Pheasant Back, Ramp & Wood Nettle Pâté

I’m usually pretty confident when I start to put together a new dish, because I’ve been cooking for a long time, and because, let’s face it, most “new” dishes are usually just a tweak or two on an old dish.  You swap out an unusual ingredient for a familiar one, turn an exotic dish local or wild, that sort of thing.  You have a basic template and play around with the elements within it.  The last time I recall coming up with something truly, stunningly original was when Iaccidentally burned some honey, and then decided to throw some rhubarb juice in the pot.  The result was something remarkable, delicious, and unlike anything I’ve ever tasted.

And, I’ve never made it again.  I should.  I think even I’m a little afraid of bringing honey to the burning point, though really the worst thing that could happen is that I would burn a little honey.  Well, maybe ruin a pan, fill the house with smoke.... Maybe my reluctance is wise.

Pheasant back mushrooms tops.  They also go by the fanciful name "Dryad's Saddle."  Dryads are not as common in our woods as they once were, so I haven't had a chance to examine their saddles lately....

Anyway:  the story of this pâté was this:  I had a mess of pheasant back mushrooms, which have been abundant this spring (they grow on dead trees, including elms, so you’ll often find them while not finding morels…).  These mushrooms are a polypore, like boletes, the family that includes porcini, but their flavor is very mild, just sort of vaguely mushroomy.  When young and tender, their texture can be excellent, and then they’re fine just sliced and sautéed.  I like to do them in butter, add a little garlic and a splash of soy sauce when they’re about done.  

Tops and bottoms; note the tiny pores of this fungus whose Latin name is polyporous squamosus.

But as they mature, they become chewy, then inedibly tough.  Sometimes you can trim the outer rim of a larger one and find it sufficiently tender.  The thing I’ve learned is that if my pocket knife blade doesn’t slide through the flesh almost effortlessly, don’t bother.  Move along, keep looking, you’ll find more.  On this evening most of my pheasant backs could have been eaten simply sautéed, but that wasn’t working for me as a topping for smorrebrod, those Danish-inspired open face sandwiches, which was the dinner plan.  Pâté came to mind, a sort of ersatz chopped liver. 

I chopped the mushrooms pretty small, threw them in a pan with some butter.  As they released moisture and started to shrink, I added chopped ramps.  Then as cooking neared completion, I splashed in some soy, for umami depth, and to make it more pâté-like, a glug of red wine (I considered cognac or sherry, but thought that would be gilding the lily).  It was smelling pretty good at this point—I had added dried thyme, and a pinch of chile flakes—but there wasn’t a lot of it, and I also was dubious about what the texture of ground-up pheasant backs alone would be like.

For both bulk and texture, wood nettles came to the rescue.  They’d just started coming up in our woods, so they were in prime condition, edible and tender pretty much from bottom to top.  I roughly chopped a cup or so, added them to the pan with a little water, steamed briefly.

After removing the lid from the pan and letting most the liquid evaporate, I let the mixture cool, then transferred it to a mini-chop food processor.  From here I took the chopped liver approach of working in as much butter as conscience would allow.  Tasting along the way, adding some salt and a good bit of black pepper, I was more and more impressed.

Smorrebrod dinner leftovers make a lovely lunch.  Closewise from top: smoked trout with goat yogurt cheese and chives; wood nettle-ramp pesto with local goat feta; the pâté; wild asparagus and homemade mayonnaise.

I’ll spare you the suspense and simply say that it was excellent, and distinctive, though built on a familiar chassis.  I will definitely make this again.  Most other shrooms—button, oyster, hen of the woods—could be used in it, and other greens, wild or not.  WARNING: the recipe below is my best estimate of the quantities of ingredients used.  Since I considered it quite possible that the resulting dish would be going in the trash rather than on the dinner table, I wasn’t writing things down as I went along.   But this is in the ballpark, and y’all are clever; you’ll figure it out.

Pheasant Back, Ramp & Wood Nettle Pâté

Makes about a cup

1 generous cup chopped pheasant back mushrooms

3 plump ramp bulbs, chopped

1 generous cup (loosely packed) wood nettles, young leaves and tender stems, roughly chopped

4 tablespoons butter, divided

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1/4 cup dry red wine

1/4 cup water

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme or a couple good sprigs of fresh, leaves stripped off
Pinch red chile flakes, optional
Salt and pepper

Melt 1 1/2 tablespoons of butter in a skillet and add the mushrooms and a pinch of salt. Cook over medium heat for 4 to 5 minutes, until they start to give up some liquid and shrink a bit, then add the ramps. Sauté another 2-3 minutes, until the ramps are translucent and soft. Add the soy sauce, wine, thyme, and chile. Cook, stirring, until the liquid is mostly gone. Add the wood nettles and 1/4 cup water, cover, and simmer for 2 minutes.

Remove the lid and continue cooking until most of the liquid is evaporated. Remove the pan from the heat and set it aside to cool.

