Tag Archives: mushrooms

Genealogy and Mushroom Stroganoff

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mushroom stroganoffLately, Jason and I have been hitting old episodes of PBS’s Finding Your Roots, because we’re basically elderly people masquerading as thirty-somethings. Besides leaving me with a pretty hardcore Cory Booker crush, it makes me wonder if I’ve been remiss in not exploring my lineage more fully.

Me being me, my impulse is to celebrate those ancestors through food, but unfortunately, my people come from lands that don’t boast the most delicious vegetarian cuisine. I’ve never had any real testing done, but family lore has it that I’m primarily made up of genes from the mushy-pea-and-haggis-rich British Isles. There is one branch of the family that is Hungarian, which remains mostly shrouded in mystery. Could I be related to Attila the Hun? It’s possible. And since I’m too lazy to actually do the research, let’s just say that I am.

attila

You can see the resemblance in the eyebrows.

It’s true that the Hungarians, too, are tremendously fond of meat, but I think they have a couple of advantages, culinarily speaking, over my Irish/Scottish/English forebears: 1) all of the Eastern European countries make some bangin’ pastries, and 2) they have a serious thing for sour cream. The first fact I realized when I went to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side. Though the staff was somewhat baffled when I asked them about Hungarian specialties and then offered up a Linzer torte, which I’m pretty sure is Austrian, I have to say that the cheese and sour cherry strudel was no joke.

The second fact I have always unwittingly embraced, but it was driven home to me recently when I got a craving for this mushroom stroganoff for which my mother (note: not at all Hungarian) gave me the recipe. Continue reading →

Mushrooms of Mexico

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mushroomsBefore I saw a man in the middle of the woods cheerfully offering me a fungus called Balls of the Bull on the tip of a machete, I don’t think I’d ever said to myself, “Mexico…that’s that country with all the mushrooms.” But then I actually went to Mexico.

Oaxaca, nestled in the country’s southern mountain ranges, is a wonderland of culinary delicacies: cheese, chocolate, mescal, an entire rainbow spectrum of mole sauces. Plenty has been written about all of these foods, though, and I wasn’t sure I’d be inspired on our recent vacation to add another blog post to the literature. But something I wasn’t expecting to find at the markets around town were the heaps of dried chanterelles and big bags of the delectable corn fungus that Mexicans call huitlacoche. Soon we were in a pleasantly fungal state of mind, so when our friend Joel, whose family we were visiting, suggested we take a guided hike up into the mountains to mushroom hunt, we jumped at the chance.

Our point man for this excursion was a small sinewy man of indeterminate age named Ilario. I told him, in my shaky Spanish, that I liked his hat. He told me, in his shaky English, that he used to live in Indiana. And then we packed into the back of his pickup truck and headed for the hills.

Mushrooming is really less of a hunt and more of a mental game, a slow construction of invisible mushroom goggles in front of your eyes. Continue reading →

Polenta: The Answer to Starch Fatigue

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mushroom polentaOne of the first lessons that any new cook learns is that you can cook pretty much anything and put it on rice and it tastes okay. Ditto with pasta. Hell, you can even use a piece of toast if you’re in a pinch.

But what to do when these old standbys start tasting a little tired? Here’s what: polenta. It’s a thick, savory corn porridge, and the exact same rice-or-pasta rules apply. If I have some roasted root vegetables rapidly approaching their life expectancy in the fridge, I heat them up in a skillet and throw them on top of polenta and it’s a whole new meal. If I have some chunky tomato-y thing that I originally made for pasta, it’s bound to taste great on top of polenta with some Parmesan cheese.

And polenta isn’t just for leftovers. Here’s a yummy mushroom number that I dreamed up in a hurry last night.

Polenta with Mushrooms and Goat Cheese Continue reading →

The Way of the Mushroom

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Found 'em!Here are two truths that I have come to realize. 1) There are people out there with a natural affinity for finding mushrooms. You will know these people when you happen upon them, because at some point in the conversation, they will not be able to control themselves, and they will tell you about the massive morel supply they scored the previous day. When they go hiking, they practically trip over puffballs and hen-of-the-woods. If physics allowed for the sparkle in their eye to be mushroom-shaped, it would be. 2) I am not one of these people.

this is not going to work.To explain how I learned this, we need to back up a step, to my birthday last month. My friend Mignon gave me a mushroom box from Back to the Roots, out of which you can grow your own delicious fungi. It was a lovely gift, and one that filled me with trepidation, since Jason and I had bungled a similar gift a couple years ago. Twice. But this one did feature smiling children, oohing and aahing over their mushrooms, on the back of the box, which boosted my confidence. I can do most, if not all, of the things a four-year-old can do. And yet, when I found myself balancing cat food cans in order to anchor a wobbly and submerged bag of peat, I had little hope that this experiment would actually work.

Enter my brush with some mushroom folk at Bonnaroo. Continue reading →

The Maitake: Sexy, Lethal, Dance-Worthy

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I’m a big fan of mushrooms.  A few years ago Michael Pollan turned me on to the fact that the mushrooms we see are actually just the furthest reaches of vast fungal organisms that can stretch for miles and miles under the ground.  We can only study them so much because to unearth them is to destroy their most delicate points of composition.  How awesome is that?  Very awesome.

Justin Laman, fearless American Education entrepreneur and unfailingly gracious host, agrees.  I presume.  He’s been a mushroom hound, an amateur mycologist, for as long as I’ve known him, and I have to think he must be at least as turned on by the forever-unknowable heart of the mushroom mystery as I am.

I did not ask him, however.  I’m simply imposing my own feelings onto his.  I did ask him about his favorite mushroom of the moment.  He told me it’s maitake.  I asked him why.  He told me, “Tasty. Real flesh that doesn’t just melt. Hearty meat. Very hard to miss-identify. Nice woodsy flavor. And they grow super huge!”

You probably know maitake.  They’re also called Hen of the Woods, and they’re awesome.  You can drizzle them with some oil, sprinkle on some spices, and roast them for a spell to end up with a hefty entre or side for dinner.  They have substance.  They also, according to the American Cancer Society, were once worth their weight in silver in ancient Japan.  “Maitake” means “dancing mushroom” in Japanese because people were so psyched to discover them.  The American Cancer Society cares because they’re sponsoring research into the tumor-reducing properties of beta glucan, a polysaccaride contained in maitakes.  Japan has been using them as medicine for centuries.

I don’t know if Laman knows any of this.  I asked him which or what kind of band maitake would be if  it were, in fact, a band.  He simply sent the link below.

 

My interpretation is maitakes are fun, even playful.  You can enjoy their essential components because you’re enjoyed them a million times before in different forms, but this time, your enjoyment just might lead to the shrinking of a cancerous growth.  Refraining from imposing upon the ‘shroom any larger meaning beyond the simple, nay—syllabic, joy frees it to thrive in its essential fungal’ness.  Perhaps they create dance parties or playtime butchery in the mouth as well.