Our friend Tristan sent me a text two weeks ago stating "My grandparents found 35 lbs of chanterelles at their cabin yesterday!"
That was a call to action for AJ and me. Our collective best day ever has been four lbs. We had to see this fabled forest that Tristan texts about, the one that supposedly churns out an exorbitant amount of mushrooms.
We piled in the Subaru on this classic, crisp PacNorWest fall weekend and drove to the grandparent's cabin on Hood Canal. It sits on 100+ acres of pristine forestland and has nearly one mile of waterfront, backdropped by the Olympic Mountains. The landscape is steep, and the cabin is about 800 sq feet built right into the hillside. Hood Canal is 50 yards down the hill, visible from all aspects of the cabin through the tall forest. Nothin fancy, but everything a cabin should be. Unbelievably fantastic.
The forest was dark, green, wet, but also bright with yellows from the big leaf maples changing color. And the forest floor was absolutely dripping with mushrooms. Within one minute of being there, AJ found about three lbs of lobster mushrooms. There were countless other kinds of mushrooms EVERYWHERE. And there were chanterelles too.
In fact, we found 30 lbs of them. And another 10 lbs of lobsters. All told, we searched for about three hours, packing up our bags and passing up scores of remaining forest mushrooms on our walk back. We retired to the cabin, fired up the pot-bellied stove, opened some fantastic wines, and enjoyed a superb mushroom risotto compliments of AJ. A real PacNorWest fall adventure - what a treat.
The cabin's deck, perched high above Hood Canal
The top of this white mushroom was the size of a salad plate
Tristan finds the mother load - chanterelles
I find a giant lobster mushroom - weighed about 2 lbs
AJ likes to cut some mushrooms!
Heavy bags, filled with loot
We even found white chanerelles for the first time - this one was the size of a softball
Back to the cabin we go to
AJ preps the table for our loot to dry
And that's what 30 lbs of chanterelles looks like
Had to get down to the intertidal - beautiful Hood Canal
Some fall color on the beach
J and A
Salamander!
Back into the forest and up to the cabin for dinner
Gotta start the night with a French red taste test
Mushroom risotto, arugula and red pepper salad, homemade sourdough bread - absolutely delicious
Below are some other pics from the weekend, mostly of mushrooms and the forest. There are so many types of them - sizes, colors, shapes...these are just a few.
(yes, that's a real mushroom!)
For those unfamiliar with the Hood Canal, its that long hooked waterway connected to Puget Sound. Blue dot is the cabin.
Now wer're back home and have cleaned and processed all these mushrooms! We set some aside to eat all week, and the rest were sauteed and bagged to go in the freezer. Now we have enough chanterelles for the year!
Lobsters and chanterelles - you can see how much bigger the lobsters are, and how they got their name
Mushrooms waiting to be cleaned, two skillets going on the stove, and then after cooling down, into the ziplock they go