When the mixture is no longer hot, transfer it to a mini food processor or blender. Taste for salt and add if needed. Add a few grinds of black pepper. Add a couple of teaspoons of butter and begin to process. After a few seconds, stop the machine, scrape down the sides, and add a bit more butter. Repeat this process until all the butter is incorporated, then process for another 15-20 seconds. We're looking for a fairly smooth texture to the pâté.

Taste again for seasoning, adding more salt or pepper if you like. I like a pâté to be well seasoned. Transfer the pâté to a ramekin or small jar, and serve as you would chopped chicken livers and the like--lovely on crackers or toast rounds as a cocktail nosh or first course, or as one element in a buffet or smorrebrod-type meal.

 
Text and photos copyright 2016 by Brett Laidlaw

Season of the Ramp

It’s always a lovely thing to make that first foray to southeastern Minnesota trout waters in mid-April, for many reasons.  The drive south is exhilarating, as I cross tiny Hay Creek at the corner of our property and then trace the southward route of its flow that begins in springs just up the valley from us.  It finds its way to the Red Cedar River, and that pours into the broad, meandering Chippewa, a mighty waterway of this region.  The Chipp is wide, and in springtime often muddy and roiling, when it reaches the Mississippi; impressive as the Chippewa can be, it is shown its place by the Father of Waters, moving majestically, escorted by swans, gulls, and eagles, through the grand castellations of limestone bluffs.

Once across the Mighty One and into Minnesota, I now proceed against the flow, up the Whitewater and tributaries thereof, to fish more intimate water.  This modest journey is a compelling reminder of how hydrology and geology shape our lives in these parts, and the circular nature of a raindrop’s path from northern Dunn County to the sea, perhaps one day to be deposited back where it started, is appropriate to the beginning of another cycle of seasons—the beginning as we think of it here, as winter’s cold static grip is broken, and things again begin to flow, and grow.

And then, of course, it is delightful to get the wading boots wet again, string up the rod, tie on a fly, try to catch a fish.  Early season fishing is usually good, except when it’s not.  Or better to say:  the fishing is always good, but the catching may vary.

Something more certain than whether there will be fish in the creel on the homeward trip is the likelihood of taking home tasty greens.  Watercress springs are a pretty sure bet, and even when winter has been annoyingly persistent I’ve always managed to bring home at least a few decent sized ramps on that first outing, usually a few days past tax time.  It will be another couple of weeks, at least, before they’ve reached picking size in my local woods; that hour-plus drive south is a fast-forward through the season, as well.

I first became aware of ramps along a Wisconsin river maybe 20 years ago, and I’ve harvested them every year since.  Some years I’ve become tired of eating them before their season is out; some years I’ve grown jaded by the hype that has come to surround them in foodie circles.  This year, perhaps more than any other, I’ve simply embraced ramps for the seasonal delight that they are, and I’ve been eating them pretty much every day.  I haven’t really come up with any stunning new preparations of what is, really, just a wild onion, but I’ve explored its versatility by treating it as a commonplace, rather than an exotic, ingredient.

Rice bowl with brook trout, ramps, asparagus, pheasant back mushroom.

I’ve put ramps on pizza, into salad dressings, chopped into a soy-based sauce that anointed a rice bowl meal, and stir-fried for the same.  I made my chile-cheddar spread with ramps instead of onion, and slapped my head when it occurred to me I could have done that with the recipe in my book.  The ramp-infused version of that pimiento cheese variation is outstanding.  I’ve added them to a potato soufflé also   laced with chopped wood nettles, and used them to flavor a birch syrup cure for duck breast that I smoked using wild black cherry wood.

Cherry wood smoked duck magret, cured in birch syrup & ramps; bracken fiddleheads.

I made a bearnasie sauce where ramps stood in for the usual shallots, and ramp-roasted brown trout served with schupfnudeln fried with ramps and bacon, and the ramped up remoulade I wrote about recently.  Whole lotta rampin’ goin’ on….

Grilled herring with "rampearnaise;" the sauce was second-day salvage & broke a bit. Still delicious.

And still, I just want to keep eating ramps.  Maybe with age my taste buds are dulling.  I would prefer to think that the great variety of ways I’ve used them is keeping the flavor fresh and intriguing.  I’ve got a bunch in the fridge still, getting a little wilted in the greens, so I think I will pickle the bulbs of those ones.  With the weather having cooled off a bit, their season in our parts should last until the end of May, at least.  We’ll see if my rampish appetite can keep up.  

Hen of the Woods Confit

The hen of the woods are starting to come in, pretty much on schedule this year--I expect to see them in early September and continuing through the month.  Last year they apparently started in mid-August, and since I wasn't tuned in, most of what I found late in August and early September were already way past their prime.  Which was a shame, because it's one of my favorite wild mushrooms, and certainly the most abundant, at least in terms of sheer weight, since a single specimen can weigh several pounds.

Not the most beautiful of specimens, but it worked well in the confit after some trimming.

