The Great Boyne City National Morel Festival

To hear five-time national morel hunting champion Tony Williams tell it, the bold idea of calling Boyne City, Michigan's, tribute to everything Morchella a national festival was easy. No one else had one. Certainly not 51 years ago when it was first hatched.

The hunting contest itself was born in a bar.  “Guys were arguing,"explained Tony (pictured with the rustic furniture he builds). "It was a bar fight! A group of about twenty met in the morning to settle it. One of them was a Lion’s Club member. They said, ‘We should organize this for the city. Nobody else is doing it, so let’s call it the National Morel Mushroom Festival.’” 

A half century later, the National Morel Mushroom Festival attracts aficionados, fanatics, and the merely curious to Lake Charlevoix's scenic shore to learn about morels, eat them in quantity, and even—should they be so inclined—purchase a few giant chain-saw replicas to decorate the front lawn.

This is bucolic country, a photogenic trip back to an older, more innocent America, with rolling hills of leafy hardwoods, neat geometric agricultural plots, and farm houses dotting the countryside. The city itself is a small if fairly bustling burg of restaurants, galleries, and shops, a place that does much of its business in the summertime—with a head start in mid-May thanks to the morel fest.

I've been following the festival from afar for a number of years now, and finding myself in the northern woods of Michigan this May to visit friends in Marquette, I just had to make the four-hour trip downstate—as the Yoopers would say—to check it out. I was also hoping to see the sort of morels that are typical in the Midwest but less common where I live.

Like the Pacific Northwest, midwestern morel hunters find natural black morels, which are usually the first true morels to flush in the Great Lakes region each spring. But after the blacks fruit they also find a confusing variety of species commonly called grays, whites, and yellows. Some of these might be the same species at different stages of growth; others look suspiciously similar to what we sometimes call Morchella esculenta.

So I entered the contest and boarded a yellow school bus on a drizzly Saturday morning. What better way to see for myself? With a flashing police escort, we drove out of town to a predetermined secret spot a half-hour away near Chandler Hill. Each contestant signed a clip board so the bus driver could count heads on the way back. "Two or three people got lost in the woods last year," someone in the front said. On our bus we had morel hunters from Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, and even North Carolina. On another bus there was a couple of South Korean women and a mycologist from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

I happened to be seated next to a local writer, Mary Ellen Geist, author of Measure of the Heart. Mary Ellen warned me that I better be ready to hit the woods at a full gallop because these hunters were serious. Sure, sure, I said. I'll be ready. My main concern was getting some photos of the action.

With that in mind I tried to identify likely experts—camo clothing, trucker hats, and a sneaking caginess were all part of my criteria—to follow into the woods for a photo-op. But then, moments after stepping off the bus, a bullhorn siren blared and everyone took off in a mad, cutthroat dash for the woods. I was still fiddling with the settings on my camera! Even Mary Ellen, who I figured could be my guide in a pinch, was last seen high-stepping through raspberry brambles on her way out of sight.

I wandered into the forest nearly last, fumbling with the camera and realizing I'd left my compass behind.

First impressions? I was a long way from Cle Elum. These great northern woods aren't like the east slope of the Cascades. Where's the topography? I wondered. How do you pick out landmarks? Without a map and compass I was feeling uncertain about my ability to roam at will. I found some kids and stuck close by, snapping pictures. They were in their mid-teens, from Ontario, and had been allowed to hunt by themselves for the first time this year. "My dad was champion a few years ago," one of them bragged. They weren't really sure where they were. "If we get lost dad's gonna kill us."

As any mushroom hunter knows, morels don't obey the laws of human commerce. This year they were late. The assembled hunters pulled mostly "caps" from the underbrush, the related Verpa bohemica mushrooms (pictured) that look somewhat like morels. Caps are fair game in the contest even if most people don't eat them, and good thing—otherwise most of the contestants would have scored a big goose egg, including me.

Knowing your trees is an important part of morel hunting wherever you are, but especially in the Midwest. Old apple trees, dying or dead elms, and ash trees are good producers. In Northern Michigan the ashes seemed to be the ticket, and I spoke with many experienced hunters who said they'll pick out ash trees from afar and walk—or in the the case of the contest, run—directly toward them. The older the ash the better, with clusters of them being even better yet. Notice the diamond-like patterning of the ash bark at right. Tony Williams can pick out ash trees by the lime-green color of their new leaves from miles away.

