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?
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| Hint: there are at least four that are visible in this picture! |
You can see the answer below the jump.