The sudden influx of fungal flesh presents a problem, along with much pleasure.  It's a versatile mushroom, excellent sauteed, roasted, even grilled, and it's an amenable companion to pretty much any meat or fish.  With its firm texture it can add a meaty element to vegetable dishes, like a promiscuous ragout of the almost paralyzing variety of garden produce available now, served over polenta or noodles.  One of my favorite ways to serve it is a simple saute of hens and red onion or shallot in plenty of olive oil, tossed with noodles and sprinkled with excellent aged gouda, like Marieke.

Well-rinsed, shredded hens in the casserole with sunflower oil and tasty duck and pork fat.

So we eat a lot of it fresh when we have it, but can rarely consume it all, even after giving away a quantity.  I've yet to find a satisfactory way to preserve it.  I think some people dry it, and I should look into that some more, though that seems a last-ditch approach.  The best I've come up with so far is par-cooking it with oil, either in the fry pan or oven, then packing portions into plastic bags and freezing it.  The confit presented here today takes that approach to the extreme, cooking the mushrooms in a lot of fat for a long time.  Initial impression:  it's a winner.

After a couple hours in the oven.

I took 12 ounces of cleaned, trimmed hens, torn into shreds about an inch wide and three inches long--of course, these are going to be pretty irregular, doesn't matter.  I tossed the shreds with a teaspoon of salt, and added these to a lidded glass casserole along with:

1/2 a big shallot (2 ounces by weight) sliced
3 cloves of garlic peeled and halved lengthwise
a few sprigs of fresh thyme
10 black peppercorns
5 juniper berries, crushed
3/4 cup fat

For the fat here, I used 1/2 cup sunflower oil and 1/4 cup of a pork and duck confit blend.  Next time I'll try it with all sunflower oil.  I would add more shallots next time, too.

Stick the covered casserole in a 350 oven for an hour, tossing every 15 minutes.  Lower the heat to 300, remove the lid, and cook for another hour or so, again tossing from time to time.

The mushrooms will give off a lot of water at first.  In the long cooking this water will evaporate, and at the end the hens will wind up almost frying gently in clear, pure fat.  If you've made duck or another kind of meat confit before, this will sound familiar.  It's the exact same progression.

At the end I removed the hens from the fat, not bothering to drain them particularly well, and found that 8 ounces remained from the original 14-plus ounces of hens, shallots, etc.  And I was able to pour out a generous half cup of fat from the 3/4 cup that went in.  The hen shreds remain a firm, appealing texture, and they're imbued with the aromatic additions and the tang of flavorful fat.  I packed them into a Weck jar, and when I added back the fat, it came right to the top.  I'll keep it in the fridge for a while and see how the flavors develop.  With the next batch I may try freezing some.

For a lovely lunch on a cool breezy day, after spending the morning in the garden harvesting ahead of possible frost this weekend, I threw some of the hen confit in a pan along with some slivered jalapeno.  The hens shed a good bit of oil, and when they were hot and the chile wilted, I removed them from the pan and tossed them with a few leaves of parsley.  A little butter in the pan, and I soft-scrambled a couple of eggs.  Served with the hens on top, sliced tomatoes on the side, toasted sourdough. 

I'm ready to get back in the garden, then later perhaps into the woods again, to see if there are more hens about.


Text and photos copyright 2014 by Brett Laidlaw

Weeds Worth the Pain

I'm bringing the blog out of hibernation to write in praise of one of my favorite wild greens, wood nettles, laportea canadensis.  I've probably had something to say about this under-appreciated cousin of the better known stinging nettle pretty much every spring.  My favorite time to harvest it is just after it has emerged, at 8 to 10 inches high, say, when it has little sting and you can consume the whole plant, adding it to a soup of wild greens or tossing it with pasta.  Wood nettles are usually up by the second week of May, and can be found in that infant state through the end of the month, depending upon your latitude.

I managed to gather a few harvests of baby wood nettles this year, but for most of May torrential rains and various obligations kept me out of the woods.  By the time I got back to check my wood nettle patches, most of the plants were up at least 18 inches, with their broad, delicate leaves fanning out widely, and their potent sting in full force.  I've said it before, but it bears repeating:  even though there's no sting in the name of wood nettles, there's a wicked one in the plant, worse than stinging nettles, in my opinion.  Maybe I've just had more bad experiences with them, as they tend to grow thick and tall near trout streams, and there's also an abundant patch of them guarding my favorite chanterelle patch.  They can sting you fiercely even through your jeans.  Beware!

Those little hairs deliver a potent sting in mature wood nettles.

But even though the wood nettles are getting tall now, they still provide excellent eating, which you can't really say for stinging nettles of the same size.  Before the plants flower and reach full height, which can be four to five feet, the leaves are still tender enough to make a versatile cooking green, and there's an added bonus product, what I've been calling "haricots verts du bois," the slender green beans of the woods:  it's the upper stems of wood nettles plants, which, when blanched and peeled, make a delightfully mild and crunchy vegetable.

Peeled (mostly) stems.