This year's contest winner ended up picking something like 342 mushrooms in 90 minutes, of which only 40 or 50 were true morels. The record is held by Tony, with nearly 800 mushrooms picked during two consecutive 90-minute contests in the mid-eighties.

Like almost everyone else in the the hunt, yours truly didn't find a single true morel, just caps. Per usual when I travel, my timing was just a bit off, like maybe 48 hours off. More about that in a moment. After boarding the buses and returning to town, the next eagerly anticipated event was the Taste of Morels, in which local restaurants cook up a bite to eat and compete for top honors. My personal favorites (though I didn't get to taste everything) were Red Mesa Grill's Corn Cakes with Morel Cream Sauce, which placed third, and Cafe Sante's Duck Onion Soup with Morel Duxelles, which took first.

All this morel action was starting to gnaw at me. Was I really going to leave Michigan without finding my own? On my way out of town the next morning I got a call from Mary Ellen. Just that morning she had taken a stroll near her home and found the first "grays" of the season. "Get over here quick!" she advised. Well, I suppose I could be a little late for dinner back in Marquette... Sure enough, a few little morels were just starting to pop around an old apple tree in an overgrown orchard. She held one out for inspection. Whether it was a gray, white, or yellow—or all three—I couldn't be sure, but it definitely had the fetching demeanor of a true morel and I could feel the first twinges of a sickness coming on.

"I've got another spot we need to check," said Mary Ellen. We hurried back to our cars and drove down the road a piece, pulling off on a dirt track a mile or so away. We both had the fever now. Ramps of perfect harvesting size carpeted the ground and Dutchman's breeches bloomed in delicate bunches.

"How will we ever see them with this riot of greenery?"

"Look for the ash."

My eye was getting better. I picked out a cluster of three ash trees and then started poking around. Voila! A small morel tried to hide from me beneath a trillium. And another... Soon I had a dozen from this one cluster of ash trees. We spotted another large ash and made a bee-line. More morels. I was scoring the way the locals did. An hour later, with enough morels to bring to Marquette, I thanked Mary Ellen and reluctantly bid adieu to Boyne City.

That night my old friends Russ and Carol put together a feast of homemade pasta with Lamb and Morel Stew ladled on top and spring asparagus on the side. Local, seasonal, and superb. We walked it off on the beach a few blocks from their home, Lake Superior lapping in the moonlight, and finished the evening with a couple beers at a hotel bar in town. The next day I would be leaving—but not without a fistful of that other local delicacy, ramps...

Morel Madness

Sometimes Marty thinks I dreamed up this whole Fat of the Land thing so I'd have an excuse to spend more time outdoors. I'm not going to argue with that theory. Seems like I've been logging more nights in the woods lately than at home. As a result, here at FOTL headquarters we're way behind on bringing you the latest adventures in the field and in the kitchen.

The cool, wet spring has produced an epic morel mushroom year in the Pacific Northwest—and I've been only too happy to harvest my share. Flush after flush of naturals keeps flooding the mountains, with multiple flushes sometimes at the same elevation. I'm finding so many naturals that I'm not even bothering to work the burns. The dryer is running overtime. In fact, I had to upgrade my homemade system to a store-bought Nesco dehydrator to handle the volume. Good times.

Over the Memorial Day weekend we went looking for sun, camping on the far eastern flank of the Cascades in what is high desert badlands. It was one of those classic Northwest beer commercials as we assembled for this group shot in down jackets and other winter gear. Even in desert canyons you can find an oasis of wild foods. We came upon on a large patch of miner's lettuce that provided our salad greens for the weekend, and closer to the pass we went on a family hike and found morels in abundance on the elk trails.

Our friends Tip and Bridget whumped up a killer morel pasta dinner. I don't have the exact details but it went something like this: chopped red onion and morels sauteed in butter, deglazed with red wine, finished with fresh sage and heavy cream and tossed with parmesan and fettucini.

The following weekend proved just as bountiful as we moved up in elevation to find the freshest morels. At one point I stumbled on a blowdown and figured there had to be a morel or two. Sure enough, one after another pointed me up the slope until I realized an area smaller than a football field was loaded with more than a hundred of the sneaky fellers.

