Photo Collage - Chicken Mushroom

We find our chicken mushrooms (Laetiporus sulphureus) more often in the fall, but they can be found starting in the spring, though the summer, and into autumn.  Our orange and yellow chicken mushroom can be a large specimen, providing huge amounts of food when the fungus is still young and tender. When the shelves are cut, they should ooze a little liquid and be juicy. Old, crumbly and bleached and faded chicken mushroom will taste like sawdust, and no amount of cooking or boiling will remedy that.

To use the flesh, we slice or cube the shelves and meaty core into manageable pieces, and use it just like chicken. It will retain it's beautiful orange and white color, and will crisp up nicely when sauteed. We have made pot pie, skewered satay, soup, "fried chicken", stuffed bread, and a pulled meat style barbecue sandwich with this versatile fungus, along with just frying it up in a pan and eating it with a sprinkle of salt and lemon juice.

Gillian holding a pink and white chicken, cut
from the base of an oak tree

Chicken mushrooms are polypores, which means they have small holes, or pores, on their underside instead of gills. They rot the heart wood of hardwood trees here in the Northeast, growing on the upper portions of the tree trunk. A similar chicken, the pink and white Laetiporus cincinnatus, rots the roots and butt of the tree, and therefore appears at the base of a tree. We actually enjoy the taste of the pink and white chicken slightly more than the orange and yellow chicken, but both are very good edibles.

From MushroomExpert.com:

Ecology: Parasitic and saprobic on living and dead oaks (also sometimes on the wood of other hardwoods); causing a reddish brown cubical heart rot, with thin areas of white mycelium visible in the cracks of the wood; annual; growing alone or, more typically, in large clusters; summer and fall, rarely in winter and spring; east of the Rocky Mountains. The mushrooms do not appear until well after the fungus has attacked the tree; by the time the chickens appear, they are definitely coming home to roost, as far as the tree's health is concerned.
Fruiting Body: Up to 60 cm across; usually consisting of several to many individual caps arranged in a shelving formation or a rosette.
Caps: 5-30 cm across and up to 20 cm deep; up to 3 cm thick; fan-shaped to semicircular or irregular; more or less planoconvex; smooth to finely wrinkled; suedelike; bright yellow to bright orange when young, frequently fading in maturity and with direct sunlight.
Pore Surface: Yellow; with 2-4 circular to angular pores per mm; tubes to 5 mm deep.
Stem: Absent.
Flesh: Thick; soft and watery when young, becoming tough, eventually crumbling away; white to pale yellow.
Odor and Taste: Not distinctive.
Spore Print: White.

Spring Chicken Mushroom

As the spring season progresses, we are finding ourselves very busy and out in the woods and fields almost every day. Between jobs, our daughter, her school functions, and other obligations, we try to head out to find our favorite wild foods when we find some time. While May and June are not the best times for mushroom hunting, sometimes we find ourselves a lucky spring chicken (Laetiporus sulphureus), or sulfur shelf mushroom growing from dead wood. While out on our desperate hunt for Connecticut morels, Robert came across a small yellow blob on a dead tree. Really small, only about an inch across, but he still recognized it as an immature chicken mushroom.

Three days later, we went back out to check the progress of the mushroom. Rain does not have too much to do with the progression of this polypore, since it is growing from wood and not the ground. It has been very dry this month, so there is not much else in the way of fungi to be found in the forest. The original small blob had erupted into a colony of soft and wet growing parts, about the length of our arm, along with other growths along the dead tree. There were no shelves yet, so we left it to grow some more.

After seven days total, we went back today to find a beautiful, big chicken. The humidity brought out some small bugs, but they flew away with a burst of breath. The knife cut through the tender flesh of the mushroom easily, and we grabbed about 15 pounds of fresh "meat" from several clusters of shelves. There is not much to clean, just a few small twig inclusions and a bug or two, and now we have several meals planned this week.

Connecticut Morels

We have only been searching for mushrooms for about 3 years now, but had never found morels in Connecticut. Until this weekend, that is. Connecticut does not get the large amounts that you can find in the mid-west, and we don't have forest fires very often, so we don't have burn morels like the west coast. Our season is short and erratic. It had been very dry- no rain for 16 days- this spring, so we figured it was another season we would not be able to find morels. We camped out with a group of mushroom hunting pals this weekend, and we made a group exploration effort that yielded 27 morels and a pile of young dryad's saddle (Polyporus squamosus).

Andrew may be in love!

Camping with mushroom hunters, wild food foragers, and fishermen and fisherwomen definitely had advantages. Dinner back at camp that evening included fried dryad's saddle and morels in butter and oil, fire roasted ramps naan bread, morel kasha and pasta salad, fresh caught rainbow and brook trout stuffed with sheep's sorrel and ramps, maitake chili, chaga tea, and some dandelion wine purchased at the dandelion festival in Ohio. We sampled, we chatted, we drank around the fire telling fish stories and mushroom hunting tales. I wish we had photos of the food, but it was dark and we had to eat in the covered tent because it was raining a bit. Looking forward to a fruitful mushrooming, foraging and feasting year with friends!

Dryad's saddle, we ate the smaller, more tender specimens

Can you spot the morels in this picture? 

