The Birds of November

It’s been a while since I've written anything about hunting here. Simple reason: there has not been much to report. The last really notable outing afield occurred two years ago, when I shot a pheasant, grouse, and woodcock—the three main “upland game birds” of our region—on the same day, at a public hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee. That was a remarkable hunt for a couple of reasons. One, I’d never accomplished that “triple crown” feat before, and it had been a goal of mine. Also, the grouse was pointed in absolutely classic fashion by our young dog, Lily. Previously she had mainly been known for flying heedlessly through woods and field, launching anything avian in her path into the air well out of shotgun range. We knew she could point; we did not know if she would.

She found the bird at least a hundred yards ahead of me and remained staunch in her point for the two minutes or so that it took me to make my way over to her through gnarly terrain. Just as I came up to her rigid,

quivering form, the bird got up, and I dropped it with the first shot. That was a notable achievement for me, too; grouse are very fast flyers, hard to shoot, and I’m frankly not that great a shot. I already had a pheasant in my vest, a bird that I had walked up, shot, and retrieved with no canine assistance whatsoever. The dogs were running around back in an alder swamp. They heard the shot and came running out to find me standing at the edge of the field with a pheasant in my hand. “Hey, look what I found,” I said. “What have you two been up to?” They wagged their tails and sniffed the bird. I think they looked a little shamefaced. It was a classic moment in the field, one I’ll never forget.

The final bird of the day was a woodcock, which I shot over Annabel’s point, again on the first shot. I don’t think we encountered any other birds that day, though my memory on that point is not completely clear. If it’s accurate, this would have been a hunt on which I killed three birds with three shots, and no misses. That’s something that’s unlikely to happen again.

It was an extremely satisfying day afield, and one I had really hoped to build on in 2010, but you know what they say about plans. October last year was ridiculously warm, dreadful hunting weather. I had to make an unexpected trip to deal with family matters at the end of that month, I blew out my shoulder, then it snowed. In all of 2010 I hunted twice, fired the gun four times at two grouse, missing badly on all shots. The one time I hunted alone with Lily, I’m not sure if she was in the same county with me for much of the outing. And Annabel, then 12 years old and game but a little gimpy, and largely deaf—well, I didn’t know if we would ever again put the bell on her orange collar and send her out with a “Hunt ‘em up. Where’s a bird?”

Based on that dismal year, I couldn’t see things going anywhere but up in 2011, but the season did not have a promising start. Another too-hot October, another unanticipated October trip taking a week out of the brief woodcock season. With no real training in the interim, but lots of self-directed “hunts” on our land—home to both grouse and woodcock, and the occasional pheasant—Lily had become an over-stimulated bundle of bad
habits. I didn’t know if we would be able to bring her back. One short outing with Annabel showed me that she could come along on hunts, but only with a chaperone. I was feeling glum about the season, to say the least. I was feeling even glummer about my future as a bird hunter.

Lily is still a couple months shy of her sixth birthday. She’s in her physical prime, and she’s an incredibly athletic dog. There’s no mistaking the sheer, unabashed joy she displays as she catapults up and down the Bide-A-Wee hills. She is also a very sweet girl, eager to please, devastated when she disappoints (our joke about Annabel is that she, too, is eager to please…herself). I had Lily’s temperament going for me when I decided I had to give her a few more tries before reaching any conclusions.

Some memorable hunting and fishing outings are memorable for reasons quite apart from fish in the creel or a bird in the game pouch. Our hunt at a small hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee, just Lily and me, will stick with me for a long time. After several hunts where she seemed to be simply running around in the woods, no sense of purpose about her at all, she suddenly…started…to hunt. Some lightbulb went off for her. Maybe the “chats” we had had on previous outings impressed her. Maybe she just needed to encounter a few more birds in the proper context. The remarkable thing was how sudden the transformation was. From one hunt with absolutely no pointing, or intimation that she even knew how to do so, suddenly she was a pointing machine. Like someone flipped a switch, or switched dogs on me.

