"Shrooming" Part II

There a folks who don’t care to eat mushrooms, let alone wild mushrooms. It could be either taste or texture. But there are those who love mushrooms. As for liker’s, Morels are delicious in many recipes and especially on there own. It’s pretty hard to beat breading them in floor and frying them in butter until the edges get crispy…along side a good steak and that’s about the pinochle of delish!

My wife is enthusiastic and she’s a lot of fun to hunt mushrooms with. It was a beautiful day, the spring woods and creatures we encountered where wonderful. The highlight perhaps was we heard the scolding voice of a Scarlet Tanager. We must have been invading his territory as in the next moment he was perched in a small aspen just over our heads…beautiful bright red bird with black wings and tail… I saw one about four years ago and probably less than six in my lifetime. They spend most of their time high in the canopy and one seldom gets such a good look at one.

We checked a couple of our mushroom spots with limited results. When we got to our all-time best spot, we found that it had been clear-cut over winter. That was a bummer and kind of sad as we’ve picked mushrooms in that area for a lot of years. That particular aspen ridge has now been logged twice in my lifetime…I was 10 the first time…makes you think…

So we went road huntin’… driving real slow and keeping eyes peeled out the rolled down windows of the truck…there is much to see…pretty flowers etc. The deal is on the way out you get a dollar for every mushroom you spot that the other missed on the way in. It’s the way to go when you don’t have a place left to check. When you spot a Morel there is a good chance there are others in the proximity. It turned out that from two that we spotted from the truck we made a “little swing” out in the woods and found new patches with nice big Morels in good numbers. We enjoyed a beautiful day, the excitement of a new find and a good catch, as well as each others company and the ribbing that goes along with hanging out in the woods, and not to mention the delicious delicacy for the table.

Thinking back about our day it was remarkable that we didn’t see another mushroom picker that day. We had that area of the vast State Forest all to ourselves. The roads had just opened for the summer so it was kind of a first look at the country after the spring thaw…a very enjoyable day for sure. Yup, I don’t mind some time out of theshop in the off season!