There's always a catch. The weather has been a boon to morels but our spring king season is looking like a bust. The boletes need warmth to pop. This year they're a couple weeks late and I'm afraid the main flush will happen all at once and then the season will quickly wind down with a crop of wormed-out porcini. Luckily I managed to harvest a bunch at the very beginning. More on that in my next post.

Sichuan Fish-Fragrant Geoduck with Morels

The gloves are off here at FOTL headquarters and we're pumping a fist for that old favorite, surf 'n' turf. Again. Yeah, I know we've already gone a few rounds with this theme before: You'll remember my Kung Pao Geoduck with Chicken of the Woods Mushrooms and my X-Country Double Lobster Risotto. Now behold Sichuan Geoduck with Morels. And if anyone utters the "A" word—y'know, authenticity, or lack thereof—well, there might be a fight.

You hear that word a lot in online chat rooms about food and restaurants, where it's usually thrown around by the guy who's been to [insert exotic city here] thank you very much and knows a thing or three about how the real native people cook and eat. This character spots inauthenticity all around, no matter how artfully camouflaged. Can you imagine what the English language would be like if it was held captive by the authenticity police? The OED wouldn't require a magnifying glass, that's for sure.

So with that preamble out of the way, I give you my take on the Sichuan classic "Fish-Fragrance," except mine doesn't use pork or any other common meat—it uses the sliced body meat of the famous geoduck clam, on this occasion the three-pounder I helped dig up last week. And rather than fungi common to China such as cloud ear mushroms it uses the beautiful morels I found the other day on the eastern slope of Washington State's Cascade Mountains, not to mention tender, thin spears of Yakima Valley asparagus.



You won't be seeing this dish on any menus and as to its claim to Sichuan...um...authenticity, I'll leave that to you dear reader, but to paraphrase the Seinfeld character without the boob job: "It was real—and it was spectacular!"

For my guide I used Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty and her recipe for Fish-Fragrant Pork Slivers, with some changes. Dunlop says the "so-called fish-fragrant flavor is one of Sichuan's most famous culinary creations, and it epitomizes the Sichuanese love for audacious combinations of flavors." As to where the fish fragrance comes from, since the dish uses nary a fish product in its marinade or sauce, she suggests that the name evokes a cultural memory of traditional Sichuanese fish cookery, so that when other ingredients are prepared in the same way they instantly recall the taste of fish.

1 geoduck body (minus siphon), thinly sliced
1/2 lb morels, quartered
1/2 lb asparagus, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 can bamboo shoots
peanut oil
2 tbsp chili bean paste
1 1/2 tsp minced garlic
2 tsp minced ginger
2 scallions (green part only), thinly sliced

Marinade

1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp soy sauce
1 1/2 tbsp cornstarch
1 tbsp cold water
1 tsp Shaoxing rice wine

Sauce

1 1/2 tsp white sugar
1 1/2 tsp black Chinese vinegar
3/4 tsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/8 tsp cornstarch
3 tbsp chicken stock (or water)



1. Marinate the geoduck. Place sliced clam in bowl and stir in one marinade ingredient after another, stirring in one direction to combine. Refrigerate.

2. Combine sauce ingredients in a small bowl.

3. Heat 1/4 cup peanut oil in seasoned wok over high flame. When oil begins to smoke, add morels and asparagus (minus tops), stir-frying 3-4 minutes.

4. Push morels and asparagus to one side and add sliced geoduck clam, stir-frying for another minute or two. Push aside with morels and asparagus and add chili paste to wok. Stir-fry paste briefly until red and fragrant, then add garlic, ginger, and asparagus tops and mix everything together. Stir-fry 30 seconds before adding bamboo shoots, then stir-fry another 30 seconds.

5 Stir the sauce in its bowl and pour into wok, stirring. Toss with scallions and serve over rice.

We drank a bottle of Eroica Riesling, which paired well with the multi-faceted flavors of the dish.

Spring Risotto with Morels, Fiddleheads & Asparagus

Do I really need to say much about this dish or its use of the best of what the season has to offer? Nah.

1 dozen asparagus stalks
20 fiddleheads
15-20 medium-sized morels, halved
1 cup risotto rice
1 small onion, diced
1 large garlic clove, diced
1/2 cup white wine
4 cups chicken broth
1/4 cup parm, grated
2 tbsp butter, divided
olive oil

1. Cut 2-inch tops of asparagus; cut rest of stalk into 1-inch pieces. Blanche fiddleheads and asparagus (minus tops) for 3 minutes. Remove with slotted spoon. Blanche asparagus tops 1 minute right before serving.

