The spikes of multiple flowers are wonderful in the vase, but also a great show in the garden. Used as a focal point in the perennial bed, as a Derby Day sentinel at the gate to the terrace or in the cutting garden, you can’t go wrong with a good thrifty clump of lupines.

Lupine (Lupinus species)

By Eric Larson 

The Lupine in one of our Iris beds is a structural entity in the garden, even when not in bloom, and when, as now, it IS in full bloom, it is indeed magical.

As a member of the Pea family, Fabaceae, it’s also useful. Lupines can be grown as soil-nourishing cover crops, and they’re helpful companion plants when intercropped with cucumbers, squash, broccoli and spinach.

Not all lupines are edible, but the ones that are have a full range of essential amino acids and can be used as an alternative to soybeans. Those of you who like me thought that Lupine seeds were poisonous may be surprised to learn that lupini dishes are commonly found in the cuisine of many Mediterranean countries.

The “sweet” varieties of Lupinus, those that have no bitter-tasting,  unsalubrious alkaloids, are grown commercially in parts of Europe and are used for everything from vegan sausages to flour. [Such products often wear warning labels because -  also like soybeans - lupines can provoke allergic reactions. L.L.]

Among the three hundred (or more, authorities differ) Lupinus species there are a few outlying woody trees and shrubs, but most are herbaceous plants, including the handsomely flowering lupines of ornamental horticulture.

Although most ornamental lupines are technically perennials, many gardeners treat them as biennials because of their tendency to flower the second year and then start declining right away. Full sun and well-drained, average fertility soil are essential to longevity, and “unimproved” species often last longer than the gorgeous hybrids featured in catalogs.

Not many pests bother with your Lupine but aphids will sometimes cover it. If they do, insecticidal soap or one of the beneficial insects will likely take care of them. Lady Beetles work wonders, but I wouldn’t recommend the purchase of same: they tend to be too mobile to do the gardener much good. That being said, the sight of a Lady Beetle larva eating an adult aphid is a sight to behold: they pick them up and eat them just like you and I would eat an ear of corn, moving down the length and turning it slightly to get the next row. Fantastic!

Flowering lupines are fairly easy to start from seed  - my preferred method – but if you are in a hurry for flowers it’s nice to know potted plants old enough to bloom the first year are widely available. Be sure to ask the seller about expected bloom season; seedlings too young to perform their first year  are also offered in spring.

Depending on the species and variety, the flower color can range from yellow to blue, salmon pink to purple and almost red.  Most of the types available as horticultural specimens are in the cooler range of purple to violet. The height is in the two-and-a-half to three-foot range when in flower, with multiple flower spikes emerging over a ten day to two-week period.

These are close to ideal cutting stage

The flowers are not the longest-lived cut flowers, but I have found if you cut them when no more than a third of the flowers have popped open (they open from the bottom of the flower working upwards), then they will last for several days in the vase. They are an unbelievably striking focal point in a large vase with just some fern leaves around the bottom.

The genus name Lupine comes from the root word lupinus, Latin for wolf.  Lupine as an adjective also means savage, ravenous and predatory, all connected with the wolf. This may have something to do with the propensity for some species to become invasive, as on the South Island of New Zealand,  where Lupinus  polyphyllus has covered stream banks and roadsides.

The native Bluebonnet in Texas( fittingly, L. texensis ) is also on the aggressive side, but of course its predominance is welcome there as part of the spring display and indeed a deserving focus of festivals, tours and other events.

One last note here about the writing of this column. If what Lao Tzu said in the 71st chapter of the Tao Te Ching is correct, then I am well on my way to enlightenment.  “He who regards his intellectual knowledge as ignorance has deep insight.”

The more I learn about gardening and horticulture, the more convinced I am about how much I don’t know. I reckon I could come up with a pseudo-Sino saying here about how long the road is, each step is an adventure, the path is winding and steep in some places, and broad and flat in others, but really, I much prefer the role of ‘guide on the side,’ to that of ‘sage on the stage.’

So let me just say that I am humbled every day in the garden, and if your observations differ from mine or you have anything to add to the discussion, I would truly appreciate hearing from you in the comments. Contributions are anonymous unless you want your identity – or website! – to be revealed, so there’s no downside to sharing more widely.

INVITATION: We will be having an open house here at the garden on Friday May 25, from five thirty to eight o’clock.  I have emboldened that time frame so that you will notice it is a change from our previous events which I mercifully cut short at seven so as not to bother people with my feeble attempts at explaining the miracles  of plant life, evolution and adaptation.  But this time we will keep  the neighbors whining deep into the evening, providing tours of the glass houses, light refreshments and our usual array of live musical talent.

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View from a roadside that’s near my house but could be almost anywhere in coastal Maine when it’s lupine time.

Our lupines are right up there with lighthouses and lobster boats for iconic Maine sights-to-see, and although there are both good and “bad” years, there has never in my four decades of residence been an early summer when they didn’t show up.

