Cheesy foraged shaggy mane mushroom stuffing

I love shaggy mane mushrooms. A lot of foragers love shaggy mane mushrooms, but they generally don't love them when and how I love them. 

When young and fresh and pure white, shaggy mane mushrooms are mild and mellow in flavor. While mellow, the flavor they have is softly sweet, creamy, a bit nutty and there's another, ephemeral flavor that's otherwise hard to place. They also don't have a meaty texture, they are rather soft and stringy. 

Fresh young shaggy mane mushrooms

The most common critique of this mushroom is that, since it deliquesces quickly after maturing and/or being picked, it can be difficult to work with. And I 100% understand with that critique. If you're not familiar with deliquescence, it's the process by which the mushroom turns to goo to release its spores. And while that's both very cool and the mycelium (the actual organism that grows the mushroom), it means the forager has a very limited window to 1) pick the mushroom, 2) get the mushroom home, 3) cook the mushroom, before it turns into black goo. 

To complicate things further, refrigerating these mushrooms doesn't slow the process down much. The only way to stop these mushrooms from dissolving is to either cook them or freeze them. Which is generally fine when you find while intentionally foraging, but is a real pain when you find them accidentally. And I find a LOT accidentally. 

While I have a couple of spots I can rely on to provide me a good number of mushrooms most every year (including my front lawn), they also pop up when I'm not actively looking for them, in places like 1) my job, 2) one of the many the trails I walk at lunch sometimes, 3) local parks, 4) various greenspaces around town, 5) the lawns of my neighbors. And when I find these mushrooms, I just can't help myself, I have to pick them as long as I can reasonably determine that they haven't been sprayed with something. Which is a problem, because I generally am not set up to cook while at work or walking a trail on lunch break, or running errands. And I can't refrigerate them, because they will deliquesce. So, I end up tossing them in a container and then putting them in the freezer. I bring them home and add them to a bigger bag in the freezer. 

But then, what do with the frozen shaggy manes? I can't defrost them because they will, once again, turn to goo. Without defrosting, I can't make popular dishes like breaded and fried shaggy manes. And slowly but surely, that bag in my freezer gets fuller and fuller. I had to make a recipe that cooked the mushrooms at the same time as they defrosted. My first thought was a soup or a stew, but with Thanksgiving right around the corner, my husband suggested stuffing. 

Because here's the thing about deliquescence--it totally changes the shaggy mane's flavor! And that's why I say that I like shaggy manes when MOST foragers DON'T like them: I like them even when they turn to goo! You see, as they deliquesce they become a lot more mushroomy. The flavor goes from smooth and mellow to in-your-face and intense. So if you like a strong mushroom flavor, give deliquescing shaggy manes a shot!

This recipe uses the mushroom's natural deliquescence as a flavor-enhancer.

For this recipe, I used my standard turkey stock to make this stuffing (recipe below), but you could use vegetable stock or bullion instead, for a vegetarian option. 

Cheesy shaggy mane mushroom stuffing

Serves 6-9 as a side

• 3/4 loaf of Italian bread, cut into approximately 3/4in cubes
• 1 quart-sized bag of frozen shaggy mane mushrooms
• 8 oz shredded havarti or other soft, smooth, mild, melty cheese
• 1 jumbo white onion, diced
• 2-3 stalks of celery, cut into 1/3in wide slices
• 5 cloves of garlic, minced
• 3 cups of turkey, chicken or vegetarian stock or broth
• 1/2 cup whole milk
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• cooked minced turkey organ meat, optional
• olive oil 
• butter
• salt & pepper 

1. Preheat your oven to the broil setting. Drizzle a small amount of olive oil on a baking pan and lightly spread it with a piece of Italian bread. Spread the cubed bread over the baking pan. Broil for 2-3 minutes, watching that they toast but don't burn. Remove from the oven, allow to cool and add to a large mixing bowl. 
2. Turn your oven to bake and set to 350 degrees. 
3. Heat olive oil and a pat of butter in a large 5qt. sauté pan over medium heat. Add in the diced white onion and the minced garlic. Sauté, stirring constantly, until onion translucent and soft. Remove the aromatics from the pan and add them to the mixing bowl with the toasted bread. 
4. Add more oil and butter to the sauté pan and reduce heat to low. Add your mushrooms, still frozen, to the sauté pan. 
5. Heat the mushrooms through over medium-high heat, allowing the mushrooms to defrost while cooking. They will deliquesce. As they defrost slowly break them apart in the pan and season lightly with salt and pepper. Let them continue to cook, absorbing the liquid that comes off them, until that liquid is reduced by half. 
6. As the mushrooms become fully cooked, break them apart into bite-sized pieces or smaller.  Remove the mushrooms from the pan and mix them and any remaining mushroom liquid in with the bread, onions and garlic. Mix in the celery and 2/3 of the shredded cheese. If you're using cooked organ meat, mix it in as well. Do not use raw meat. 
7. Coat the bottom of a 13x9 casserole dish with butter or olive oil. Spread the stuffing mix out over the dish. 
8. Pour the stock evenly over the stuffing and sprinkle the remaining 1/3 cheese over the top.
9. Bake in the 350 oven for 50 minutes to 1 hour, or until an inserted butter knife comes out clean. 

