Super cheesy, scalloped wild mushrooms with leeks. Vegetation, low carb side dish, gluten-free optional

The best way to keep a massive haul of most kinds of mushrooms is to dry them. Drying is optimal for the boletes, chanterelles and other vase-type mushrooms, morels, lactarius, oysters, jelly fungi, and pretty much any gilled mushroom. I've even had good luck with the small puffballs, though I've never tried it with the large ones. The only group that drying isn't ideal for is the polypores.

And so it was with the mushrooms I used to make this dish. I found a long-lost container of wine-cap mushrooms (Stropharia rugosoannulata) in the back of the pantry. I believe these are from the batch we harvested in spring of 2014, which was from a truly epic flush of mushrooms.

Don't have wild foraged wine-cap 'shrooms? That's ok! Try this dish with store-bought cremini or portobello mushrooms.

Tofu stuffed with pork and foraged wild mushrooms. Gluten-free optional.

These adorable little cubes of steamed tofu are my riff on a traditional Hakka Chinese dish, where they are traditionally stuffed with pork and salt-cured fish. I can never really get into salt-cured fish, so I've substituted foraged mushrooms.

Hakka cuisine isn't well represented in the US, but the Hakka people are one of the important ethnic groups in China. They also have an international presence, primarily in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and some of their food has melded into those cultures. So when you have Taiwanese cuisine in the US, it may have Hakka origins or influences.

This dish can be made with nearly any wild, foraged mushroom, but for preference, I'd use hen of the woods, any of the Agaricus, wine-caps, or dryad's saddle.

Using store-bought mushrooms? I recommend mushrooms traditionally used in Asian cuisine: shiitake, enoki, or hen of the woods. 

White button mushrooms or cremini would also be good.

Also note, this dish can easily be made vegan, remove the pork, and triple the amount of mushrooms. 

Foraged Wild Mushroom & Ramp Strata

And just like that, ramp season is over! 4 weeks, give or take a day or two, and the leaves of all the plants are yellowing, wilting, and dying. We went crazy, harvesting the last of the greenery last weekend. We picked enough for another batch of Spicy Black Bean Fish with Ramps, enough to fill a couple of large freezer bags, and enough for this bread pudding dish.

A strata is like a bread pudding, very rich and dense. This is not a light meal, this is not a healthy meal; with heavy cream, prosciutto, eggs, bread, butter, and cheese, it's just plain decadent. . . But ramp season comes just once a year, and it just seemed fitting to have it go out with a bang!

I reconstituted wine-cap (Stropharia rugosoannulata) mushrooms from that epic haul of a couple weeks ago to make this dish, but you could use fresh cremini or white button mushrooms instead. Tossing a few morels in would probably be pretty great as well, given how well they pair with cream.

White Bean & Sun-Dried Tomato Stuffed Wine-Cap Mushroom Recipe

I am not kidding. Go out and make this recipe. Right. Now. If you aren't lucky enough to find wild mushrooms, portobellos will be fine, but you need to try this. 

While out foraging last Saturday, my husband spotted some huge mushrooms growing in woodchips outside a park, as we raced to the morel spot. After hunting around for morels (and finding a nice haul), we stopped at the park to see what he spotted.

Sorry, no pictures in the "wild"

I don't know where the park got it's wood chips, but they were literally bursting with fungi. You could barely walk from one clump to another without trampling dozens. Most were non-edible, very possibly poisonous, but on one edge of the park we found the motherload of wine-caps (Stropharia rugosoannulata).

Within minutes we had over 10lbs of mushrooms. I failed to take pictures as we were in full sight of the road, and in a park full of people (who were giving me the stink eye), and my husband was hurrying me on--fearful of the police. The mushroom ranged from the smallest, firmest young buttons to older mushrooms, with caps the size of salad plates! Some of the older mushrooms had tops which dried out, and had cracked, but when I sliced through them, the interior flesh was still firm, white and moist. The entire collection was surprisingly bug-free, only one had to be thrown away.

Stropharia rugosoannulata aren't the most difficult to ID, but they aren't a beginners mushroom either; still I was confident in what I had, having been with several experienced mushroom hunters who had ID'd them for me before. I would not recommend you try to hunt these until you have several other species under your belt, and preferably get introduced to them by a local expert.