We went in to a stand of small aspen.  Lily was working ahead of me to the left. Even before the point I sensed something different in her manner. She was out of sight when her collar started a steady beeping (it’s an electronic collar that beeps every ten seconds or so when she’s running, then every second when she stops). As I came up behind her I could see from her body language that, yes, there was a bird, but maybe not right there. Close, not in front of her nose. I went in ahead of her, circled to right and left. No bird. I told her to hunt and she zipped past me, slalomed through a patch of dogwood. She drew up short, all four feet planted solidly on the ground, and swiveled her head sharply to the right. Then she did not move.

As I approached a woodcock flushed, mere feet from her quivering nose. It veered skyward, over the tops of the aspens, and I had to turn and get the gun up high, and I missed, and I missed again. I cursed, but I recovered from the disappointment quickly. Lily broke her point with the shots, but came to me when I whistled, and I praised her as few dogs have ever been praised in the history of bird hunting. Then we carried on, and in a few minutes she pointed another woodcock (or perhaps the same one), and again my shooting let us down. But again we were SO HAPPY! Finding and missing woodcock is the best game EVER! We had one more bird encounter that day. On the flank of a distinctive little piece of topography, a sort of rocky knoll covered with scrub oak, dogwood, and stunted jack pine, Lily stopped, her head directed downhill, a solid point. The grouse didn’t hold for long, though. It flushed within range of a shot, but entirely out of sight behind a patch of pines. That was it. Three birds found, pointed, nothing in the bag. A great day.

One thing that has been disconcerting this year has been a general scarcity of birds. Often in woodcock season, as the birds are migrating through, I’ll find eight to twelve birds in the best bits of cover. This season I think the most timberdoodles (woodcock have a lot of nicknames) encountered in a day was four. Lily and I hit a fresh piece of terrain on a cool gray morning, just a couple days from the end of woodcock season—pheasant stays open in Wisconsin through December, and grouse to the end of January, though it’s rare that conditions allow comfortable hunting much past the beginning of December. It was great looking cover—scrappy patches of dogwood and alder along a small creek, extensive stands of young aspen, or “popple” as it’s locally known. We didn’t flush a bird. Well, maybe a chickadee. Lily hunted well. She gave me a “false point” once, came to a dead halt and wouldn’t move even when I told her to hunt after I’d circled entirely around her. She was pretty sure there was something there, but there wasn’t. Could be a bird had flushed ahead of us, leaving a strong scent but no feathered evidence. We made our way back toward the car, and I was thinking it was going to be a lost day, but for a pleasant, if somewhat arduous, walk.

We came up out of a ditch and on to the dirt road that dead-ends farther back in the hunting ground. I could see the car in the parking area just ahead, and I broke open my gun—a side-by-side 20-gauge. I had Lily at a heel as we came up on the road, but when I saw the road deserted I let her go, and she immediately left my side and dropped down in the ditch on the other side of the road. I heard the collar start its steady beeping, and assumed she was stopped for a drink of delicious ditch water. But the beeping went on, and I heard no slurping. I realized she was on point.

I found her on a solid point beside a clump of alder. The cover was thick on the road side, more open farther in, and I was fortunate that the woodcock when it flushed did not veer for the road but rather followed the edge of the alders. The flush came as I was just even with Lily, so I didn’t have too much time to think—this is good—and I dropped the bird with the first shot. It fell in the center of another clump of alders, and was an easy find. I saw it before Lily did, but waited for her to come around and track it down. It had hit the ground dead—when I opened it I found that a pellet had gone right through the heart. Lily came up to the bird and sniffed at it, mouthed it a bit. Our dogs haven’t been trained to retrieve, and don’t seem to take to it naturally. I gave her a chance to bring it to me, but didn’t insist. I picked up the bird and put it in my vest with warm words of praise for my dog. First bird of 2011, first bird in two years.