This has led a great many people to assume they’re native wildflowers. They’re not. Or usually they’re not. Most of the time they’re the same invaders Eric described conquering New Zealand, L. polyphyllus, a parent of many well-loved hybrids, which is only  a native wildflower in the Pacific Northwest.

We do have a native blue lupine, L. perennis, but the bigger, more vigorous, mullti-colored L. polyphyllus is driving them out. This is not an entirely good thing, however spectacular visually, because the native species is an essential food for the larvae of a highly endangered native butterfly, the Karner Blue.

There are a number of reasons the butterfly is threatened with extinction; the fact that they don’t like L. polyphyllus (or are poisoned by it, depending on which source you consult) isn’t the only problem. But it certainly isn’t helping.

Total Ramp tart. Similar to quiche, but with with less custard, more ramp (and crisper crust).

Having recently worried around at the ethical questions attendant on promoting wild foods to all and sundry,  I offer this post with mixed emotions.

On the one hand, Have Ramps Will Cook. We are lucky enough to have access to several large patches; the spirit of experiment springs eternal and besides, people have been asking.

On the other hand, providing recipes is – I hope! – an invitation to use those recipes, so there we are with the ethics again, along with  another reservation,

namely that ramps are at their most delicious when most simply prepared. Recipes that play around with these fleetingly available wild pleasures may be very tasty, but they have an unfortunate tendency to reduce the star ingredient to a supporting player.

But then on the third hand (something I often wish I had in spring garden and foraging season), some ramp recipes have components that work with other ingredients too. The tart shell below, for example, can be used for all sorts of custard or mousse based pastries, so there’s a bit of redeeming social value that has nothing to do with the marquee vegetable.

Ways to Use Ramps

RAW:

• In a green salad vinaigrette, made with two thirds to three fourths Romaine and the rest roughly chopped ramp leaves, with a modest number of chopped ramp bulbs for crunch and punch (they’re not as garlicky as they smell, but if they’re freshly harvested they’re not shy, either).
• Chopped and mixed with mayonnaise moistened sandwich fillings like tuna, chicken and hard boiled egg.
• To make Ramp Butter. Finely mince a few, using both bulbs and leaves, put the result on absorbent toweling and squeeze out any free liquid, then mix the greenery with an equal to slightly larger volume of softened salted butter. Chill tightly covered for up to 10 days or freeze. Use as a topping for grilled meat or fish, baked potatoes or winter squash, on steamed asparagus or as a finishing fillip for milk based chowders. Spread it on slices of toasted baguette to get a pretty upgrade on the usual garlic bread.

COOKED:

• On their own as a green vegetable. Cut them up, keeping bulbs and leaves separate. Cook quickly in butter or olive oil, giving the bulbs about a minute head start on the greens. Eat. Heat makes ramps even sweeter while making them less pungent. Plop a poached egg in the middle, it’s dinner.
• In mixed vegetable stir fries – add the chopped ramps after you turn off the heat.
• In Pasta with Asparagus and Herbed Ramp Hollandaise, Roasted Ramps with Morels and New Potatoes, or Endive Wraps with Chicken and Roast Vegetables, all available on this post  (Where I promised a recipe for ramp-wrapped meatloaf without stopping to remember I never make meatloaf the same way twice, so it never showed up. The recipe is: make meatloaf – I’m pretty sure the one in the picture was mostly venison. Form it into a fat cylinder, wrap the cylinder in a double layer of ramp leaves and wrap the whole works in foil. Bake on a shallow pan, peeling back the foil for the last 15 minutes or so.)

Total Ramp Tart

Conveniently made without a tart pan (or pie plate). It was inspired by this Rustic Ramp Tart but differs in having a lot more ramp in proportion to egg, in being innocent of cheese, in being more like a main dish than a snack, and, I have to confess, in being a bit more of a production to make which of course I think is worth it. The finished tart is very good hot, but even better at room temperature.

Bonus aspect: Shaping the crust with a double raised edge produces a deeper shell than just rolling up the perimeter, but it’s still flat enough to pre-bake blind (unfilled) for maximum crispness, without the whole “ line with foil, fill with beans, etc.” routine. That means you can fill it with a modest amount of anything that needs a pre-baked shell from quiche mixtures to  pastry-cream lined fresh fruit tarts. Just in time for strawberry season!

For an 8.5 inch tart, 4 main dish, 8 appetizer servings:

• Pastry for a one-crust pie (this one is fine if you don’t have a favorite)
• 1 beaten egg
• (a pizza stone, if available. It makes a crisper bottom crust but is not essential)
• approximately 2 dozen good-sized ramps
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/3 cup cream
• ½ tsp. kosher salt
• 1 tbl. butter

Make the crust:

1. Place the pastry between two sheets of waxed paper and roll out a little thicker than you would for pie crust – 3/8 inch, if you were measuring which please don’t bother. Put the whole works on a flat sheet and refrigerate or freeze.
2. Use a toothpick to trace around an 8.5 inch template (overturned plate, bottom of spring form, cake pan). Remove top sheet of waxed paper and cut the circle on the marked line. Cut another line about ½ inch in toward the center. Re-cover and return to the fridge.
3. Remove top sheet of paper, pick up the ring of crust, put it on a flat pan and refrigerate.  Set aside the ragged outer edge of pastry in case you need to make repairs, then replace the waxed paper and roll the circle out until it’s about 10.5 inches in diameter and probably no longer tidily circular. No problem. Back to the fridge.
4. Remove top sheet of waxed paper and replace with baking parchment. Flip pastry and peel off other waxed paper. Brush outer 3 inches or so with the beaten egg, apply the chilled circle of dough, then roll the outer edge up over the ring, crimping as though for a conventional pie. Into the fridge once more while oven heats to 375 (with the stone on the middle shelf).
5. Bake for 10 minutes, then check. If bottom of shell is rising, prick just the top layer with a sharp knife point to deflate. Continue baking until the shell is completely cooked, well browned all over, 15 to 20 minutes more. You may have to cover with foil near the end to keep the rim from over browning but this is less likely here than with blind-baked deep shells.

Make the filling:

1. While the crust is baking, cut bulb ends from the ramps. Halve the long way, then slice across thinly. Set aside. Chop the tops coarsely. Set aside. Beat the leftover beaten egg with the yolk, cream and salt and set that aside.
2. When the crust is almost done, just a couple of minutes away, melt the butter in a wide skillet over medium high heat. Cook the chopped bulbs until translucent, about a minute, then add the chopped greens and keep cooking, stirring constantly, until they’ve wilted and darkened, about a minute more. Object is to reduce mass and drive off extra water without cooking any longer than absolutely necessary, and to have the ramps hot when they get put on the crust.
3. Spread the greens on the crust and slowly pour in the egg mixture; it’s basically just enough to glue the greens to themselves and the crust and there should be room for all of it, but if not, stop before overflow. Return tart to the oven, lower heat to 350 and bake just long enough to set the egg, about 8 minutes. (Extra filling, if any, can safely be poured over the top after about 4 minutes.)

Serve warm or at room temperature, neither hot nor cold. And don’t try to reheat it in the microwave; extra liquid will be forced out, making the tart runny and soggy…As you can tell, I tried it.

Ramps (Allium tricoccum) at home in typical habitat

We regularly hunt for and pick them, trying to be responsible about it. We frequently  cook and eat them  in season, trying not to be too piggy about it. And I, at least, have two sub-questions:

1. Is the worry about over-harvesting* justified? And
2. Is it possible to formulate a general rule for the ethical enjoyment of foraged wild foods?

Given our intense involvement with wild mushrooms, you won’t be surprised to hear I didn’t start thinking about this the day before yesterday. It’s been at least 15 years since morels entered what might be called the upscale mainstream, and at least 10 since a host of other wild mushroom species started popping up in retail markets.

Ecologically, mushrooms and ramps are very different. Fungi are not plants and mushrooms are not fruits, but the mushrooms we eat are like fruits in function. Their purpose is purely reproductive, so they can be harvested over and over without damaging the parent fungus. Ramps, on the other hand, are entire plants, ** and they are plants that grow slowly. The trip from seed to harvest size can take three to five years.

But for the purposes of this discussion, wild mushrooms and ramps are very similar: both are foraged foods that have only recently become popular with a wide range of consumers, even though they have long histories of culinary use.

Traditionally, most foragers were country dwellers who gathered these foods recreationally from places nearby, for themselves and their families and, on occasion, for sale or sharing at local festivals.

These amateurs are still around, but now that there’s an expanding market, there is also an expanding group of professionals,  foragers who gather wild foods to sell, who do this work full time and who may move from place to place with the seasons, following what is for them a primary source of income.

Regrettably, many professional foragers are not professionals in the sense of having respect for the long term health of their industry. They have no interest in conservation – either of the target comestible or of the environment that sustains it -  and because time is money as surely in the woods as anywhere else, the more they can harvest from any one place, the better.

As a result, large swaths of territory can be so thoroughly stripped that the valuable product – whatever it is -  cannot regenerate. And if the land is so badly torn up that other species become collateral damage, well, tough darts.

In view of these problems, it might at first seem as though the rule is easy, an extension of the currently fashionable idea that one should slaughter the animals if one wishes to eat meat: do it yourself or don’t do it. If consumers don’t buy wild foods, heedless harvesting will not be an issue.

All very well and good (about the wild foods, I mean, please don’t get me started on the meat). But there are a few little problems:

1. Not all commercial harvesters are full time, and not all of them are pros-come-lately. I may be particularly sensitive to this because I live in Maine, where foraging has been a way of life for many since time out of mind, but I think most people would hesitate before suggesting an end to, for instance, blackberry picking. And there are a lot of reasons why telling clam diggers to stop it sounds like a bad idea, right up there with saying all lobster boats should be converted to sport vessels.