2. Saute onion and garlic until soft in a tablespoon each of butter and olive oil, a couple minutes. Add morels and cook for 2-3 minutes before adding fiddleheads and asparagus (minus tops). Cook together another 2-3 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

3. Add more olive oil if necessary, then add rice, stirring to coat. Cook for 2 minutes over medium heat.

4. Add a ladle of chicken broth at a time until rice is al dente.

5. Off heat stir in a tablespoon of butter and parmesan cheese. Serve immediately, garnishing with asparagus tops.

Serves 2.

Sea Scallops with Maple Blossom Pesto, Morels & Asparagus

I missed the lowland blossoming of big-leaf maples, but now that it's morel time in the foothills I get another crack at the floral, slightly sweet blossoms. Maple blossoms can be added to salads, sautéed, or even used to make pesto. I blended equal portions of maple blossom and fresh mint from the garden to make this simple pesto. The rest of the ingredients are standard. Adjust as you see fit. The amounts below make enough pesto for two.



Maple Blossom-Mint Pesto

1/4 cup maple blossoms
1/4 cup fresh mint
1/8 cup olive oil
scant 1/8 cup pine nuts
1 clove garlic
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp salt
fresh ground pepper

For the rest of the meal you'll need the following ingredients:

8 large sea scallops
several large morels, halved
1 dozen stalks of asparagus, trimmed
olive oil
butter
paprika
sherry
chives

1. Make pesto in food processor.
2. Saute morels and asparagus in butter and olive oil over medium heat, turning carefully with tongs, 5 to 6 minutes.
3. Season scallops with salt, pepper, and paprika. While morels and asparagus are cooking, saute scallops quickly in a separate pan with butter over medium-high heat. Finish with a splash of sherry. Allow sherry to cook off and make sure to get a crisp edge on the scallops.
4. Spread a dollop of pesto on each plate. Arrange scallops, asparagus, and morels over pesto with a garnish of chives.

Serves 2.

After plating the meal, the scallops will slowly release their juices, mixing with the pesto to create a colorful sauce. The touch of sherry goes well with the pesto's hint of floral sweetness, and this in turn is balanced nicely by the earthiness of the asparagus and especially the morels.

Hangtown Fry

The old mining town of Placerville, California, was dubbed Hangtown back in the mid-1800s after a trio of outlaws met their end on the same day and in the same oak tree. Legend has it that not long after that a Forty-niner who finally hit paydirt took his diggings into a local saloon and demanded the most expensive meal in town. The cook picked his three dearest ingredients—fresh eggs carefully packed for the rough overland journey, oysters shipped up from San Francisco, and bacon from the East Coast—and fried them up together.

If our miner had been a hedge fund manager the cook might have even tossed a few glittering flakes into the pan, but as it is this plenty rich West Coast classic has satisfied most hungry prospectors for more than 150 years.

Lately I seem to have a surf 'n' turf fixation involving seafood and mushrooms. You can see my Kung Pao Geoduck with Chicken of the Woods Mushrooms and my X-Country Double Lobster Risotto that used Maine lobster and Washington State lobster mushrooms. This time around I combined oysters harvested the other day with my first morel mushrooms of the year.

We got the oysters last week during an outing with the drunken midgets. After showing a few friends of mine the ropes on the oyster bar—then watching them shoot raw oysters left and right—it was miraculous that I got home with any at all. Shucked oysters will keep for several days in the fridge, and though not fit for slurping raw they're perfect in a Hangtown Fry.

4 eggs, beaten
3 oysters, shucked
3 morels, halved
2 slices slab bacon, cut into thirds
1 scallion, bulb sliced, green tops cut into thirds
1 small jalapeño, sliced
flour
cracker crumbs
oil/butter
hot sauce

1. Set oven to 350 degrees. Grease 9-inch cast-iron skillet, then fry bacon over medium heat with a little oil. Remove to plate.
2. Saute morels, jalapeño, and scallion bulb in bacon fat until lightly browned, 4-5 minutes.
3. Meanwhile dredge each oyster in flour, dip in egg, and roll in cracker crumbs. Add a knob of butter to skillet along with battered oysters. Brown on one side, flip, and add remaining scallion tops. Reduce heat to medium-low. Cook 1 minute before pouring in egg and returning bacon to pan.
4. Cook egg mixture for several minutes before finishing in oven like a frittata.
Note: For less fussy approach, simply fry all the non-egg ingredients together and then scramble. Or, alternately, for a more elegant dish, remove each of the ingredients from the skillet in turn when done sautéing, then add back as eggs begin to set, as shown in photos.