Turkey organ stock

Makes 5 cups

• turkey organs: heart, neck, liver, gizzards and tail
• 8 cups of water
• 3 cloves of garlic, sliced
• 1 small yellow onion, cut into chunks
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 tbs. salt
• 1 tbs. freshly ground black pepper
• dried tarragon and basil to taste
• olive oil and/or butter

1. Brown the organ meat in olive oil in a large stockpot over medium-high heat. When browned, but not cooked through, remove the meat from the pan and add more oil or butter, if needed. 
2. Add the onion and garlic to the pan and sauté until translucent. Increase the heat to high and lightly brown everything. 
3. Pour the water into the stockpot over the vegetables. Add the meat back in along with the bay leaves, salt, pepper and dried herbs. 
4. Simmer for 2-3 hours, skimming the foam as needed. Strain out solids. 

Elderberry clafoutis pie

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Americans! To our neighbors in the great white north, Happy Thanksgiving, 6 weeks late, and to our southern neighbors, feliz Día de la Revolución! Wherever you're from, I hope you're celebrating the harvest season with a sweet treat. 

Thanksgiving is one of the few occasions where I will attempt to bake. As a rule, I personally hate baking. It's more science than art--get something wrong and it generally won't work out at all, unlike cooking where almost any mistake can be mitigated, one way or another. Baking also generally involves a lot of steps, a lot of bowls, a lot of prep work, and significantly more time than cooking--all of these are things I hate. So, in our household, my husband generally does most of the baking, including all the Christmas baking of cookies, cherry coconut bars, and fudge. 

But my husband is a nurse and it's rare for him to get the entirety of Thanksgiving off.  And while Christmas baking can sort of be worked in in and around and throughout the holiday season, Thanksgiving dessert needs to be prepared on Thanksgiving Day, meaning it generally falls to me to make. I usually make a fruit cobbler or a fruit crisp, as they are easy, basically foolproof, and require some of the least prep work in the baking world. 

But for the past year, recipes for clafoutis have been popping up practically non-stop in my Pinterest feed, piquing my curiosity. 

Like a cobbler, a clafoutis involves basically 5 steps: grease a baking pan, layer in fruit, mix a bunch of things, spread on top, and bake. 

And, despite the town of McKinney clearing away much of the elderberry bushes in a part I frequent--why did they do this? They didn't replace it with anything--I still had several containers of the fruit in the freezer. So, I decided to try my hand at an elderberry clafoutis for this year's Thanksgiving. 

This recipe requires some special equipment:

• Blender
• Deep pie pan; my pan was around 1.5" deep and was barely enough. A 2" pan would be much better. 

Elderberry Clafoutis Pie 

• 2 cups fresh or frozen elderberries | If frozen, defrost and reserve the liquid
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup plain white flour
• 1 cup granulated sugar, divided into 3/4 and 1/4 portions* 
• 2/3 cup heavy cream or whole milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp almond extract
• 1/4 tsp salt
• Butter to grease the pan

1. Preheat the oven to 325
2. Grease a deep pie pan with butter.
3. Spread your elderberries out in the greased pan. 
4. Add any reserved elderberry liquid, the eggs, the flour, the 3/4 cup of sugar, the cream or milk, vanilla, almond and salt to the blender and liquify. 
5. Pour the mixture over the top of the elderberries--slowly, if you can. Sprinkle the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar over everything evenly.
6. Put the pan in the oven and bake for around 45 minutes until it puffs up and turns golden brown on top.

* This makes a lightly sweet clafoutis. Next time I would probably increase the sugar a little to offset the tartness of the elderberries more. I would also sprinkle the elderberries themselves with sugar in the pan. 

Right out of the oven

The result and what I would do differently next time

Elderberries float, which doesn't provide the intended 
layer effect

The elderberry clafoutis was tasty, but it did have the regular issues that any elderberry dish has, primarily being the crunchy elderberry seeds. There's no real way to work around these, unless you have a juicer and want to juice the berries first, so just be aware, your topping is going to be textural. 