We had another successful outing a couple of days later, the closing day of woodcock season, although we saw no woodcock. At the small hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee where Lily had had her turn-around day, we finally

started to see some grouse. I walked up one bird that Lily had run past, and missed my shot. Farther back in a mature woods with a boggy section I knew grouse frequented, Lily started to get “birdy”—that is, she broke out of her broad crossing runs and began working a smaller area in more detail, her nose close to the ground, her tail going like an airplane propeller. I turned to the left, she turned to the right—my instincts were better, and the grouse flushed in front of me. I took one errant shot before the bird curved out of view in a stand of pine. Lily came barreling back my way, and I told her “Whoa!” She didn’t seem to hear. I told her again, but it still didn’t sink in. Three times is too many times to have to tell a bird dog to freakin’ WHOA! Once I did get her attention, we had another of those “chats.” She promised she would try to do better, and almost immediately, she did.

Not two minutes later, in this same open area of mature oak, elm, and maple, she went on point again. Woods like this are not supposed to be good grouse habitat, but the grouse in these parts apparently didn’t know that (we have the same sort of joke about trout that don’t seem to know that they shouldn’t exist outside of “designated trout streams”). In dry years, and also in mid-winter, I think they seek out the spring seeps in this area for water and for the little green things growing there. This time Lily went on point along a big deadfall, an oak that had tipped over pulling its roots right out of the boggy ground. I came up near that tall root clump; Lily was on point around mid-tree. The grouse flushed, and flew straight away from me barely over head-high. I had to make a quick sidestep to clear the tree, get the gun up, and I would only have a single shot.

I took it; the bird did not drop, but it seemed to dip. I was pretty sure I had hit it. I stopped and quickly replaced the shell I had spent, then started walking briskly in the direction the grouse had gone. Lily passed me and I asked her if maybe it was possible there was a bird on the ground around here. Her answer was immediate: she went into tracking mode; she had found the scent of the running bird, and was following it avidly.

It didn’t take long to find the wing-shot bird. Lily subdued it, I came and took it from her, I broke its neck—not something I relish doing, but we who eat meat have to accept the fact that animals die for our pleasure; this was just a particularly intimate illustration of that fact.

Overall, in terms of the pointing, the adjustment, the shot, the tracking, that was one of the more remarkable bits of dog-and-hunter work I’ve been involved with in my brief hunting career. We had a quiet celebration over the bird that had given its life to make it possible, and made our way back to the car.

A lot of hunters wouldn’t see two birds in two outings as much to write home about. In spite of hopes and anticipation, my woodcock season ended with a single bird in the bag, an appetizer for two. But for me those

outings marked the beginning of my new hunting life with my “new” dog, Lily. It’s tough to leave Annabel behind—but it’s even tougher to hunt with her. I worry constantly that she’ll wander off in the woods, and with her deafness not hear us to find her way back. I worry that when her enthusiasm overcomes her physical limitations, as it always does, she’ll injure herself without even knowing she has done it. More than that, we’ve had a good run together. She brought me into this world which I find as compelling and challenging as anything I’ve ever done. It’s Lily’s turn now, and the education continues.

Next time, bird cookery at Bide-A-Wee.





Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

A Bit of Winter Green

It's become something of an annual tradition that on a sunny day in February, when the cabin fever is running high, I put the dogs in the car and head to a woods I know, a little ways south of the cities. A sweet little trout stream runs through this woods, and the stream is fed by a pretty spring, and in that spring lives the only green thing in the white winter woods (except for some tenacious moss): watercress.


Because cress grows in springs that bubble up from the earth at a fairly constant temperature year ‘round, the plants are protected in a sort of microclimate created by the 40-degree water. The plants dangle their fine white roots over the sandy bottom, but they take most of their

nourishment from the water itself—it’s Great Nature’s hydroponic salad garden. I carefully snip off a sackful of leaves, trying to leave the plants undisturbed—preserving the resource must be a key tenet of any successful forager. While a spring bursting with cress, or a forest floor covered in ramps, might look to be inexhaustible, I remind myself that it got that way because it has been left alone.

The spring is not bursting with cress at this time of year; the plants are holding steady, waiting for sympathetic signs from the season. I harvest sparingly, taking a few leaves here, a few there. When I'm finished I want the spring to look exactly as it did before I started picking.