Serves 1 hungry prospector or 2 hedge fund managers.

And so it begins...

Here in the upper lefthand corner of the country we have to endure weeks of hearing about everyone else's spectacular morel mushroom finds before we get a taste of our own. The flush usually begins in the southeast around Georgia in March, then spreads north and west from there, up into the Carolinas and across the lower Mississippi states of Arkansas and Missouri and into the Midwest. By the end of April the morel fruiting has usually marched up into New England and the Great Lakes region.

But Washingtonians need to be patient. California kicks off the West Coast season and then there's usually a stall before Oregon turns on and then Washington. I plan on mid-May to mid-June for the bulk of my morel picking, by which time most of the rest of the country has eaten their fill.

There are benefits to holding up the caboose. Our season is long. Morels in the Pacific Northwest start in the river valleys and migrate uphill, sometimes lasting through the summer at high elevations. My first morel foray is always to the most exposed locations in low-elevation valleys. I'll find morels out in the open in direct sunlight, far from any shade trees—a habitat that would surprise an East Coast morel hunter. Later in May and through June I'll go higher, looking for areas of disturbance in the mountains: ORV trails, timber harvests, roadcuts, burns, and so on. Unlike the low-elevation morels, these mountain morels seem to associate more with conifers.

These are black morels I'm talking about, likely a complex of species. Yellow morels in some ways are even more of a mystery. The big beautiful yellows (Morchella esculenta) are familiar to Midwestern pothunters, but in the Pacific Northwest they seem to be mainly confined to localized areas west of the Cascades, particularly along the Columbia River and its tributaries. For a while now I've wondered whether the Great Floods during the last ice age were responsible for carrying the spores of interior yellow morels to more westerly locales. In any event, you don't see many yellows up here in Puget Sound and most of our hunting is on the eastern slope.

If you want to go deep into the puzzle palace of morel taxonomy, check out this page from MushroomExpert.com.

Another wrinkle in morel morphology is the so-called "landscape morel" or "mulch morel." These are the earliest of all morels. They pop up in flower beds, beauty strips, parking medians—anywhere a commercial mulch or bed of wood-chips has been put down. Mulch morels have been known to fruit in Southern California as early as January or February. I wouldn't advise eating these morels unless you can verify that the mulch hasn't been treated with chemicals, as they so often are.

We're coming into a special time of year in my neighborhood. The thought of spring morel forays gets many a mushroom hunter through the long dark season...and then hot on the heels of the morels we have the spring porcini, a Northwest specialty. The next two months will be spent madly foraging on the dry side of the mountains, a perfect place to be in spring when deep snow drifts still haunt the high country.

Spring Lamb with Morel Wine & Herb Sauce

While porcini hunting recently, I had good luck finding some exceptionally large morels in one drainage, with several larger than my hand. I found most of them near the elevation limit of the fruiting porcini, and I suppose if I had kept going up I might have found a bunch more, but my heart was set on porcini, so I picked these as a satisfying bonus—and made sure to mark my maps with notes for further investigation another time.

I got three meals out of these collateral morels, including this lamb dinner for six that also boasted the last gasp of my in-city miner's lettuce patch. The miner's lettuce I added to a salad of tender spring greens from the garden, which got topped with three large squares of semolina and chive gnocchi. For the gnocchi recipe, click here. The grilled lamb graced the gnocchi with a ladle of morel sauce completing the picture. Really, it was an insanely good meal, and not nearly as difficult to prepare as all these instructions might suggest. Semolina gnocchi is a piece of cake, much easier than potato gnocchi, and the morel sauce is fairly intuitive if you've ever made a sauce before. Mascarpone is a nice trick for replacing heavy cream; a little goes a long way and it's a useful thickening agent.

Lamb Marinade

6 Lamb chops, French-cut
3 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tbsp sage, chopped
1 tbsp thyme, chopped
1 tbsp rosemary, chopped
salt and pepper, to taste

Season lamb with salt and pepper. Whisk together remaining ingredients and brush on both sides of lamb. Marinate 2 hours, then grill.

