foraging for chantrelles

happy mid october! we are a few weeks into our new place…don’t ask wil if he likes it, because he honestly hasn’t spent much time here except to sleep. only a couple more weeks and i get my husband back (and hopefully he has some form of job in the non-plural sense!*).

our friend and new neighbor laura and i decided to go on a little adventure sunday. it may have been a poor year for tomatoes, but the late arrival of summer heat and unending rains were the ideal setting for mushrooms, especially chantrelles, in this part of the state. and the decision to go frolic through the woods with baskets convinced her to get a library card (she has only lived here for *ahem* all her life), to get ourselves all studied up on mushrooms…foraging and preserving.

on an absolutely sublime fall day, we started out at karam farm, picking ourselves some beautiful fall produce…end of season peppers, zucchini, squash, and even some green beans and eggplant. i nearly filled a big 5 gallon bucket and paid a whopping $5.60 (getting all of the aforementioned). it hurts to hear people say that it costs too much to buy healthy foods like produce, because it doesn’t! plus you get to spend the time outside seeing beautiful veggies grow out of the ground right into your palm. we were excited for the chance to find and try this farm…for next year…while sauvie island farms will be my go to for berries and fruits during the summer, karam is solely produce, with a sweet ‘let me drive you through my backyard’ family owned feel, open every day during the growing season. (and no pictures, since i was too busy picking and trying to determine which types of peppers to pick, and unknowingly, yet very zealously picking what turned out to be hot cherry peppers. whoops)

with a good load of veg in the back of the car, we made our way up through some forestry roads. ever so often we’d see a car or two pulled off and pulled off on a whim (and had a good time guessing  by car type if they were foraging. beat up volkswagen caravan? my gut would be a yes!). our first location was a dud. having no idea what we were doing, we probably looked like idiots, scraping and poking the ground of leaves with sticks, and trying to identify every mushroom we found…”is it the ‘tawny grisette‘? or the ‘death cap‘?” when in doubt, don’t pick. or touch.

we gave up quickly, and drove for quite a ways…passing through a clear cut section, then a thick wooded section,  clear, wooded, and repeat. once again, on a second whim, (and probably because we were both silently feeling like we’d driven too far but didn’t want to say anything) we turned off and then hit jackpot. a guy almost literally popped out from behind the bushes when we pulled up and told us about how he’d already filled 4 or 5 large buckets of chantrelles and lobster mushrooms, just that day!

i won’t lie, when we found that first little bright orange mushroom, we both shrieked and squealed. little did we know that we’d later be finding mushrooms the size of our fists, and even as long as our hand outstretched. but boy, knowing we found our first chantrelle was such sweet relief!

so our payload may have not been buckets and buckets, but the search was great, the weather beautiful, and the sense of adventure permeating the air. someone explained it like an easter egg hunt for adults, and i don’t think i could describe it any better. we want to figure out how quickly they reproduce and grow because we are ready to go back up and do it again! i meant to weigh the mushrooms i came home with (maybe a pound? maybe 2 or 3?), for the satisfaction that i brought home some stunning specimens of the edible fungi world for free, while people pay up to $15 a pound for these things.

the little guys that weren’t lasting in our fridge went into a low oven for a couple hours to dry out for future use. the the big guys…i’m not sure. mushrooms are a newer addition to my palette, and am curious on what to do. the cooling of outside temperature has made me think about a big bowl of risotto. what would you do?

*i got a call from him a few hours after i first starting drafting this post with the news that he was offered to stay at laurelhurst market when his internship ends! praise the lord.