 In fact, you can eat the peeled stems raw, too, but a quick blanching in boiling water removes the sting and makes them very easy to handle.  I don't bother with gloves when picking the nettle tops, but long sleeves are probably a good idea, at least until you get the knack for picking them.  Wood nettle leaves grow in rather widely spaced tiers along the stem, which allows you to reach in, carefully, and grasp the stem about a foot down from the top.  Don't I get stung?  Am I possessed of digits of steel?  Yes I do, and no, I'm not.  I do feel a bit of sting on my fingertips, but the fingertips, at least mine, are not all that sensitive to wood nettles's sting.  So I take hold of the stem and bring my fingers up until I feel where the stem breaks easily.  As with asparagus, this is how I know that the stem is tender.

I bend it over to snap it, and as I pull it away the skin usually peels off from one side--that's how easily they peel.  When the leaves are big, stuffing them into my sack without getting stung is the most perilous operation.  So, yes, there's usually some pain involved, but it doesn't last long, and for me, the reward is more than worth it.

Once I get my prickly salad home, I dump the sack into a big bowl and wash it thoroughly--use tongs to agitate, but be gentle if you want to keep the stem sections intact, for they are delicate and break easily.  By this time, having been jumbled around in your sack and swished in water, a lot of the stinging capacity is gone, and then a dunk in boiling water does away with the rest.  The liquid you blanch the nettles in makes a tasty tea, similar to stinging nettles tea, perhaps a bit milder.  I add a little maple or, in this case, birch syrup to sweeten it a tad.

You'll notice that you can still see some of the little hairs on the unpeeled stem sections, even after blanching.  There's no sting there anymore, as I've said, but you may taste a little prickle on the tongue as you eat them. This may be an acquired taste; myself, I don't mind it.

The blanched wood nettle leaves can be used anywhere you'd use spinach, or young turnip or mustard greens.  To me, the flavor is much superior to spinach, and it doesn't make your teeth feel funny....  With the stems, pretend that they are wild haricots verts, or chop them into anything to which you want to add some crunch, from tuna salad to salsa to deviled eggs.

Or to soup, such as a bowl of ramen, which is a common lunch at this forager's house.  And when I say ramen, I'm talking the packaged kind with dry noodles and little flavoring packets.  But not the 29-cent kind.  No, with my dorm-room dining days well behind me, I now splurge for the 99-cent to $1.39 per package ramen.  Some of these deluxe instant lunches come with three count 'em three different little flavor packets--the powdered stuff, maybe some kind of oily or bean paste stuff, and one with bits of dehydrated vegetables.  Livin' large!

To fancy up my ramen just a bit, I sauté some kind of onion (or leek, ramp, shallot) in a bit of oil, add a good teaspoon of sambal, or better, our homemade chile-garlic paste, then add water, and the noodles.  I'll usually add about half the packet of powdered soup base (can't imagine how salty it would be if you used the whole thing, because it's pretty salty with half).  A minute or two before the noodles are done I toss in some greens, today, of course, wood nettles.  And today I also had some veiled oyster mushrooms that I found in our woods on my nettle-gathering walk yesterday.  These are a lesser oyster, for though they can get fairly large, the meat of the cap is thin, and they're pretty chewy.  Good flavor there, though, and a good textural addition.  A few slices of radish and spring onion, maybe a few drops of sesame oil and/or a dusting of hua jiao, because it's all about the garnish!  Slurp on.

Working in the outdoor forager's lab is very pleasant duty this time of year.  Forager's assistant Lily keeping half an eye on things.

Oil From Pumpkins

The idyllic western Wisconsin countryside we now call home is a magical place, so perhaps it’s no surprise that amazing things happen here.  There are world-class cheeses produced on modest farms, the hills become flush with morels, then chanterelles in their season, and crystalline spring creeks vivid with trout thread through the lush valleys.  In one such valley two inspired men (with a little help from their friends) are squeezing oil from pumpkins, creating a product not merely distinctive for this region, but rare in the whole U.S.A.  Ken Seguine and Jay Gilbertson are the visionaries behind  Hay River Pumpkin Seed Oil, which has been on the market since December 2006.

Pumpkin seed oil is a product well-known in Europe, particularly Austria, but when the first bottle of Hay River oil hit the shelves in 2006, it was the first

bottle of American pumpkin seed oil to hit the shelves, period.  I’m aware of at least one other company now producing pumpkin and squash seed oils, but it is still a fairly exotic ingredient in the American pantry.  Once more people learn about it, they’re going to like it.  It takes a little getting used to, since it is unlike any other oil we commonly use, but it is both approachable and versatile.  Think of it in the same vein as a high quality extra virgin olive oil in terms of how you might use it; now forget all about olive oil.  This uniquely fragrant oil is nothing like that.

The story behind the oil is as remarkable as the product.  Ken’s from suburban L.A., Jay’s from Eau Claire, and they were living in the Twin Cities when they started looking for a home in western Wisconsin to be near Jay’s parents in 2001.  It took nine months of looking until they found “our picture of heaven,” in Ken’s words.  (Another factor in their move to the area was the siren song of Roberts and Cash—that is, our friends Don and Joni of Otter Creek Growers, previously stewards of Elsie’s Farm, a near legendary endeavor that introduced many Twin Citizens to the wonders of this green, rolling land.  But not us; we didn’t really get to know Don and Joni until we started coming out to Bide-A-Wee. Along with Don and Joni, Ken also acknowledges local farmers Kate Stout and Mike and Patty Wright-Racette for helping them to get started.)