Of course, I sample some leaves of cress while I’m picking, and that pungent, almost hot flavor, along with the brilliant green of it, acts as an absolute tonic to my winter-dulled senses. Then with a few servings of cress tucked away, the dogs and I take a wandering walk along the stream. They dash back and forth from bank to bank, kicking up a splashy ruckus. I’ll try to find a quiet pool to peer into, try to spot some trout. Opening day of Minnesota’s trout season is still weeks away, but a guy can dream….



This stream usually runs thin over sand and graveled riffles, only deepening in corner pools where the current digs into the bank, but this year I found I couldn't cross in the expected places, wearing only calf-high boots--beavers had built two dams a couple hundred yards apart. That extra depth could make for good fishing, for a while, though the dams might not survive the spring floods that often scour a narrow valley stream like this.


It was a great day to be out. I wandered from the path and had a pulse-raising trudge through knee-deep snow--should have brought the snowshoes--soaked up a good dose of vitamin D in sunshine that is strong and hot on a calm clear afternoon now.

The cress we use judiciously, as these winter leaves are especially pungent. Last night we tucked a few leaves into extraordinary fish tacos, local as hell, and more details on which to follow.

A fine weekend to all.

Brett




Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Two Birds at Bide-A-Wee (Part Two: Pan-Roasted Grouse in Cider Cream Sauce)

Annabel, our senior griff', is eleven years old now, and though she has slowed down quite a bit, and gets up a little gimpy from her frequent naps--a touch of arthritis, most likely--she can still find and point grouse. She sort of moseys through the woods now, not looking particularly intent on anything, but when her nose detects the scent of a bird, everything changes. Very few pointing dogs actually assume the "classic" pointing pose, front leg lifted and cocked. In fact, when one of my dogs stops on a hunt with her foot in the air like that, I pretty much know it's not a serious point.

Instead, they will stop with all four feet planted, stop as soon as they catch the scent of a bird, and turn their heads toward the scent. Then it's my job to find them, frequently in thick cover (an electronic beeper collar helps here), figure out exactly where the bird is, maneuver to gain the best angle for a shot, walk in to put the bird up, and knock it down with my 20-gauge side-by-side shotgun.



Matters do not often unfold in exactly that fashion for me. I miss my share of birds, or they flush wild or fly low through the brush or disappear behind trees. Then Annabel will break her point and run in crazy circles, barking in excitement, or frustration, it's hard to tell which. This is by no means "classic" bird dog behavior, either. In fact, even if I do manage to hit the bird, she still runs around barking at the sound of the gun, and she is of almost no use in helping me find the down bird. Lily is much better. Every bird I've shot with her in the field, she has been right on it. She doesn't retrieve, but that's fine by me. Having a bird in a dog's mouth for any amount of time does nothing to improve the quality of the meat.


On a rare warm day in October, I went out with just Annabel to hunt a smallish state hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee. We started late morning with the temperature climbing toward 60. We hadn't gone far into a stand of young aspen before my moseying dog stopped at the edge of a clump of dogwood within the aspen, and as I approached her a grouse flushed and escaped low behind thick cover. As I watched it go without firing a shot, a second bird got up and disappeared into a grove of white pine before I could locate it.

That was encouraging, and as we worked our way through that patch of aspen we located a couple more grouse as well as two or three woodcock. I think I missed on one of each, and had no shot at the others.

As we left the aspen stand and started up a little knob of a hill covered in dogwood, small oaks, prickly ash and assorted scrappy cover, Annabel stopped--again at a juncture of aspen and dogwood. I moved around to her right, to try to get the bird between us, and just as I crossed an opening in the trees, the grouse flushed. I hadn't expected the bird to be that close to my pointing dog, but the opening in the trees gave me a perfect shot. I turned to my left as I raised the gun, and brought the bird down with the first shot.

Annabel began running around, barking.

