Alison L. Gardner - The wild mushroom cookbook : recipes from Mendocino

Acclaim for The Wild Mushroom Cookbook

This delightful exploration of fungi is at once accessible and esoteric. The authors reveal forest treasures and offer them up in scrumptious dishes, from appetizers and soups to desserts. The Wild Mushroom Cookbook not only guides you through the preparation of mushrooms but also inspires you to get out into the wild to harvest them yourself. Keep a copy in your kitchen and buy another for your favorite mushroom lover.

If you love the thrill of the mushroom hunt and bringing back your trophies to feast on as much as I do, this is a must-have book. Chock-full of mushroom lore, serious fungi knowledge, and inspired recipes for using mushrooms in every way, Alison and Merry welcome you into their wild and adventuresome world with open arms.

A truly authentic West Coast gem! From souffl to sorbet and aspics to applesauce, these amazing women bring their readers an amazing blend of fearlessly diverse culinary concepts and clear mastery of mushroom!

This Mendocino gem is a mushroomers delight, with great depth of information and unique preparations for the usual and unusual fungi. I love the abundant candy cap recipes! The cookbook makes a great gift, too.

Merry and Alison have created a masterpiecean invaluable resource that appeals to the wild-foods enthusiast as well as the gourmet chef. They explore the delights of the lesser-known as well as the more common wild mushrooms that populate the Pacific north coast. Well-written and informative, this treasure-trove of recipes ranges from appetizers to dessert!

I recommend The Wild Mushroom Cookbook to anyone interested in cooking, wild foraging, mushrooms, or the West Coast. With something for everyone, it would be a great addition to your shelfa cookbook destined for many well-worn pages.

This very interesting cookbook features mushroom recipes that many wild mushroom cookbooks ignore. I look forward to serving chanterelle pesto on gemelli pasta for our clubs next potluck. The seven recipes for pigs ears alone make the book valuable to meits one Ill use frequently.

The Wild
Mushroom
Cookbook

Recipes from
Mendocino

Alison Gardner
Merry Winslow

Illustrations by Merry Winslow

The Wild Mushroom Cookbook

Recipes from Mendocino

Copyright 2014 by Alison Gardner and Merry Winslow All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part, by any means whatever, except for passages excerpted for purposes of review, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, or to order additional copies, please contact:

Barefoot Naturalist Press

P.O. Box 894

Mendocino, CA 95460

www.wildmushroomcookbook.com

Cover and book design by Michael Brechner / Cypress House

Photographs and illustrations by Merry Winslow

Cover Photograph of turkey tail mushrooms by Alison Gardner

PUBLISHERS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Gardner, Alison (Alison L.)

The wild mushroom cookbook : recipes from Mendocino / Alison Gardner and Merry Winslow. -- First edition. -- Mendocino, CA : Barefoot Naturalist Press, [2014]

pages ; cm.

ISBN: 978-0-9904400-0-0

eBook ISBN: 978-0-9904400-1-7

Includes index.

Summary: The most comprehensive collection of wild mushroom recipes ever assembled in one book, from breakfast to dinner, appetizers to dessert. It also describes the best uses for different mushrooms, mentions procedures useful in their preparation, and covers the best methods of preservation for different species. Full of ideas which may also be applied to store-bought mushrooms, this book will stimulate your imagination and guide your creativity.--Publisher.

1. Cooking (Mushrooms) 2. Cooking (Mushrooms)--California--Mendocino. 3. Edible mushrooms. 4. Edible mushrooms--California--Mendocino. 5. Cookbooks. I. Winslow, Merry. II. Title.

To the memory
of Ryane Snow

Contents

Foreword

T HE M ENDOCINO C OAST IS a magical place to see and enjoy wild mushrooms. Their abundance and variety draws visitors from all over the country. Photographers, ecologists, mycologists both professional and amateur come to this area in search of mushrooms. This book is for the mycophagist, the person who hunts mushrooms for food and wants to find out how to prepare them.

Mushrooms play incredibly important roles in our natural ecosystems. They are food for many of our wildlife from squirrels and deer to banana slugs and insects. They are decomposers of leaf litter, manures, large woody debris and even other mushrooms. In our moist climate, they are the ultimate recyclers. More subtle than the decomposers are the symbiotic mushrooms that contribute to forest health. These mycorrhizal species make up most of the large mushroom body that we see in our walks in the woods. They extend the trees root systems to absorb more water, nutrients and they increase the trees resistance to drought.

Please respect our natural environments and pick gently and only those specimens that you plan to eat. An entire group of mushrooms might look fine to eat but one or all may be riddled with maggots. When picking mushrooms it is best for the mushroom to be cut close to the ground so as to disturb the soil as little as possible. However, many people make sure and look for the volva of an Amanita first as many are toxic, and cover any mushroom remains. This is important because the fragile microscopic mycorrhizal strands grow throughout the leaf litter and are the connections to the trees that we want to protect.

Mushrooms are a delight to just look at while wandering through our majestic forests. After more than 30 years, my children still want to go mushroom hunting when they come home to visit in the fall. Finding and identifying mushrooms while walking in the forest becomes a walk of exploration full of surprises and, if you are in a permissible area, a rewarding bounty.

I would encourage all mushroom hunters to become familiar with those places one can hunt legally and safely. The largest public land open to mushroom hunters on the Mendocino Coast is the 50,000 acres of Jackson State Demonstration Forest. One can acquire maps and permits for collecting at their office on Main Street at Spruce Street in Fort Bragg. Local State Parks do not allow collecting any plant or mushrooms (except Salt Point).

Obviously one needs to know what species to pick. Be very careful in your mushroom identification deliberations. There is not a single book published which has all of the mushroom species that you will encounter in the woods. Enjoy this lovely book full of wonderful recipes for local Mendocino Coast mushrooms!