Once they were living in the country, the path to Hay River oil wound its way through their interests and experiences in an unpredictable but, in the end, undeniably organic fashion.  Ken was a life-long gardener with a plant science education, both Ken and Jay were extremely interested in sustainable foods, and they had encountered pumpkin seed oil via Ken’s one-time employer, Horst Rechelbacher—that’s the Horst, of the Aveda company, a native of Austria.  With no American pumpkin seed oil in production at the time, there was clearly a hole in the upscale oil market, and they decided to fill it.
 

For several years they tested a variety of “naked seeded” oil pumpkins, looking for the best match for the climate.  A trial pressing of their chosen variety took place in 2005.  “At every turn, we've had to invent our own way. Being the first pumpkin seed oil produced in the U.S. meant that there simply was not anyone to tell us what to do or warn us about the pot holes,” Ken wrote in an email.

The growing is the easy part, according to Ken:  “After all, they’re pumpkins, not orchids.”  And the oil, he said, practically sells itself, as well.  Keeping the whole endeavor very local, the seeds are processed by Botanic Oil in Spooner, WI.  Harvesting is probably the hardest part.  For the first few years everything was done by hand: “Very pleasant, very communal, very cool and very expensive.”  Twenty to forty people gathered for these great pumpkin emptying parties.  

When Mary and I encountered Ken and crew last fall they were in the midst of a maiden run with a new, custom-built harvester that wasn’t working very well.  Ken was cordial and smiling when we stopped on a drive to see what strange things were happening in that Barron County field on a choice October day, but he later told me that much cursing had preceded our arrival.  The custom machine was temperamental, and slow; they’re now looking in to buying a European-made harvester.

Ken Seguine and crew harvesting pumpkins

You can read much more about Ken and Jay’s journey at their website; it’s well worth the read. 

Now about the oil.  Maybe start with the color, which is remarkable.  The Hay River website describes it as dark red, but it can also appear to be a striking dark green, depending on the light and whether you’re looking at a thin or thick layer of it.  This phenomenon is called dichromatism.   Perhaps it has to do with red and green being complementary colors, which is also a factor in red-green color blindness, with which your faithful correspondent is blessed.  But still I have no trouble appreciating the beauty of the oil’s color; to me it appears mostly to be a deep forest green.  The color makes it a splendid choice for garnishing pale, contrasting foods—we’ve used it on polenta, and drizzled on poached eggs.

Polenta with pumpkin seed oil, pan-seared Superior whitefish

The way the seeds are processed contributes to both the color and the aroma of the oil:  the seeds are toasted, then cold-pressed.  The toasting lends a nutty fragrance and flavor, but there’s still a fruity component to the scent.  I’ve often found a simpatico between the smell of chanterelles and that of a fresh sliced pumpkin, and I get some of that in the oil’s aroma, too.  It’s one of the things that led me to concoct the salad below.  As dark as the oil is, you might expect a real noseful when you take a sniff, but it’s subtle, much milder than sesame oil, which can easily take over a dish.  The tempered insinuations of Hay River oil make it much more versatile than I would have thought.  It threads through a salad and nicely blends with the other flavors, while providing a uniquely silky unctuousness.  I wouldn’t splash it into every salad I make, but then, I wouldn’t do that with a really expensive olive oil, either.

Raw squash, celery root, and apple salad with pumpkin oil dressing 

Which brings us to the price.  At nearly $20 for a 250 ml (8.45 ounce) bottle, it’s certainly on the spendy side.  But a little does go a long way, and for adding unique, local flavor to my cooking, I’m happy to keep a bottle on hand (Ken and Jay did give me one bottle to experiment with).  Ken hopes that scaling up production and making the processing less labor intensive will help to bring down the price.  Cooking and salad oil have been one glaring lack in the pantries of those of us trying to keep our food as local as possible; with Hay River pumpkin oil and Minnesota’s Smude cold-pressed sunflower oil, I’m on the verge of phasing out canola, and I’m using way less olive oil than I used to.  I get really excited to see these kinds of products come on the market, and I feel extremely grateful to people like Ken and Jay and the Smude family, true visionaries, for making them available to us.

Ken suggests using the oil drizzled over squash soup, lightly salted as a bread dip, or even on vanilla ice cream—I’ve not tried the latter, but it sounds intriguing.  In a salad dressing made with pumpkin oil, I think the usual proportions of three parts oil to one of acid would be overwhelming.  In the dressing for the chanterelles and green bean salad below, I went one to one, and still the pumpkin oil flavor was pronounced, very pleasantly so.  Maybe the best way to describe the flavor of this oil is to say that it’s assertive, but not aggressive; so it won’t take over a salad made with tender spring greens, but can stand up to stronger flavors, like wild mushrooms, or beets.

Hay River Pumpkin Seed Oil is pretty easy to find in the Twin Cities and western Wisconsin.   See here for exact locations.