I had shot the bird at quite close range, and thought I had seen where it fell, but these animals are extremely well camouflaged. It took me a couple of minutes to find the bird. Annabel was no help whatsoever, but I certainly would never have shot that bird without her point. When I found the bird I called her over, and we engaged in a sort of dog-and-hunter high fives. "Whatta you know, we got one," I said. "Good girl, good dog." But she was off already to look for more.

It was nearly noon then, and getting hot for hunting, so we called it quits shortly after. In just an hour we had moved at least eight ruffed grouse and four or five woodcock.



I gutted the bird as soon as we got back to the cabin, and plucked it a day or two later back in Saint Paul, let it air dry in the fridge, and took it back out to Bide-A-Wee to cook for dinner the following weekend. I had thought I might grill it, then finish it in a cider and cream sauce, but October had returned to its chill, wet, blustery ways, that sun-washed morning in the woods a distant dream, so we fired up the Haggis and got out the cast iron.

First, I want everyone to appreciate the superb job I did plucking that bird. I know that anyone who has ever tried to pluck a grouse will be impressed by how clean that bird is, how intact is the skin. The skin of a grouse is delicate, and often torn by shot or dog tooth. It's no mean feat to wind up with a bird that nice. It's a tedious process, but it's worth it to me, and then, I'm not usually burdened with dozens of grouse to pluck in a season. A lot of hunters don't bother with plucking. They'll usually skin the bird, a quick and simple process. Others will "breast out" their birds in the woods, leaving behind everything but the boneless breast meat. This is both illegal, for a variety of reasons, and a terrible waste of excellent meat and bones--the carcasses of grouse produce a spectacular stock, and there's a decent amount of meat on the legs, too.

In preparation for cooking, the well-plucked bird is cut in half, seasoned with salt and pepper, smeared with butter. It's a very lean meat which benefits from a little added richness. It also benefits from bacon, but then, what doesn't? I rendered off a couple of tablespoons of lardons from our home-smoked bacon, and in that fat I browned an apple, cored and cut into eighths, not peeled.


Some sliced red cabbage and onions, sautéed, then simmered with a bit of water and cider, cooked on the Coleman stove. A handful of fingerling potatoes I grew at Bide-A-Wee were boiled separately and kept warm on the side of the wood stove.


Then I browned the grouse. Threw in some chopped leeks.

Added a cup of chicken stock, a half cup each of Cedar Summit cream and our own apple cider, a few sprigs of thyme (we can reach out the window and snip it from our potted herb garden on the south side of the cabin!). I finished cooking the grouse in the slowly reducing sauce--it was barely bubbling--for ten or fifteen minutes. Towards the end I put in the precooked potatoes to warm up.



And we served it forth. A well-cooked grouse is among the most exquisite things you can eat. This bird, well, I'd say it produced some of the finest meat I have ever tasted, lean but moist and tender, with a flavor both pronounced and subtle (but I'm not going to say it tasted wild...).

Just a really fine thing to eat, and a celebration of the land and the season. That said, there's no reason you couldn't do the same thing with cornish hens, or chicken.




Thanks, Annabel.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Rillettes de Porc

This is just about the simplest of all patés to make. It's really just fatty pork slowly simmered with a few seasonings until it's falling apart. Then you smash it up with your hands, beat it with a spatula, and pack it into ramekins. The area around the city of Tours in the Loire valley is known for its pork products, particularly rillettes. A little crock of rillettes, with its constant companions, grain mustard and cornichons, is often served with an aperitif. Or it may be part of an assiette de cochonailles, a things-made-from-pig plate--a bit of ham, dried sausage, a slice of terrine--served as a dinner first course or casual lunch.

We often simplify even further, making lunch out of a lump of rillettes, some crusty bread, a few salad leaves, maybe a piece of cheese. This is such a simple, honest dish, so evocative of its rural origins and a frugal way in the kitchen that does not trade flavor for economy. In other words: It is cheap, delicious, and reeks of terroir.

As with all very simple preparations, the quality of its few ingredients is all-important, and here the pork is practically all there is to it. Therefore, use only the best natural or organic pork you can find. It calls for an inexpensive cut, pork shoulder, so it won't break the bank. We're lucky here in Minnesota to have a number of excellent local producers whose pork is widely available--Pastures A Plenty , Hidden Stream Farm , Chase Brook Natural Meats , to name a few.