2. Also because I live in Maine, I’ve seen first hand how a niche product, in this case sea urchins, can quickly go from ubiquitous nuisance to species at risk, complete with licensed harvesters and very short, tightly regulated harvest seasons. It took about two decades.  But regulations did get adopted before it was too late; the urchins appear to be recovering. I suppose there’s no point in hoping a lesson was learned, the tragedy of the commons shows no signs of going away. But it may not be too farfetched to hope a more organized industry could be a sustainable one.

3. Although there are examples of local near-extinctions, there’s not much hard evidence that foraging is endangering wild foods to any significant degree. And it’s becoming clearer and clearer that – if you’re talking about the survival of an entire species – over harvesting may be  less of a threat than loss of habitat. Urchins, for instance, are very sensitive to things like pollution and water temperature. Ramps can grow in shady back yards, but not under streets and houses.

April 1, 2012 (no fooling). You can just see the tips of the ramp leaves below the sign. The much smaller lettering says “Good for salads and pesto!”

* For a decent, albeit tip-of-the-icebergy overview of the endangerment issue, see When Digging for Ramps Goes Too Deep, by Indirani Sen, published last April in the New York Times.

** One conservation-minded suggestion, made by me among many others, is to harvest only leaves and not too many, so  that the bulb below will be able to regenerate. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go to the root of the problem, which is that the bulb is the tastiest part.

Ramp photos by Bill Bakaitis

late autumn color, late autumn flavor: winter squash, chestnuts and wild mushrooms

Must say I do love a soup that tastes rich and creamy without being heavy – or containing cream. Also nice if it doesn’t require an arsenal of seasonings and is easy and quick to make.

The quick part does assume the squash is already baked, and that you know speedy ways to peel chestnuts, but why not? *

As usual, the ingredient list is pretty much the whole recipe, but given that the beauty shot of the main ingredients promised something a bit more extensive, here’s a rough outline, based on the most recent iteration.

“Rough” and “most recent” are definitely the words for it; this is one of those home style soups that’s infinitely variable.

In other words, almost impossible to screw up.

If we’ve eaten most of  the squash, I just use more mushroom and chestnut. When I have the help of chestnut peelers, I shamelessly take advantage. Don’t have these particular mushrooms ? No problem, there are plenty of alternatives.

That’s “alternative,” as in “it’ll be good, but in a different way.” Recipes that call simply  for wild mushrooms or mixed wild mushrooms drive me nuts.

As though there were no differences! Granted, all of them taste like mushrooms, but anyone who thinks Boletus edulis and Cantharellus cibarius can be interchanged willy-nilly should have their head examined simply isn’t paying attention.

I am tempted to rant at length. Instead will just mildly point out that this soup can be made with almost any pair of mushrooms, wild or domestic, but one of them should be an intensely flavored low moisture variety like hen of the woods or shiitake and the other should be a firm, meaty but tender variety like lactarius or cremini.

AUTUMN SOUP

as measured out in midcoast Maine in Late October 2011

3 tbl. butter

3.5 oz. Lactarius thyinos, cut into half-inch chunks

A large onion in roughly 1/3 inch dice

5 oz Grifola frondosa coarsely chopped

12 chestnuts, roasted, peeled, and coarsely chopped

5 c. light chicken stock

6 oz. baked winter squash, roughly cut into walnut sized chunks

4 good sized springs of fresh thyme – enough to add a hint but not a shout

3 scrapings of nutmeg

1. Melt the butter in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the lactarius chunks and cook, stirring occasionally, until they are lightly browned and completely cooked through. Remove and set aside.

2. Add the onion, cook until golden, then add the frondosus. Keep cooking and stirring until the vegetables are brown and there is no free liquid in the pan. Stir in the chestnuts, add the broth, cover, and simmer over very low heat until everything is falling-apart soft, about an hour, maybe more.

3. Stir in the squash and seasonings, cover and cook until the squash is more or less dissolved, about 20 minutes.

4. Fish out the thyme and puree the soup. Depending on the toughness of the mushrooms, it will come out somewhere between fine applesauce and French Restaurant. This batch was the former and perfectly tasty, but I did put it thorough a strainer to achieve F.R. for its portrait.

5. Reheat, salt to taste and portion out, topping each bowl with a sprinkle of the reserved lactarius. An herb garnish doesn’t help, tastewise, so I resisted the temptation to pretty it up with something green. If you feel you must, a sprig of chervil wouldn’t do much harm.

BAKED WINTER SQUASH

Is more flavorful and less watery than squash that has been boiled, steamed or microwaved. All the same like baked potatoes, including stabbing here and there to prevent explosions. Unlike potatoes, squash leaks sweet juice, so you do have to put it on a pan. At 375 degrees, it’ll take anywhere from one hour to two, depending on the squash variety, size and age. (They cook more quickly after they’ve been stored for a while.)

That’s my preferred method, but when I’m in a hurry I halve the squash, remove the seeds, rub the cut surfaces with olive oil and roast the halves face down. Seed removal is a bit more of a chore, but you do get those delicious caramelized cut surfaces.

