Updated from the archives, with new recipe, links and photos.
A few Junes ago, Ted was mowing the occasional blades of grass in our lawn.
Along the edge of the woods, underneath the oak trees, he spotted a couple of oddly shaped mushrooms. Are they morels, he wondered?
Oh, yes, they were. And the more we looked, the more we found.
Two quarts of morels!
Have I told you that our land was once used by a charcoal maker? He was known as "The Indian," because he was a member of the Narragansett tribe that has its roots here in Rhode Island. (Nobody we know remembers his name.) There are large concrete platforms buried beneath our grass; on those platforms, more than forty years ago, The Indian burned wood into charcoal. A mushroom forager told us that the residual ash in our lawn creates a happy environment for morels.
We harvested every one of those wonderful morels, and I noted the date on the calendar. The following year, we didn't find a single morel. The year after that, just a handful. Last year, none.
Dried mushrooms I've purchased from farmers and farm stands in France (cepes) and in the Pacific Northwest (mixed morels, chanterelles and porcini) have kept for more than two years in tightly-sealed glass jars in my pantry, with no significant loss of quality.
We should have dried our harvest that first year.
