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Archive for the ‘black trumpets’ Category
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
 I don’t cook with an insane amount of cream. I hate cheese. I don’t eat offal. And I wash my mushrooms in WATER…*gasp*! I don’t understand why there is such a problem with mating water with mushrooms. They grow in the RAIN for pete’s sake!!
I went for a little walk yesterday. It’s been raining here for bloody forever it seems. We finally got sunshine on Monday! It’s been gorgeous all week. Yesterday I had time to hike up to my black trumpet patch. I don’t know who designed this mushroom garden but next time, can you not put  it on such a steep hill? The picture really doesn’t have the right perspective. One wrong step and I’m sliding down an awfully long way. I precariously perch myself on the hillside, trying to plant my feet against trees or logs or rocks, some of which slip away since the ground is so saturated and muddy! What I’ll do for these yummy fungi.
I had a wonderful asparagus soup with a couple of little black trumpets as a garnish at Soif over the weekend. I decided to run with that idea and made a potato leek soup to use as my black trumpet medium. The difference here was that I had a big pile of them so there was a huge trumpet in every bite! I love being a hunter-gatherer ;-)
But even with all that washing under running water, there was grit. I tried to fool my mouth by putting a really crunchy salt on as a finisher, but I still knew there was sand and not just salt! I guess getting sand in my soup isn’t that French either.
I’m reading Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat right now and could completely relate to Grant’s story of traveling and eating in France and Italy. It took me back to L’Arpege and it was a great meal but I was so uncomfortable I had a panic attack. I would love to have amazing food in a subway station…in a park…in a living room. Anywhere that’s not so stuffy, proper and snooty. I loved Italy for that.
Someone recently told me I don’t even need to post recipes, she likes just reading my blabbing-on posts. But I just grabbed this little plug-in that I want to try out:
Recipe: Potato Leek Soup
Ingredients
- 1/2 stick butter
- 2 large potatoes
- 3 leeks (white and light green parts only)
- 1 cup white wine
- 2 garlic cloves, minced
- 4 cups chicken stock
- salt and pepper to taste
- Mound of black trumpets for “garnish” (optional)
Instructions
- Melt butter in a pot.
- Add chopped leeks. Cook until they start to soften and barely brown on the edges (just barely).
- Pour in wine and add garlic. Let the wine reduce almost away.
- Add chicken stock and potatoes. Simmer until potatoes are cooked.
- Pour into a food processor/blender and puree until smooth. If you want to be fancy, strain through a chinois or cheesecloth. I tend not to be fancy!
- Salt and pepper to taste. Top with sauteed mushrooms.
Cooking time (duration): 30
Number of servings (yield): 3
Meal type: dinner
Microformatting by hRecipe.
Posted in black trumpets, dinner, leeks, mushrooms, photos, potato, recipe, recipes, self pleasuring | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
You didn’t think there would be all these posts about trumpets without a recipe did you?
A lot of people like black trumpets in cream sauces but I’m not a fan of cream sauce. I like to enjoy them simply.
All I did was saute them up with a handful of chopped kale and one clove of garlic. I threw everything in the pan at once with the olive oil and cooked it on medium heat until the water evaporated. Added some salt, tossed it with pasta and topped that with some toasted pecans.
So yummy, so easy!
Posted in black trumpets, recipe, recipes, self pleasuring | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
The trumpet is a trickster. It hides, disguising itself as a leaf shadow. You can be looking at a hillside covered in leaves and see nothing. Then, you find one trumpet! Score! After that you realize there are many more around you that were hiding!
Hunting these is so different than hunting porcini–which are so huge sometimes you can see them while driving by. My husband’s first porcini was a drive-by find! Or hunting chanterelles which is like an Easter egg hunt–pretty little (or big!) orange beauties peaking out from under the leaves. Both of those mushrooms you can hunt from a relative distance, they stand out. Not black trumpets. They blend, they hide in the shadows.
My apologies for the quality of this pictures, it is from my phone, but that will just make the challenge that much more fun. Pretend it’s blurry because you’re foraging in the rain and your vision is obscured by it.
Now, find the trumpet:
Did you find it? It’s a lone little creature, not hanging out with any of its friends.
Do you see it?
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Does this help?
They are well worth the search. I know, finding it in the picture does not help you taste them but maybe it will inspire you to find a local mushroom group or foray and search for youself!! Just a disclaimer here, if you’ve never foraged for wild mushrooms, don’t do it alone and randomly eat things you find it the woods. I don’t want any of my readers to die from hardcore food porn attempts. I want you to live on to eat well!!
I will be sad when this season comes to an end since I’ve found some good new trumpet patches this year! I will just have to enjoy them while they last.
Posted in black trumpets, hardcore | No Comments »
Friday, February 19th, 2010
 I have a hard time just hiking. Hiking to me is like an easter egg hunt. I rarely look up, I rarely even look at the path, my eyes are always scouring the hillsides and duff.
Unfortunately, I usually don’t have my real camera with me either. So the photos are less than perfect but these lovely little fungi were just popping through the green moss (is that moss?) that was growing on the hillside. I don’t know what it is but I never find trumpets on flat land, it’s always somewhere that I have to perch precariously on a hillside and try not to slide all the way down it!
I did pretty well yesterday. Enough for this weekend’s frittata at least!
Update:
I cooked up the black trumpets the same way I did last time but had many more to savor today!
I put them in olive oil with one small minced clove of garlic over medium heat and let them cook off their water.
I think the best way to enjoy trumpets, or really any tasty wild mushroom, is simply on a piece of buttered french bread. Well, I didn’t have any french bread! So atop a frittata they went again.
I don’t know if these are one of my favorites because I get so few of them or not. I’m torn between trumpets and porcini as my favorite. My son said this morning that his favorites are grilled porcini and black trumpets (he’s 5). I think I agree!
Posted in black trumpets, hardcore, mushrooms | No Comments »
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
I went for a hike, knowing there was a chanterelle patch in the area but really not wanting to find any. I’m done with those for the year (I found two anyway, even though i wasn’t looking for them!). I was really on the hunt for black trumpets. It looked like good terrain for them, I was convinced they were there.
So, like staring at one of those 3D prints with the hidden pictures, I stopped and stared at the hillside. Slowly, these leaf shadows become mushrooms before my eyes. Success!
Unfortunately, I scoured the area and only found a small handful of these black beauties but that’s fine by me. I’d rather have a few than none, they are truly one of my favorites. Nom nom.
And since I had so few and wanted to savor them as much as possible, I sauteed them in just olive oil and shallots and put them atop my Sunday food-church frittata. Sooooo yummy. I also added the two little chanterelles I found just because, what else could I do? I couldn’t let them go bad. I need to head out and find more trumpets, this whet my appetite for them, they are such a wonderful little fungus!
Posted in black trumpets, craterellus, hardcore, mushrooms | No Comments »
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