Homestead Wins

With so many homestead fails in the last week, it's good to have a win or two.

Those of you who know us personally know that we love learning to forage for our own food. In particular, we (primarily Mr. Bee) love hunting gourmet mushrooms. We've found chanterelles, porcini (and a host of other boletes), lobster, chicken-of-the-woods, oyster, inky caps, shaggy parasol, prince, matsutake, hedgehog, shrimp russula, slippery jack, blewit, candy cap, witch's butter, edible puff balls, and fairy ring to name a few. But in our two years of hunting, we had never found the famed Morel.

That all changed this week. We don't have good phone reception at our house, so on our way home from work we pulled over to make a few calls. On our way back onto the road, Mr. Bee found his prize. In fact, within an hour we had loaded the paper bag we keep in the car for just such opportune "sightings" with more than 300 morels. (I can't describe to you how many that is. Think like, uh, if you reached down to pick up what you thought was a dollar bill and it turned out it was two 100 dollar bills. That kind of crazy!) Most are black morels, which are the most common kind in the PNW. We also have yellow morels and even a few of the West Coast-native red morel (NOT the red false morels, mind you). It was a mushroom hunter's paradise and I'm proud to say that my morel spotting skills are almost as good as my legendary chanterelle locating skills. With more practice, I'm certain they could be refined.

How many morels can you find?

Hint: there are at least four that are visible in this picture!

You can see the answer below the jump.

Did you get them all? No? How come you couldn't find any?

With such abundance, we thought it best to share with the neighbors. We took our treasures over to J&E only to learn that E found a handful of morels in her garden that very day! Crazy coincidence, which completely confirms all of my previous suspicions about them. We're hopeful that means our property may be fertile ground too, though there's been nothing yet.


As a side bonus, Mr. Bee recently discovered that we have three different kinds of ferns:

1. Sword Fern--pretty but contains carcinogenic compounds

2. Bracken Fern--look like long fists stretching toward the sky. Very popular in Asian cuisine, but again, contains some known carcinogens

3. Lady Fern--pretty and tasty! If you were to go to a restaurant and order fiddleheads, this is what you'd get in the PNW. (On the East Cost, you'd get Ostrich Ferns.)

lady fern 

The ferns are growing all over our property; no more tramping through acres of nettle-filled forest floor to find ourselves these tasty treats! (As a side note, we try to avoid cancer as often as possible and only eat the Lady Ferns. The others are just pretty to look at.)

Sauteed in butter and lemon