Ramps Recipe - Ramps Twists

Here is a great use for the ramps pesto we make using the green leaves of our native edible wild leeks (Allium tricoccum). Another spring ephemeral, the leaves of the ramps start to poke up from the warming earth in April. They can be gathered for about a month and a half before they send up their flower stalk and the leaves begin to yellow and die back until next spring. We rarely dig the entire ramp, as this kills the plant and we don't use the bulb very often. The leaves are full of the funky-garlicky goodness we like, and we harvest the leaves by cutting one leaf from each cluster of 2 or 3 that each plant produces from its bulb. By taking only a few leaves from any area, we ensure the health of the ramps patch. They reproduce very slowly by splitting their underground bulbs, and digging them up as many short-sighted commercial harvesters do will destroy future sources of this delicious wild edible. Most of the recipes we come up with use the leaves, and the pesto recipe freezes well to use all year.

Find this recipe in our book.

Ramps patch

This recipe is available in our book, available Spring 2016.

http://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/book/?GCOI=60239108626260&

Garlic Mustard Recipe - Garlic Mustard and Cheese Ravioli

Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is another super-invasive plant in our area along the east coast. The whole plant is edible, the leaves, flower stalks, flowers, roots, and seeds that are produced in massive quantities. Eating this invader can be done for a good portion of the year, and the blanched leaves store well in the freezer. The flavor overall is garlicky, with a bit of a mustard bite that some people might find bitter. We like the second year's triangular leaves better than the oval, scalloped leaves of the first year's basal rosette, they tend to be more tender and less harsh. We like to pair the pungency of this wild edible with earthy flavors like mushrooms, plus rich textures like cheese in recipes, while still adding a good quantity of garlic mustard. This recipe is mostly about making a filling. You can fill wontons or pasta dough for ravioli, or even use it to stuff some puff pastry triangles or bread. We used some wild hen-of-the-woods maitake mushrooms, because that is what we had in the freezer, but grocery store mushrooms will work fine.

Garlic Mustard and Cheese Ravioli Filling     makes about 2 cups

1 T olive oil
1 c. chopped ramps or onions
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 c. chopped maitake mushrooms, or chopped shiitake mushrooms
2 1/2 c. garlic mustard leaves, roughly chopped
4 T farmer's cheese, or drained ricotta
1 T sour cream
1 tsp salt

1. Sautee chopped ramps or onion in the olive oil over medium heat until transluscent, 4 minutes. Add garlic and chopped mushrooms, cook until the mushrooms release their juices and it evaporates, about 5 more minutes.
2. Toss in 2 cups of the garlic mustard leaves and cover the pan, cook 2 more minutes to wilt the leaves. Remove from the heat and allow the mixture to cool.
3. Put the cooked onion, mushroom and garlic mustard mixture into a food processor, and pulse a few times to mix. Add the remaining 1/2 cup of raw garlic mustard leaves, the farmer's cheese, sour cream and salt, and continue to pulse until the mixture is finely chopped. Taste and adjust salt.
4. Use the filling to fill ravioli, wonton wrappers, or as a spread.

First-year basal rosette

Second year leaves and flower stalks

Japanese Knotweed Recipe - Knotweed Fruit Leather

Japanese Knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) is one of our most prolific invasive plants, it spreads by producing copious winged seeds in the fall and through underground rhizomes. Colonies of knotweed advance and can puncture up through the pavement in the spring, making them especially hated by public works employees who will try to cut down the stalks and poison the heck out of the plant. When gathering some knotweed shoots in the spring for consumption, try to get them from untreated areas and away from roadsides. They should also be picked before they are 12" tall; when they are still thick and have not unfurled too many leaves is the best time. To eat them raw, we prefer to peel the stalks, which can be difficult since the stalk is hollow like bamboo. When they are younger, the stalks are thicker and the peel comes off rather easily with a knife or potato peeler. For this fruit leather recipe, you can use smaller unpeeled stalks, or peel the larger ones with a stringier skin. Since we purchased a better blender, we can make this fruit leather without the peeling step.

Peeled knotweed stalks

The color is not particularly appetizing, olive green, but the flavor is similar to sour apples, without any of the knotweed's typical vegetal qualities. Our daughter, Gillian, really enjoys this snack and we had trouble keeping her away from the fruit leather long enough to take a picture. I tried two different methods of drying the fruit leather: the oven and the dehydrator. We have a cheap 1990's Ronco dehydrator that works just fine, using the fruit leather plastic tray. I then tried spreading the puree on parchment in the Ronco and it worked, but was a little more brittle. Then I spread some puree very thickly on some silicone baking mats on a sheetpan in the oven and it worked, but took the longest to dry. Once I removed it form the drying surface, I just rolled them up to store them in some glass jars.

Update: We finally saved enough money to purchase a good Excalibur dehydrator. This recipe makes enough puree to fill 2-12" square trays lined with the silicone liners. I use the fruit leather setting, about 130º F until the leather has darkened and dried. The old Ronco still works too!

This recipe is available in our book, available Spring 2016.

http://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/book/?GCOI=60239108626260&

Pile of knotweed peels