Shaved Chanterelle and Haricots Verts Salad with Raspberries and Pumpkin Seed Oil Vinaigrette

Except for the salt, this salad is one hundred percent local, and with chanterelles and pumpkin seed oil, it combines two of the most distinctive flavors I know.  A total whim based entirely on seasonal convergence and my own personal association of chanterelles and pumpkins, it is a splendid blend of contrasting and complementary flavors, aromas, and textures.  If you don’t have a really good cider vinegar, rice wine vinegar might work, or try a bit less sherry vinegar.  The raspberries provide bright flavor and lovely color.  I used small wild red and black raspberries.  Chanterelles are unique among mushrooms in nearly every respect, but I suspect that a firm cultivated mushroom, like shitake, might work; or perhaps oysters?  Worth a try. This is a keeper.

Serves two

4 medium chanterelles, about 2 ounces total

2 teaspoons unsalted butter

20 small haricots verts

1 tablespoon minced shallot or sweet onion

Salt

2 tablespoons raspberries

Chervil for garnish, optional

Dressing:

1 tablespoon pumpkin seed oil

1 tablespoon cider vinegar

¼ teaspoon maple syrup

Pinch salt
Coarse sea salt

In a small saucepan blanch the beans in boiling water for 1 ½ to 2 minutes.  Drain and refresh under cold running water. Drain and set aside.

Place each chanterelle cap side down on a cutting board and slice very thinly through the stem end to the cap.  Melt the butter in a medium skillet over medium heat and add the chanterelles and a pinch of salt.  Toss the chanterelles in the butter for about a minute, then add 3 tablespoons of water, cover the skillet, and cook for 2 minutes.  Remove the lid and add the shallot or onion, and continue cooking over medium heat until the water has evaporated.  Cook for another minute, then remove the chanterelles from the pan into a mixing bowl.  Add the beans to the mixing bowl, as well.

Mix the dressing and spoon it over the chanterelles and beans.  Mound the salad on small plates and garnish with raspberries—a perhaps 8 per person.  Sprinkle a bit of good coarse sea salt--like sel de Guerande, fleur de sel, or Maldon--over top.  Add a sprig of chervil if you have it.  It is the prettiest of the herbs, I think.

(Disclosure:  Jay Gilbertson, a novelist, reviewed my cookbook on Amazon.com; the review was also printed in the Hay River Review and the Dunn County News.  It was pretty much a dream review, for which I am extremely grateful, and might seem to be beholden, except that I was a fan of Hay River oil well before the book or review appeared.)




Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Chanterelles, the First of 2012

I considered a few clever titles for this post, along the lines of "There's Gold in Them Thar Hills!", that sort of thing.  Then I decided to cut the crap and get right to the important news:  the chanterelles are up in west central Wisconsin.  I brought home about a pound and a quarter from yesterday's outing.  It's the most thrilling wild harvest of the year, in this forager's opinion.

In fact, I recorded an essay on this golden topic for the  Wisconsin Life essay series on Wisconsin Public Radio last week.  The piece starts out, "When the summer has been warm, and wet, I start to look for them the first week in July...".  And so when I happened to look at the calendar and notice that it was the second week in July in this warm, wet (enough) summer, I wondered why on earth I hadn't been out to my favorite chanterelle woods.  Straight away, I remedied that omission.

This is the sort of woods I search in:

It's a mature forest, mostly oak, though I've found them in quantities in a friend's woods where the maples may outnumber the oaks.  An important feature here is the lack of underbrush, or even many weeds on the forest floor.  They're choked out by the thick mat of leaves.  This makes it easy for the forager to get around, and makes the mushrooms easier to see once they do push through the leaves.  It's on a steep slope, too.  Fairly steep, oaky hillsides are the only places I've found chanterelles.  That's not to say they might not be found elsewhere.  I'd love to hear about other foragers' experiences with chanterelles, my favorite wild mushroom.

On this day I was ready to conclude that I was too early, after all.  Nothing in the first spot I checked, nothing along the trail that is often spangled with them by now.  So I was about ready to exit the woods and head for the trout stream, instead, when I saw this:

Just a little button, which I did not pick, but it got me looking more carefully.  I found two or three larger ones in that area, and then I did a clever thing:  I backtracked up the path I'd just come down, to find the several nice-sized chanterelles that I had walked right past.  It wasn't that I had been inattentive, but sometimes the angle makes all the difference, and almost all the mushrooms I found this day were pretty well hidden in a thick layer of oak leaves.  Later in the season, even next week, I hope to find a lot that look like this:

But yesterday they mostly looked like this, so it was like playing "find the fungus":

Make that "find the fungi":

A while back I developed a superstition, on some foray when the chanterelles were harder to come by, that a turkey feather on the ground would point me to a find. For example:

My timing this year was perfect. It would have been a wasted trip if I'd become anxious and headed for the woods last week. The pound-plus that I brought home will keep us happy for at least a week, and it was delightful to find little babies like these, so pretty in a bed of moss (sorry for the crappy picture, but I wanted to show how small they can be when they're just emerging):

It fuels anticipation for next week, and beyond. You never can tell with mushrooms, but this chanterelle season is off to a promising start. We could use a little more rain, but not pounding cloudbursts that kick up mud on the mushrooms. The weather over the next few days looks fairly pleasant, but a chanterelle hunt is never a cakewalk, at least not the way I do it. I started the morning with a sweatshirt on, and got to the woods early, around 7:30. Nonetheless, I had ditched the sweatshirt before I started, and had sweated through my T-shirt well before I was done. I was swarmed upon by ravenous mosquitoes and buzzed by annoying deerflies, got stung by nettles and scratched by prickly ash. It's all part of the package, and well worth it.