Morel Wine & Herb Sauce

1 lb morels, halved (or quartered if large)
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp butter, divided
1 large shallot, diced
1 cup red wine
1 oz porcini, pulverized
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 heaping tbsp mascarpone (or 1/4 cup heavy cream)
splash Madeira, to taste (optional)
salt and pepper

Reconstitute porcini ahead of time in warm water and set aside for 30 minutes. Heat olive oil and 1 tbsp butter in skillet, then add diced shallot and morels. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes over medium-high heat before pouring in red wine. Reduce by two-thirds, then add porcini stock, herbs, and a splash of Madeira. Lower heat to medium and cook several more minutes to reduce by half or so. Just before serving, stir in remaining butter and mascarpone. The sauce should thicken nicely and the butter will lend it an attractive sheen. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve with that red wine you've been saving for a special meal. Serves 4-6.

Semolina Gnocchi with Wild Mushroom Sauce

At the monthly meeting of the Puget Sound Mycological Society last Tuesday the chef of Serafina, a Seattle restaurant, gave a cooking demonstration using this recipe. I've tweaked it slightly to suit my needs, using chives instead of green onions because that's what we've got in the garden, and pulverizing the porcini for a richer sauce.


Semolina Gnocchi

2 cups milk
2 tbsp butter
3/4 cup semolina flour
1/4 cup parmesan, grated
2 tbsp chives, chopped
1 egg yolk
salt and pepper to taste

1. Boil milk and butter over medium-high heat. Slowly whisk in semolina. Reduce heat to medium-low and stir a minute or two. Stir in parmesan, chives, and seasoning. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring. Remove from heat and stir in egg yolk.

2. Grease a baking tin and spread mixture on tin to cool for several minutes. Using a spatula, spread and flatten gnocchi evenly so it's approximately 1/3 inch thick. Refrigerate. Trim edges and cut into 1-inch squares.

Wild Mushroom Sauce

1/2 oz dried porcini
1 medium leek, divided
1/2 lb fresh morels, sliced
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil, plus more if necessary
1 tbsp fresh sage, chopped
splash Madiera
1 heaping tbsp mascarpone cheese
salt and pepper to taste

1. Pulverize dried porcini and bring to boil in 2 cups water with 1/2 leek, trimmed and roughly chopped. Reduce heat and let simmer 5 minutes before removing from heat.

2. Saute morels in pan with butter and olive oil until browned, about 4 minutes. Season. Add remaining leek, cut into julienne, and cook another few minutes. When leek has softened, add sage and deglaze with Madiera. When Madiera has evaporated, add 1/2 cup of mushroom-leek broth and reduce by half.

3. Gently brown gnocchi in olive oil and butter in another pan, preferably nonstick. Cook in batches, removing to warm plate in oven when done. Finish mushroom sauce with mascarpone. Add more mushroom broth if necessary. (At this point I added a touch more Madiera.) Check seasoning and ladle over gnocchi.

Serves 4. Eat with good friends who bring good wine. A spinach salad with toasted nuts and cheese pairs nicely.

Morel Madness

The fever has taken hold. It starts with a scouting mission and a few scattered victories of patience. Not a meal, just hope. For a week you hold off because it's still too cold outside. The ground needs to warm. Some say in the forties, others argue for 50 degrees or more. Plant indicators get your pulse going: the first trilliums are blooming and cottonwood tees are leafing out. A week later, reduced to a quivering mess, you drive over the pass to investigate east side river valleys. On south-facing benches above rivers and creeks the first honest troops emerge out of mulchy leaf piles in the sunny spots. This is just the beginning. You're on a downward spiral now.

It's not a good year to have the sickness. Seattle mushroom hunters have been champing at the bit for weeks. Like last year, the morels in my neck of the woods are late. The problem with a late fruiting is the weather can put the kibbosh on the whole affair before it's even out of the gate. The ground is moist from runoff but a few days of unseasonably hot weather this late in spring can dry out the earth and cook the young mushrooms that have already poked their snouts up.

If all goes according to plan, the morel fruiting proceeds from riparian corridors on the east slope of the Cascades to higher elevation patches in the mountains, following the snow-melt. Right now the concentration is at about the 2,000-foot level in central Washington. If the weather cooperates, we'll have several weeks of morel madness interfering with work, home, sleep—with pretty much every aspect of our daily lives.