* Frozen partially cooked peeled chestnuts are quite tasty and an enormous time-saver, as I learned some years ago when a chef friend sent me some. Being as they’re not a money saver (unless you’re a chef with labor costs) and are not sold at any stores nearby, I have never bought any. But they are available retail, from Chestnut Growers Inc., a Michigan farmer’s co-op, among others. If you decide to go for it, please come back and let us all know how it worked out.

Ingredients for autumn soup: chestnuts from a farmers market, Lactarius thyinos (no common name), hen of the woods, Queen of Smyrna squash

I took this picture to run with the recipe – not yet written – because I was about to roast the squash and chestnuts, making them less photogenic.

But then I realized the picture itself is a massive seasonal alert. So:

Bill’s detailed hen of the woods hunting advice is here.

The post where I roll all over in delight about the squash, after a timely reminder that the window of specialty squashes is both small and right now, is here.

And really a lot about roasting and peeling chestnuts is here.

Further refinements:

THE SQUASH

This is the first Queen of Smyrna I’ve had this year, and I tasted it with considerable apprehension. Last year’s song of praise was so effusive the possibility of embarrassing disappointment seemed larger than the possibility of confirmatory delight. No worries! It was amazing.

Right now, Queen of Smyrna is being grown only on the farm in Northern Maine where it originated. I got it at Fresh off the Farm, in midcoast Rockport. But that just makes it the poster squash for “eat local.” Wherever you live it’s likely there’s something equally rare and fabulous at a farm stand or farmers market near you.

THE CHESTNUTS

I bought them a couple of weeks ago at the Poughkeepsie, NY farmers market, from a vendor who warmed my heart by clearly being not a professional farmer but just some guy who happened to have a (Chinese, not American) chestnut tree in his yard. Also a couple of apple and pear trees, from the looks of his stand. There was not a lot of anything – a few small boxes of apples and pears, I think maybe three pints of chestnuts.

It was the end of the day, but he couldn’t have started out with a whole lot more.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m profoundly grateful to and admiring of the professional farmers who day in, day out make local food a reality. But I’m also glad this kind of neighborly exchange is not yet dead (and not yet priced out of a place in the marketplace).

The chestnuts themselves, I regret to say, were only so-so compared to those grown by the pros. But being very fresh they were quite wonderfully easy to peel.

THE MUSHROOMS

The hen of the woods is amply covered in the article linked up top.

The L. thyinos isn’t exactly uncommon but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it offered for sale. Some experts rate them uninteresting or even unpleasant. A mystery, that, except for being another reminder that taste is in the mouth of the taster and that mushrooms can vary a lot depending on where they grow.

We have a few reliable spots and the thyinos we harvest there rate quite highly with us. Although the taste is on the delicate side, sort of mushroomy and sort of floral; the texture is outstanding: delightfully firm, not tough but crisp, and it remains so even after thorough cooking.

Thyinos is hard to miss because when cut it exudes quantities of orange milk. The closely related L. deliciosus group has the same milk but turns green when handled. It too is edible, although “deliciosus” is pushing it.

THE APPLES

Not in the picture and not in the soup, but this very Sunday is Great Maine Apple Day and I wanted to give all within driving distance a heads up.

I probably should have titled this “Harvesting Wild Mushrooms;” there are all kinds of them just about everywhere (or at least everywhere in the Northeast). Our vegetable gardens may be soggy – even without Irene this has been a mighty rainy summer – but in the silver lining department there’s a bumper crop in the woods and fields.

Oddly, we haven’t found too many Cantharellus cibarius, the chanterelles usually sold under that name. Instead, we’re getting boatloads of the smaller sorts, including the Craterellus tubaeformis, aka Cantharellus infundibuliformis in Bill’s picture and the ever-popular black trumpet (Craterellus fallax).

Also lobster mushrooms (scroll down for collecting and cleaning tips) and a great many boletes.

This includes Boletus edulus, or king bolete , the species called Porcino in Italy. Friends familiar with both insist our kings are not as royal as true Italian porcini. In my opinion, they’re plenty delicious enough – far better than other common boletes – and absent the genuine article it’s difficult to compare.

Being married to an expert mycologist puts me next to a grand assortment of less-well-known edibles, about which I will not speak just now since you really need to know what you’re doing before it’s safe to eat them.

Actually, you should know what you’re doing before you eat any wild mushroom. After all this cheerleading I’m sorry to be the ghost at the banquet, but I keep reading about wild mushroom feasts where a grand variety is served to people who have not tried them all before and it’s making me nervous.

Most of the time, no problem; the combination of good will and a healthy fear of legal retribution seems to be working pretty well. The scary part is the chance of trouble; sooner or later, it’s pretty much inevitable. The more different mushrooms consumed, the more likely it is that one of them will provoke discomfort – or worse – in at least one of the consumers, and if you’ve served a whole bunch of different species it’s going to be near-impossible to figure out which one’s to blame.

Even mushrooms long classified as the safest of the safe can cause bad stomach upsets. Sulfur shelf, for instance, has long been classed as one of the “foolproof four” because it’s so easy to recognize, yet there are many (myself among them) who cannot eat any of what has turned out to be a whole class of related mushrooms.