 Hit the woods. You may strike gold.

Text and copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

"It's as if there's something in there that you may never get again, so you don't want to eat it too fast, but you can't stop eating it."

Smoked Trout with Gooseberry Mayonnaise, Grilled Wild Oyster Mushrooms, and Garden Forage Salad

Sometimes the path to a delectable plate of food is short and direct, and sometimes it wanders through an unexpected forage, a sorrel juice swamp, fatigue-induced lowering of expectations, and several happy discoveries before arriving at its destination. This is a case of the latter circumstances.

 The first thing I must confess to: I DID NOT CATCH THE TROUT. No, indeed, I purchased it. Farm-raised rainbow trout from the  Bullfrog "Eat My Fish" trout farm south of Menomonie. See, a writer contacted me asking for a recipe to accompany an article on fly fishing along the Ice Age Trail in Wisconsin. I said, can do, but I didn't want to recycle a recipe. To come up with a new preparation, I needed trout. But with all the recent rain, our streams are flowing bank-full, unfishable. So it was off to the fish farm, which I'd been meaning to visit, anyway. It's a totally charming spot not far from the confluence of the Red Cedar and Chippewa Rivers, and I look forward to a return visit on a weekend when the music is playing and they're cooking up shore lunch trout fries.

I bought four fish. Two of them I grilled and served over market and garden greens with a bacon and spring onion jam. It was great, but that is not the dish I'm writing about today. With the two remaining trout, I had an ambitious plan: one I would grill, and serve with a gooseberry sauce that appears in Judith Jones's memoir, The Tenth Muse ; the other I would poach, and serve with a mayonnaise in which sorrel juice would take the place of lemon. The mayonnaise was an idea I'd been toying with since I started having fun with rhubarb juice. I'd been planning to make that complex meal on Sunday night.


Sunday morning Mary and I loaded the bikes on the car and drove to Downsville (not far from the fish farm, in fact) to take a ride on the Red Cedar State Trail--our first ride together of the year, and a perfect day for it. I had not planned to forage, but sometimes you seek out wild food, and sometimes wild food is thrust upon you. The first thing we encountered was elderberry bushes in bloom. No surprise there, as we had noticed the pretty white umbels along the roadways. We stopped to savor the flowers' delicate aroma, then moved on.

We didn't get far before the gooseberries caught our eye, big patches along a considerable stretch of the trail. We had no bags or other containers (except what our lunch was packed in), so we picked a few handfuls and dropped them into Mary's pannier. Black cap raspberries were also starting to ripen, and we tasted a few of those before moving on (I walked into a patch of wood nettles trying to get at some of the black caps, and was reminded that one ignores the stinging qualities of those innocuous-looking plants at one's own peril--I was scratchin' and pedalin', pedalin' and itchin'...).

We made it without further incident or delay to the end of the Red Cedar trail, where it joins the Chippewa River State Trail, very near where the two rivers meet. The Chippewa drains a considerable watershed, and it was high and roiling after all the June rain. Usually by midsummer the Chippewa meanders sweetly along broad sandy beaches--it always makes me think of the Loire River in France; if only west central Wisconsin were home to the lovely restaurant/inns that are so prevalent in the Loire. It's an up-and-coming wine area, but I honestly don't know where I'd go in this area to enjoy a meal with any kind of French finesse.

Well, we had sandwiches, hard-cooked eggs, and sweet little carrots from the farmers market. But before our déjeuner pique-nique, we were lured to the trailside bushes again by what I first thought were black currants, but which turned out to be ripe gooseberries--the two plants are, of course, very closely related. We picked gooseberries for a while, and also gathered about a cup of black caps--we ate the eggs as an hors-d'oeuvres to free up a container. The day's last foraging surprise came in the form of two clumps of white on a dead standing elm. I made a U-turn and quickly confirmed that they were oyster mushrooms. I used my bike pump to thrash a path through the nettles (succeeded in being stung, nonetheless--you can't say I'm one to learn from painful experience...), reached the tree, and was able to knock both clumps off with a dead branch--one flew off into the nettles, but the other I nimbly snatched before it hit the ground. Both were in reasonable condition (more than I could say for myself) when I put them in my bag--just a few of those beetles that seem to always inhabit oysters.