The bigger issue is that I don't think that elderberries are right for a clafoutis because they are too small and too light. This means they float when you pour the liquid mixture over them. 

A clafoutis is supposed to come out as layers: crust on top, moist cake in the middle, and fruit on the bottom. But because of the floating, the finished product didn't have that layer effect. Instead, my fruit rose to the top (see pic) and became part of the crust. Still tasty, but not the intended result. 

Other than that, a great, lightly sweet dessert made with the kind of wild ingredients that would have been eaten by both the Native Americans and the early European settlers, though they likely would have been dried to make it into November. 

Mushroom candy made with foraged wood ear mushrooms

A little while ago a stumbled across multiple huge flushes of some of the most perfectly formed, perfectly fresh, perfectly "ripe" wood ear mushrooms, Auricularia angiospermarum; also called jelly ear and tree ear mushrooms. If you want to learn how to identify these mushrooms, click here. 

They were so perfect that I was immediately inspired to try something I've wanted to do for some time: Wood ear mushroom candy.

Is this not the single most perfect wood ear mushroom you've ever seen?

I've been really interested in the idea of mushroom candy since I purchased my first (and still one of my favorite) edible mushroom identification book, Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America by David W. Fischer and Alan E. Bessette. In that book the authors introduce the jellytooth (Pseudohydnum gelatinosum) and apricot jelly (Phlogiotis helvelloides) mushrooms and mentions that while they lack a lot of flavor on their own, but act as a culinary novelty that can be turned into some truly unique foods, including desserts. Alan Bessette also includes a recipe for "glazed jellytooth." This dish is clearly a dessert with sugar, fruit-flavored liqueur, berries and apples. 

Both of those mushrooms fall into the large category of "jelly fungus." These two mushrooms are fairly uncommon and, when you do find them, rarely found in any abundance. But the wood ear mushroom is quite common throughout much of the continental U.S. and is often found quite abundantly. Interestingly, despite being abundant, easy to identify and having a long history as food in multiple cultures, the wood ear mushroom isn't mentioned in the book. 

I've also seen wood ear mushrooms used in desserts from foragers on blogs and on Instagram and the Central Texas Mycological Society posted one as well. So I really wanted to try my hand at my own. 

A note on orange liquor

This recipe, as is, does include alcohol. If you want to share with children or if you don't drink alcohol you can substitute with an orange syrup, orange extract or orange juice concentrate. You can also use the orange liquor but bring it and the orange juice to a boil and simmer for a few minutes to cook off the alcohol. 

These mushrooms have only a very small amount of alcohol in them though, they don't absorb much when they reconstitute.

Another note on dried mushrooms

Before you begin the recipe, you must first boil the mushrooms for at least 2 minutes. This is because you shouldn't eat wood ear mushrooms uncooked AND boiling wild mushrooms can help with any potential parasites.

The mushrooms must already be dehydrated for this recipe. This is because wood ear mushrooms pick up the flavor of whatever they are reconstituted in, and we want to infuse the mushrooms with flavor.

If you don't have a dehydrator you can dry in the oven. For oven drying, spread out on a baking sheet and bake on the lowest temperature your oven can produce, 140-170 degrees are ideal. If your oven can't go below 200 degrees, you should keep it cracked open. Check often, flip every hour, and remove mushrooms as they become dry--usually after 4-6 hours. 

After the mushrooms are truly dry you can wait as long as you like to begin. 

The dark area inside is the mushroom

Chocolate and orange wood ear mushrooms

Please note, this recipe does require a dehydrator or dehydrating mushrooms in the oven.

• 
  
  Around 3 cups of fresh wood ear mushrooms
• 7 oz of your preferred chocolate, I like a ~70% cacao dark chocolate
• 1 pint orange juice
• 1/4 cup orange or peach liquor, or whichever flavor you prefer
• Confectioners' sugar (optional)

1. For this recipe, you need to work with mushrooms that have been first boiled and then dehydrated. See above. 
2. Mix the orange juice and liquor in a large bowl. If you don't want these to have any alcohol at all, bring the mix to a boil for at least a minute and then let cool. 
3. Add the mushrooms in and set aside in the fridge for at least 2 hours to reconstitute. 
4. Spread parchment on a cooled baking sheet. Space the pieces of reconstituted mushroom out on the sheet. 
5. Melt the chocolate in either a double boiler or a microwave.
6. Drizzle with the orange juice/liquor and then the chocolate. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar if you wish.
7. Place in the refrigerator for 1 hour. Then flip each piece and repeat the process. 
8. Enjoy, but they should be kept in the refrigerator and should either be consumed or frozen within 4-5 days or the mycelium will begin to re-consume the mushrooms, which isn't bad for you but does impact the texture.