Short version: persnickety as they may appear, Bill’s Long Lived Mushroom Eaters Golden Rules are worth following.

This festival of links is just a taste of our blog entries over the years. There are many more of Bill’s expert collecting tips and a few of my favorite recipes in the mushroom section. It’s not logically organized( time for an upgrade!), so scrolling can take a while. If you know what you’re looking for, try the index first.

* Michael Kuo, in themushroomexpert.com.

Photo by Bill Bakaitis

Not sure if I’m bragging or confessing; but either way we did pretty well morelling this year, at the expense of working on the new evergreen garden, up-potting the last batch of tomato seedlings, giving the raspberries their second weeding…

Morels Part 1: The All American Fried Morel Experiment

Although many delicious varieties of wild mushrooms grow in the US, almost all are collected and eaten by only a few, primarily mycology nuts and gastronomic sophisticates with plenty of disposable income.

But morels are different, small d democratic, hunted and loved by a huge diversity of country dwellers who put them in the same “well of course” mental basket as berries, ramps and dandelions. To my way of thinking this makes them the all-American mushroom.

Thus it follows as night the day (or vice versa, the Rapture having fizzled again) that – I hope I’m not offending anyone – they should be cooked at least once per season the classic American way: breaded and fried.

Actually, cracker-crumbed and fried. Saltines are the most common, but Ritz crackers and pre-seasoned cracker crumbs also have advocates.

Plain flour has many adherents, too, most of them on the scornful side when it comes to cracker crumbs.

So when Bill brought in a good supply of  specimens large enough to cut in cutlets I decided to give them a – limited, unscientific, not obsessivecompulsive Cooks Illustrated style – side by side comparison.

I chose 4 coatings, none of them crackers which have already over the years been tried and found overbearing.

1. Flour seasoned only with salt and white pepper

2. Flour seasoned with salt, white pepper and a few shreds of lemon zest

3. Fine cornmeal, seasoned with salt, white pepper and skepticism, but corn and morels is one of the great combos and cornmeal is great with fried green tomatoes, so…

4. Crushed shredded wheat. Mighty close to crackers, but I was curious because Bill had been reading to me – from his vast collection – about a recipe that nestled a morel preparation in nests of kadief, none of which we happened to have in the house.

The winner was the lemon zest flour. Bill rated the plain flour a distant second and the others “don’t feed me this again.” I thought the cereal had possibilities; the wheat flavor accented the meatiness of the mushrooms, and if I’d crushed it a bit finer…but he remained unpersuaded.

All-American Fried Morels

1. Choose large, grit-free, symmetrical morels. Cut off the stems and halve the caps the long way. If necessary, clean the inside surfaces – by wiping, not washing.

2. Prepare a shallow bowl of beaten egg thinned with a little milk. Set out a plate with the coating of choice.

2. Heat a generous 1/3rd inch layer of peanut or corn oil in a deepish skillet wide enough to hold the morel halves without crowding. When the oil is hot but not smoking, add enough unsalted butter to raise the fat level to 1/2 inch or so. Keep the mixture warm over low heat.

3. Coat the slices with the egg, pressing the honeycombed side down firmly so the egg gets into the holes and the slice flattens out a bit if it wasn’t flat already. Dip them in the coating, covering both sides of the slice with a thin layer. Set the slices aside on a rack.

4. Reheat the fat to @ 360 degrees. (A torn-off bit of morel should sizzle and slowly start to turn color.) Fry the slices, turning once, until they are richly browned. Drain on absorbent paper and serve as soon as possible.

Serving Suggestions: You can just put them on a plate and pass it around – assuming everything hasn’t already been snatched off the draining paper – but fried morels and mashed potatoes, with steamed asparagus on the side, is a favorite around here. They’re also nice with green salad (hooray for garden lettuce at last!) Or you can just keep going toward fried chicken: pour off almost all of the fat, make a roux – with the lemon flour if you used that – and make cream gravy.

Where there are shoots, there will soon be flowers. Also bees.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling overwhelmed with imminent spring. It’s just so inspiring to see those fleets of tender crocus shoots pushing up; so inspiring ( in a slightly different way) to see those fleets of last autumn’s canned goods still lining the shelves.

Haven’t started raking yet, but I have been making Honey Bars, playing around with assorted vintages, pairing the perfumes of the honeys with different nuts: floral with hazelnuts, herbal with pecans, smoky with black walnuts.

That’s the thing about keeping bees:  if you get any honey at all, you generally get a lot, so even though last year was a total bust we’re in no danger of running out.

The thing that’s in danger is the bees. And as Bill points out in this guest post, the first wave of threats is already pawing away at the doorstep.

Sweetness in the Snow (Nope, It’s not Maple Syrup)

By Bill Bakaitis

In deep winter, our bees stay put, venturing out only on the rare warm days when they can clean up the hive (and themselves) without fear of freezing.

