Wednesday, September 23, 2009



Chanterelles! We had some success on the weekend. db and I went to Nanaimo to visit with pw. He took us to a few of his spots where he's found chanterelles and lobster mushrooms before. The woods are still very dry so the season is quite late this year, but we were able to find some. Here are the chanterelles we brought home. They really shrink down quite a bit once cooked. We dry cooked them as my field guide (All that the Rain Promises and More) suggests. They were very tasty and it makes me want to get out there and find some more.
I forgot to take pictures of the lobster mushrooms. Fortunately I had just read mister anchovy's blog on how to prepare lobster mushrooms and that helped us. Thanks mister anchovy!

Nanaimo was nice. We took a little hike on Mt. Benson. pw has some knee trouble so we had to be careful about climbing too much. It was a beautiful day and it's a nice hike.
This really was the best way (I think).




In other food notes. Saturday evening we finally got around to celebrating db's birthday, which was actually on the 15th. We needed time for his dinner since we wanted to make ravioli. db made a squash, mushroom, chard, and taragon filling. Then we went to work. I made the dough and db rolled out the dough while I filled the ravioli. We make a good team.                                                               
We made enough to freeze for another time, and enough to take some to pw as well. I hope he enjoyed it.




4 comments:

mister anchovy said...

Wow, those chanterelles look beautiful. Our chanterelle season is done, but honey mushrooms are starting and lobsters continue for a while and there's boletes and lacterius and puffballs if I get lucky and so on...

sp said...

Honey mushrooms? I'll have to look those up. We found quite a few boletes, but had trouble clearly identifying them so we let them be. And so on is right!

mister anchovy said...

I found a bunch of mushrooms I think are honey mushrooms today. I'm doing a spore print now to be sure. There is at least one nasty lookalike and I don't have experience with this mushroom. I sent a photo to my brother, and he said they look like honey mushrooms but he wasn't going to say for sure from a picture. They should have a white spore print. Honey mushrooms grow in clusters, usually on dead stumps and limbs, and my brother tells me that sometimes they fruit in huge quantities.

Wandering Coyote said...

I need to get a book like the one you mention (unavailable on the Canadian Amazon site, grrr) and get out there!

The ravioli looks amazing!