Yes, our incredible mushrooming season continues into the new year.
We celebrated New Year's Eve and New Year's Day by gathering hedgehogs and golden chanterelles and checking on our lovely sulfur shelf that appeared a couple of months ago. What a joyful way to ring out the old and ring in the new!
Our spectacular sulfur shelf continues to amaze us.
The following weekend we gathered more hedgehogs in the space of a couple of hours than we would probably encounter in a typical year. Many were large, and all were in perfect condition, and they were everywhere. We also found a couple dozen young golden chanterelles along the way.
We've never dehydrated hedgehogs before - frankly, we've never found enough to consider dehydrating them before. As an experiment, last Monday we dehydrated some, then rehydrated them later in the week for use in a cream sauce. Yummy. Of course, they were a firmer mushroom than the usual hedgehog mushroom in the sauce, but other than that, they were a lovely product with which to cook.
Based on the success of that experiment, I've dehydrated the remaining hedgehogs (2 dehydrators worth!) from last weekend, put the dried mushrooms in glass jars with a moisture absorbing packet, and will keep them sitting in my freezer for a week or so to ensure that no critters that may have been on the mushrooms will remain alive (this is always recommended when dehydrating mushrooms!).
We haven't made it out mushrooming yet this weekend - too many chores - but we're expecting to venture out later today and return with gifts from the forest floor. Imagine gathering hedgehogs under sunny, blue skies in January. What a delightful way to start of the new year!
MJT 1/9/11
p.s. Well, mid-day Sunday we went on down to the spot that we call "The Point". We came back a couple of hours later with a respectable basket of hedgehogs that immediately went into the dehydrator and a good sized, fully mature cauliflower that had been nestled in beside an old evergreen. I think that this fantastic mushroom season is spoiling us!