Then, long before the snow is gone come the first warm rains of the season. They fell here a little over a week ago, following which we immediately began to see dead raccoons on the side of the road and raccoon tracks in fresh snow around the neighborhood.

Then, a few nights ago I heard one scrabbling around in the side yard.  Oh, No, I thought. One way or another, Ugly is about to be the word in the bee yard.

Both raccoons and their distant cousins, the Black Bears, emerge from their winter denning slumber in mid-March, hungry and ready to roam. They are on the look-out for fast food. Around here, that usually means bird seed, household garbage, molasses spiked ‘sweet feed’ and bee hives.

Almost all of our neighbors set out garbage nightly, many feed the birds, and at least two provide sweet feed to their stock. Amongst this suburban smorgasbord, bee hives can beckon as the sweetest of finds. In such a setting, things can get real ugly real quick.

When the ‘coons come, the bears are usually not far behind, and they seem to have a singular fondness for the contents of bee hives. It’s not so much for the honey, but for the developing larvae packed into the innermost combs of the hive. But whereas the ‘coons opposable thumbs can open latches and investigate nooks and crannies with the skill of an ornery six year old, the bears use all of the grace and cunning of a smack down wrestler to demolish the hive in their effort to get to the larvae.

One move, Ka Blam! And the three hundred dollar investment of a single hive is splintered in an instant. Ugly!

To ward off this threat, those of us who keep bees have learned to surround the hives with an electric fence.  The problem facing us in an early spring with a deep snow pack (and so far this year over seven feet has fallen) is that the fence is buried under snow and any electrical current shorts out immediately.

So for us, the first sign of the sweetness of this spring was not the boiling off of maple syrup but the digging out and reconstruction of the electric fence.

When most of us think of honey we think of warm days, blossom filled vistas, fragrant evenings and jugs of amber sweetness. Yet the tasks of late winter, although not so bucolic, are also part of the picture. Remember this the next time you purchase a pint of home grown honey at your local farmers market.

(Note: This seems like a good place to add that large mammalian threats are the least of the bee’s worries and that’s pretty much all bees, not only domestic honey bees like ours but also the native pollinators lately much in the news as possible replacements. Decline of Honey Bees Now A Global Phenomenon Says the United Nations. LL)

There will be trees and flowers and food and garden design and some eeks of the week and a great deal more. But as it happens we are starting out with the wild mushrooms that appear here so frequently, because, as Bill said yesterday,

“ A January Thaw: What could be nicer? Today at noon it was 56 F on our front porch.The sun was shining, our  bees were out for their first cleansing flights of the winter, the odd songbird or two could be heard rehearsing spring calls, and on our new year’s walk this shining bit of cheer and promise: ”

No, they’re not edible; just a reminder that there’s always something growing (and always something to share).

Roll and cut Pepparkakor, the quintessential Solstice gingerbread cookie (animals, birds and stars belong to everyone, regardless of religion or lack of same.)

To cope this year, I’m going to try a 180 from the time honored “one dough, many  cookies” strategy. As soon as I get this posted I’m going to shrink the list and use the dough for spicy walnut ginger fingers to make the fancy cut out shapes necessary to a proper assortment. They’re only a distant cousin of pepparkakor , but under the circumstances I’ve decided they’re close enough.

Bill, meanwhile, has none of these problems. He just keeps going out mushrooming and will with luck bring home winter oysters, about which ( and a few others) he has written another guest post

The delicious Winter Oyster Mushroom can withstand repeated freezing and thawing cycles and can be found through the Fall, Winter, and Spring in the Hudson Valley of New York.

FRIGID FUNGI: A GUIDE TO THE FLESHY MUSHROOMS OF WINTER, from First Rate (Winter Oysters) to Fatal (Autumn gallerina)

By Bill Bakaitis

Almost any walk through the Northeastern Forests in winter will reveal a wide assemblage of hard conks or leathery fans decorating the fallen logs and standing timber of the area. Among these tough woody fungi will be a few that are fleshy and pliant. Some will have been nibbled upon by squirrels and deer, suggesting edibility. Here is a primer on a few of the most common: one is deadly, the others, to some degree or other, are edible, even choice.

Galerina autumnalis is the deadly one, and it can be found year round in the Hudson Valley. Although it grows on wood, most commonly on punky downed logs, this small butterscotch brown fungus contains the same toxin found in the Destroying Angel Amanitas. There is an Old Wives Tale that all mushrooms sprouting from wood are edible, but as this mushroom indicates that bit of Folk Wisdom is a myth, a deadly myth!

A full description of this “Autumn Galerina” can be found on Page 620 of Lincoff’s The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, the reference most often turned to in the Northeast for authoritative information.  Or see this  more detailed description.  Be absolutely sure you can identify this mushroom before you consider eating any that even remotely resembles it!

I have found it in the Hudson Valley fruiting in every month of the year.  At times it is mistakenly collected by young adults seeking a psychoactive experience. It also can be mistaken for Flammulina velutipes, the following edible species.

