is that what you can see is the "fruit", what you can't see is underground or spread throughout the log, threads getting nutrients from decaying organic matter.  They fruit in order to reproduce.  When you find a spot with edible mushrooms and harvest them, you can keep coming back to the same spot to get more as they grow as you are only "picking the fruit" and not disturbing the fungus itself.

The gills of the mushroom have cells on which spores are produced.


Gills of the mushroom

You don't want to store mushrooms in plastic, we were told.  Use a brown paper bag for storage.

There are different types of oyster mushrooms.  These were growing on the side of a dead tree, but were falling apart and way too far gone to eat.

We found some Turkey Tail Mushrooms.  I think you can see why they are called Turkey Tails.  They are widely known as having medicinal qualities when brewed in a tea, specifically in hindering the growth of cancerous tumors and being an anti-malarial and anti-oxidant.  We did not harvest any of these.  There is something called a false turkey tail mushroom and we want to be absolutely sure what we're dealing with.


Turkey tail Mushrooms

We saw all sorts of mushrooms.  This was a hard, non-edible type mushroom growing on a dead log.

Here was another oyster mushroom.  Again, a little too far gone to harvest and eat.

We ran across a brick foundation of sorts in the woods.  I have no idea what it was for.

I zoomed in and captured a fern growing in the bricks.


Wild fern growing amongst the bricks

This moss growing on an old fence post caught my eye:


Moss growing on an old fence post lying in the leaves

This Spring we're going to go with him foraging from chanterelles, another edible mushroom found in Louisiana.  We brought the oyster mushrooms back to the house.  Tomorrow I'll show you what we did with them.