Sweet Vitriol

Morel Madness, Part Deux

by Ether

Last night we were treated to a lovely thunder storm, complete with huge flashes of lightning and wall-shaking thunderclaps. We sorely needed the rain as it’s been a bit of a dry April around here. After Saturday’s attempt for morels I figured I’d go out on a foray today in hopes that the rain encouraged the mushrooms to pop their little heads up. Boy was I right, these yellow morels are almost the size of Luminiferous’ hand! Not only did I not have to drive 30 miles out of town this time, but I found a few nice little caches of morels essentially in my backyard. Now I’ve got a little secret too.

We spent the evening cleaning and stringing today’s finds to dry. There were a ton of the big yellows, a decent helping of the blacks (some call them grays at this stage due to the white edging on the caps), and five half-frees. Half-frees are a new variety to me, so named because unlike the other morels their caps aren’t connected to the stems the entire way down but just halfway, the rest creating a hanging skirt. I’m hoping to go back out in a couple days, as I left behind plenty of very young mushrooms to mature in the woods before picking them. I’ll probably sauté those and freeze them, so I can compare how the flavor holds up with the different methods of storage.

Posted by Ether on April 28th, 2008 filed in Local Food, Mushrooms, Nature