Flammulina is another small butterscotch colored mushroom. It has a number of names in various field guides, ‘Velvet Foot’ or ‘Velvet Footed Collybia’, being ones which seem to have staying power, even though the genus Collybia has been radically eviscerated by taxonomic redistribution. Lincoff’s description (p. 759) correctly points out that Flammulina typically grows on sound standing wood – most commonly Elm in my experience.

The stem is often covered with a yellowish to brownish velvety covering (the ‘Velvet Foot’). Galerina usually has a ring on the stalk, although the ring quite often will have fallen off. Flammulina has no ring.  Another important distinction is that whereas the spores of the deadly Galerina will be rusty-brown, the spores of the edible Flammulina will be white. Michael Kuo’s detailed description of the mushroom is here , and his useful guide to finding spore color by making spore prints is here

Most collectors who eat mushrooms seem to rate Flammulina as ‘edible’ but not ‘choice’. I have eaten it in the past, either fried up in butter and garlic or as an addition to soups or stews. Leslie, with the more refined palate, prefers to keep it in the woods rather than in our refrigerator.

This brings us to the two Winter Oyster Mushrooms, one of which, Panellus (or Pleurotus) serotinus is like Flammulina  ‘edible but not choice’.

Panellus is often referred to as the Late Fall Oyster. I usually find it from first frost in mid-October to hard freeze mid-December, although in the Catskills I would often find it as early as September on fallen Beech logs at high elevations. Before I knew better, I would even leave the more balmy lowlands to seek it out.  It is quite distinctive, often bluish or greenish yellow with yellowish gills and a well defined stub-like stalk.

It is also quite tough, and would easily escape damage tucked into my rucksack, withstanding the climb up, over and then down the mountainside. It also dried well, and provides a decidedly chewy experience incorporated into hearty stews. Shall we say that its bitter flavor lends itself well to robust sauces, like burgundy or tomato, or both!  For more see Lincoff (p 789), or  this detailed description, bearing in mind that P. serotinus is another one that Leslie has banned from the fridge.

She has no quarrel with Pleurotus ostreatus, the flagship species in the Oyster Mushroom complex, and the one from which its name derives. This is truly a ‘choice’ mushroom, a delicious candidate for the table. As the name implies, ostreatus often has a distinctly delicate oyster or anise like aroma, a quality that comes, at least in part, from its enhanced protein content. This mushroom not only feeds on the cellulose and sugars found in the tree, but also sets out a specialized mycelial network designed to trap and feed upon nematodes which live within the fibers of the host tree.

Unlike the thinner fleshed Oysters of summer, the Winter Oyster is usually large, each leaf like cap may be up to eight inches wide and an inch or more thick. They grow in overlapping clusters and it is not unusual to find a clump that approaches a cubic foot in size, weighing several pounds.

Nearly a cubic foot of oyster mushrooms.

Also, unlike the summer oysters that are usually riddled with white grubs – the larval stage of the red and black beetles which scurry between the gills – ostreatus found in winter are clean of such infestations. When I come upon a good fruiting of them I can pick only what I need for the next day or so, confident that I can return days or even weeks later and harvest the rest (assuming of course that they are out of reach of deer and rodents, which also seem to relish this choice edible).

Several companies have developed commercial species of Oysters, with differing colors, shapes, tastes and aromas, depending upon the strain and upon the substrate used to grow them . None I have tried, however, can compete with the wild ones for the table.

One cooking technique that has worked well for me is to incorporate a bit of anise flavored liquor somewhere in the recipe; Pernod is the one I most often use. A few drops seem to highlight and enhance the anise/oyster flavor component of the mushroom..

Oysters are very easy to cultivate. The simplest method is to cut up sections of the fruiting tree and bring them into a domestic location. All that remains is to water, watch and harvest.  Only a bit more sophistication is needed to inoculate virgin material; oysters are often the first mushrooms attempted in mycology labs. Straw, leaves, newspapers, corn stalks, and a host of other materials have been used as substrates. In graduate school at SUNY New Paltz we had great success growing oysters on rolls of toilet paper.

But be forewarned, Oyster mushrooms can easily escape the substrate for which they are intended and take over the house, growing on the walls, beams, and even toilet seats! In the 1980′s members of our local mushroom association were able to purchase fresh Oysters grown in a nearby greenhouse by an innocent organic farmer. Two years later I heard that he had to abandon his house after the invading Oysters had moved in.  In another case, this summer I was asked for advice by a team of Wood Scientists on a similar case on the west coast.

Greg Marley, of Mushrooms for Health, found and photographed this cluster this summer in Maine.

Lincoff describes the Oyster Mushroom on p 793, and Kuo has a good  description, with multiple links, here.

ONE FINAL CAVEAT

One final caveat: Pleurocybella (Pleurotus) porrigens, commonly called Angel’s Wings, is one of the Oyster species which has long been considered edible and safe. But recently it has been associated with a number of deaths in Japan of people who had chronic kidney diseases.

All mushroom photos by Bill Bakaitis unless otherwise credited