Rillettes takes advantage of the scrappy bits of pork, the butcher's left-overs, and of the pig's good fat, as well. The pork for rillettes should be at least one-third fat. That's all the more reason to use only excellent natural pork, as anything suspect that is fed to an animal is concentrated in the fat. And I'm sure I hardly need to say it, but please avoid at all costs the so-called "enhanced" pork often sold at the big-box grocery stores, industrial product injected with water and various salts, to make it "juicy," because all the flavor has been bred out in the effort to transform the noble swine into "the other white meat...".

The fat of a well-raised pig is dense, white, and creamy. It renders into exquisite lard, a venerable fat with a thousand uses. In the context of a diet rich in the whole blessed variety of local, seasonal foods, and of a life rich in interest, exercise, and joie de vivre, it can be enjoyed without fear, without guilt.

You can eat the rillettes right away, but they are best if allowed to age for a day or two and, sealed with a layer of fat, they'll keep for at least a couple of weeks, improving with every day.

Vive le cochon, and would you please pass the mustard?

Rillettes de Porc
makes enough to fill three four-ounce ramekins; this recipe can easily be doubled or tripled

1 pound pork shoulder, at least one-third fat, cut in 1-inch cubes
3/4 tsp salt
coarsely ground black pepper
bay leaf
pinch quatres-épices
three sprigs fresh thyme

Place the pork, salt, bay leaf, thyme and spices in a heavy saucepan. Add water to cover by an inch or so. Bring to a boil, turn down to a simmer, cover, and cook until the pork is falling apart, three to four hours. You may need to add more water during this time.

At the end of the cooking all the water should be gone, but only just at the very end--you don't want the pork frying in its own fat. When the pork is done it will crush easily with a fork. Let the pork sit, in the pan, overnight.

In the morning, roll up your sleeves and wash your hands. Now, dig right in to the solidified mass of rillettes and crush the pieces with your fingers. Working methodically and joyfully, you may be reminded of the mystical communion experienced by the whalers in Moby Dick as they worked together to render the blubber, their arms immersed in liquid fat, their hands glancing off each other as the ship rocked on the cold, gray sea; you may not.

Work the pork with your hands until it is fairly a paste. It will be pretty melted already, but put it back on a low heat to melt it thoroughly. Remove three tablespoons of clear fat and set it aside; this will be used to seal the top of the ramekins.

Now, transfer the rillettes to a large bowl, and working over ice (or a snowbank, deer skull optional; it really has been a rough winter here*), beat the rillettes with a wooden spatula until it is quite cold and it forms a homogeneous mass. Taste for salt as it cools--you'll probably want to add a pinch or two, as it will taste less salty as it cools. Add another grind of black pepper, too.

I followed the basic recipe laid out by Jacques Pépin in A French Chef Cooks at Home. Once the rillettes are nearly done, he says you should, "...work it with the wooden spatula for 1 or 2 minutes to whiten it and make it more fluffy." Then he says (I love this part): "Remember, it should not be too fluffy. Therefore, do not overwork it." What more do you need to know? I'm not sure I would call this "fluffy," at all, never mind "too fluffy." It will be white and paté-like, and you will be tired of stirring it. So stop, already.

Divide the rillettes among three 1/2-cup ramekins. Pack it in nice and tight. Melt the fat you have saved, and pour it over the top of the rillettes, turning the ramekin to cover the top completely. Refrigerate. About an hour before serving, take a ramekin out of the fridge to warm and soften just a little. Serve with crusty bread, grain mustard, cornichons; or with a salad.

A glass or two of cold sauvignon blanc from the Loire, such as sancerre, pouilly-fumé, quincy or reuilly is especially sympa with rillettes.