We ate our sandwiches in a shady spot where a spring trickled out of a limestone wall and made a little cascade as it flowed toward the river. We made it back to the farm in mid-afternoon (after a stop for a root beer float at the Menomonie DQ, utterly satisfying). It was a lot of sun and activity for us oldsters who hadn't been on the bikes much. I took a nap. When I got up I took a shower. I started thinking, grilled trout poached trout sorrel mayonnaise gooseberry sauce.... I started thinking, "Plan B." We had some chicken andouille in the freezer from Seward Co-op. I said to Mary, honey, we're having sausage tonight.

But the thought of those trout in the fridge was nagging me. I'd bought them on Thursday, now it was Sunday, three days later, and they still smelled fine, but another whole day.... I wasn't sure they'd be delicious simply grilled by Monday night. Into the brine they went, to get all tasty for a date with the smoker on Monday.

Late Monday afternoon I built a cottonwood fire while the trout rested after being removed from the brine. I love a homemade mayonnaise with smoked trout, and I still had that sorrel idea in mind. I gathered a few leaves of sorrel from the planter on our deck, chopped them roughly, whizzed them up in the mini-chop with a bit of water. Sieved the resulting slurry, and...oh, baby, that was some nasty stuff. The raw, unsweetened rhubarb juice was pretty harsh, but this stuff was in the chemical weapons department.  Once the initial shock subsided, I took another whiff. It smelled a bit like the rhubarb juice, and very, very strongly like fresh-mown grass--so I wonder if that was precisely the smell of chlorophyll.  I think I'm going to leave the sorrel alone until after a few fall frosts have mellowed it.

At any rate, we were now at Plan C level...or was it D? Enter gooseberries. Judith Jones's gooseberry sauce is an extremely basic concoction of berries, sugar, and water. Intriguing in its simplicity. I was still hankering for mayonnaise. So I took a half cup of gooseberries, half green and half ripe, and put them in the mini-chop with a quarter cup of water, whizzed it up, strained it. Gooseberries have a lot of pectin, so my juice was more of a puree. But it smelled and tasted good, tart but a little sweet. I added half a teaspoon of sugar. That gave me three tablespoons of puree.

I proceeded with my mayonnaise, omitting the mustard I usually start with.  My oil was half plain canola and half Smude cold-pressed sunflower oil.   It took a bit more whisking and slightest dribbling of oil at the start to get the emulsion started, and once started it was looser than usual, but that turned out to be a plus. When the oil was half in I added some of the puree, then near the end the rest, along with a couple pinches of salt. I separated the finished sauce into two ramekins, and to one added a few green gooseberries finely minced, so one ramekin was smooth and one was chunky. Mary and I agreed that we preferred the chunky. The gooseberry flavor was subtle, but there.  I think if I had cooked the berries briefly to extract more of a juice, it might have given a stronger gooseberry flavor, but I don't necessarily think it would have been better.


Here's what Mary said about this mayonnaise at dinner (and she had only had less than one glass of Sancerre--the perfect wine, as it happens, to accompany smoked trout with gooseberry mayonnaise): It's as if there's something in there that you may never get again, so you don't want to eat it too fast, but you can't stop eating it. 

As for the rest: The Bullfrog trout that we had grilled had seemed a little bland compared to stream trout; the smoked fish, however, was some of the best I've ever had. That had to do partly with the moist, fatty flesh of those rainbows, and partly with the cottonwood smoke, another happy accident brought about by the fact that we have all these cottonwood logs lying around the yard. I'd been impressed by the grilling qualities of the wood, so decided to give smoking with it a try. It had a subtler flavor than the apple I usually use, more like Pacific Northwest alder-smoked salmon. (I was about to write that that might make sense, since alder and cottonwood are in the same tree family, but a quick Google reveals that they are not closely related.) It was beautifully smoked fish, moistly sweet and savory, and delicious with a dab of mayonnaise or without.

The grilled oyster mushrooms: Mary said it before I could: Bacon for vegetarians. I had tossed them with a bit of sunflower oil, salt and pepper, and grilled them until well brown. Fungi cum bacon, say no more.

The salad: A proud achievement for us, our first salad entirely from our new gardens. It required a bit of foraging/weeding in the form of the succulent purslane, which will be appearing in many more salads this summer, as it is abundant in our garden, and delightful on the plate, with a refreshing crunch and a lemony twist. Pea tendrils, whoever knew you could eat these, back in the day? I first tasted them when I was teaching in Chengdu, more than twenty years ago, now, and then literally jumped for joy the first time I saw them at the Saint Paul Farmers Market. Now they're everywhere, and more than a bit trendy. I consider it forage, and delicious. Then some red leaf lettuce, bit of sliced radish.  It was dressed with some  Hay River Pumpkin Seed Oil, a bit of our homemade cider vinegar, and a little coarse salt.


 Many detours later, then, a memorable meal.  I hope to get back down to the Red Cedar Trail to gather more berries. Right at the trailhead there's a sign saying that the public is welcome to gather mushrooms, berries, and nuts from this state-owned land. It says to leave the flowers alone, so I'll get my elderflowers elsewhere. They're blooming like crazy now.


Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw