We have morels!
My husband discovered them as he was cutting the grass,
popping up at the base of our old ash tree.
Just a few feet away in an undisturbed wooded area
I found more. That calls for a hunt.
They like to grow near certain trees, especially where
there is dead and decayed wood- perfect conditions here.
Both my mother and neighbor advised me to soak them first,
slice, batter and fry them- in butter according to my mom .
When I was young I wasn't much of a mushroom fan
except when mom cooked these! They are so different!
You can read more about them HERE.
If anyone has other recipe ideas, please let me know.
10 comments:
Lucky you! They are a big deal here and people go out in the mountains hunting them but we have none around our place. The girls don't like mushrooms so I would have to eat them myself if I had any, which might be a good thing.
Very much a post of Faith and Morels (ugh!).
I should look for some in our woods. The deer usually get any, though.
What?!
I've never heard of these.
I'm going to read up and follow your link.
Pat
Oh, if you find a recipe you need to share this with us...because now, I'm just curious!
Pat
We have mushrooms here, but I am afraid to eat any of them since I don't know much about it. I gave some to the chickens once, and they gobbled them up and didn't die. But I lost my nerve and didn't try any myself.
What a wonderful find. Congratulations!
I would love to be confident of mushroom identification, but I am pretty sure we don't have the right conditions here on the farm.
Enjoy them, Kathy!
Too bad we don't have any truffles around here too though. You'd think we would. You see morels now and then. They grow near tree roots. Truffles also grow near tree roots--just underground.
Did I ever tell you I worked at a mushroom farm inside an old rock quarry during high school? We had our own canning operation too. The whole thing with growing, harvesting, and canning mushrooms is really very simple. I'm surprised more people don't do it.
Yahoo no, I didn't know you worked there, didn't even know we had mushroom farms in the area. I've seen the mushroom kits you can buy to grow your own either inside or on logs.
Google: Mushroom farm Valmeyer
You can see several photos of it at Google Images. It was an old rock quarry in Valmeyer, IL. It's used as a storage facility now. Gateway Cold Storage has the biggest part of it. Knaust Mushroom Farms owned it when I worked there. Knaust used to be huge until the mushroom business went south.
The complex is called Rock City now. The underground caves cover something like 5 or 6 million square feet. They had tractors pulling huge flat wagons through the place that we sat on. They would take us a mile or more back sometimes. Mushrooms grow best with no light at all, so there are no lights back there. Pickers wore miner's hardhats with a light on them so they could see to pick. We just used a knife to cut the mushrooms at the stem. New ones would grow overnight. It was pretty interesting really. Lots of illegal Mexicans worked there during the 60s and 70s. Hundreds of them.
Soak them in salt water to make sure any bugs come out of their hiding places. You can fry in butter with or without battering them. I love them, haven't found any here yet this season but they should be popping out soon.
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