_______________________________________

* Actually, that's a souvenir from the Wisconsin woods; Annabel found it for me a few years ago when we were fishing on the lower Kinnickinnic River.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Trout Caviar Book Club: Annabel's Choice

You can't say this isn't a gastronomical family, when even the dogs have their noses stuck into cookbooks! These are completely unstaged photographs, folks, I swear. Annabel's head is actually stuck between the pages of the book. She started out as below, then rolled over:

Best we could tell, she was interested in a recipe for oeufs en meurette, poached eggs in red wine sauce (I always put some of our home-smoked bacon in; a great winter dish).

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Big Fun(gi)

Having gone on at such length quite recently about the rigors of the foraging life, the sweat, the toil, the terrible encounters with thorn and bramble, etc., I feel just a little bit abashed to display this nearly effortless haul: close to twenty pounds of delectable wild fungi gathered in, oh, maybe, five minutes? Well, they came from two different spots, so there was some driving time involved. This is the joy of having a little foraging history, that I now know precisely where and when to look for some of my favorite wild mushrooms of the year.

What we're looking at here are two big hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, grifola frondosa, and one lovely specimen of a tooth mushroom, genus hericium. Whether it's the hericium commonly called a bear's head, lion's mane, old-man's-beard, or something else, I'm not sure. There's a lot of taxonomical confusion in the tooth mushroom world, I gather--and that's coming from sources far more knowledgable than I: David Arora author of the definitive (well, almost definitive, I guess I should say...) Mushrooms Demystified, for instance. It doesn't matter much, though, because all the hericiums are distinctive (as a group), edible, and, in my experience, delicious.

I've been finding these particular mushrooms for so many years now, they're like old friends. Old friends that you pluck, slice up or pull to pieces, saute, and eat.... Well, let's say they're like gifts from old friends, which is indeed what they are. The mushrooms you eat are the fruit of the fungus, which lives on after you've harvested said fruit, just as an apple tree doesn't mind if you gather its apples.

I see in my notes that I first located this tooth mushroom in 1998! It was growing in a scar in a maple tree near one of my favorite trout streams. It reoccured in that spot for several years, and then, two years ago, failed to appear. I figured that was the end of that but, hoping that it might have spread its spores to a receptive tree nearby, I checked back again last year, and found it fruiting again on the same tree, but in a different spot. It's now expressing its fungalness through another scar a couple of feet over my head, so I have to knock it off with a stick and catch it as it falls.

This year's specimen weighed just over two pounds. Those hens-of-the-woods, on the other hand, which I've been finding in the same spot for six years now, weighed in at over eleven pounds for the big one, more than five for the "small." Around here (Minnesota and Wisconsin), hens are almost always found at the base of white oak trees. They parasitize these trees, and after they've helped to kill them they'll often live on for years on the stump, which is where I found these two.

Though hens and tooth mushrooms aren't closely related, they're structurally similar, both put together a bit like a head of cauliflower, with lots of branches emanating from a solid central core. Here they are each in cross-section:

When you find mushrooms of this size, you get a lot of opportunities to experiment. We have sauteed, roasted, chopped into stuffing, grilled, used in pasta sauces. The simple saute, in good butter, with some onion or shallot and garlic, a sprig of thyme is still probably our favorite method, and we love to spoon that over a plain omelet, with of course a slice of toasted country bread alongside. These mushrooms are also fantastic when they soak up the fat and juices as they roast along with a chicken and chunks of autumn vegetables. Oh, and now I'm remembering a wild mushroom bechamel sauce made with hens, some tooth, and puffball mushrooms that contributed to the best lasagna ever.

In a cool autumn with enough rain, but not too much, you can find hens and tooth mushrooms over a period of weeks. We have finally had some decent rains here, and on a walk through the grouse woods with Annabel yesterday (seven flushes, two shots fired, zip in the game bag), I noticed more mushroom activity than I've seen all year, though nothing I knew to be edible save for a couple of water-logged oysters. It's a lovely time of year to be in the woods, anyway, even if no birds or mushrooms come home to the table. Take a walk, a pocket knife, a good field guide, and appropriate caution in approaching wild mushrooms. You're guaranteed a fine time.

Text & photos copyright 2008 by Brett Laidlaw