Here's some video action from this past week:




True Morels and False Morels

Compare the pictures of these true morels above with the false early morels (Verpa bohemica) I was finding a few weeks ago. Notice how the caps of true morels are more pitted while the verpas appear more wrinkly. Though not clear in the pictures, true morels have cap margins that attach to the stem while caps of verpas are more like skirts that only attach at the peak of the cap. There's also a species of true morel called a "half-free" (Morchella semilibera) with a cap that attaches to the stem midway between the hemline and the peak.

True morels are in the genus Morchella; false morels are either Verpa or Gyromitra, depending on the common name of choice in your locality. A couple weeks ago I posted a poll (results visible in right column) asking readers to vote with their stomachs. I see now that my poll is flawed in one major way: the term "false morel" means different things to different people, largely determined by region. For the purposes of the poll, I was lumping together verpas and gyromitras under the single category of "false morel," but after doing my radio interview on KUOW last Monday I had lunch with Patrice Benson, president of the Puget Sound Mycological Society. She considered the term false morel to only apply to the genus Gyromitra, and doesn't eat any of those species. Verpas she does eat.

Overall I tallied 191 votes. The breakdown went as follows: 84 (43%) don't eat false morels (or whatever they consider to be false morels); 25 (13%) do; and 82 (42%) didn't know what the heck I was talking about in the first place. It's too bad I wasn't more clear about what, in my mind, constituted a "false morel," because anecdotally I've been gathering some interesting responses lately to the ongoing question of edibility.

To wit:

• A few members of the Cascade Mycological Society whom I admire very much for their fungal knowledge strongly believe that verpas and gyromitras should never be eaten. You can read their reasoning here.
  
• One of my regular readers, John from Bellingham, has made a persuasive case for eating verpas and even a couple of the gyormitras based on his own review of the available literature (also available at the above link).
  
• The current president of Puget Sound Mycological Society eats verpas but not gyromitras.
  
• Verpas are sold in farmers markets in the Seattle area and elsewhere.
  
• The eating of verpas, from my own unscientific survey, seems to increase in parts of the Pacific Northwest where true morels are not as easily obtained.
  
• Outside the PNW there are pockets around the country where wild mushroom enthusiasts eat verpas, gyromitras, or both—despite what the literature says. This is a cultural phenomenon.
  
• After raising the issue with the ForageAhead Yahoo group, the discussion became so heated that a few members threatened to quit the group.

The bottom line is that the jury is still out on many of the species commonly known as false morels within the Verpa and Gyromitra genera. As the literature is not definitive, making a decision about whether or not to eat these mushrooms comes down to personal comfort levels. This would seem to be a murky corner of mycology that an enterprising scientist could put his/her stamp on. Memo to would-be mycologist: Please give us some answers!

To Eat or Not To Eat?

I pulled the same stunt last year. Got all worked up by my online pals down in P-Town who were finding big, beautiful specimens of Morchella esculenta, the yellow morel, along the brushy banks of the Columbia and Willamette rivers.

Unfortunately, yellows are hardly present up here in the Puget trough, possibly because of the carnage inflicted by the Vashon Glacier 15,000 years ago, when its recession (oops, bad word) left soil deposits here that don't agree with this particular species of morel. (That's my theory, at least.) Instead, most of us Seattlites suffering from morel madness jump over the mountains to scour river channels and ridges east of the Cascades, where we find black morels.

But it's still cold over there! As I discovered Wednesday. Lotsa snow left on Snoqualmie Pass, and the cottonwoods are just starting to bud out, looking redder than green at 70 mph on the Mass Pike...er...I-90. They say it's time to hunt morels when the cottonwood leaves are the size of a mouse's ear. Booshoo! (as we say in underage company). This is a mouse's ear ^^. We've still got two weeks before this area produces.

Another indicator is our lovely wake-robin, the western trillium. These were just starting to bloom, only a few up that I saw. Spring is barely sproinging in these parts. The ground looks matted, like it just woke up after a rough night. Cold winds whistled up the river, sending yellow-rumped warblers into cartwheeling feats of treehopping.

Falsies

All I found were a bunch of these here false morels, Verpa bohemica, a good warmup drill but hardly worth the drive. I picked 'em anyway. Maybe this would be the year I finally screw up the courage to eat the verpas. Some folks do. Some folks love 'em. Me? I don't like the idea of ingesting anything spiked with rocket fuel. That's right, false morels, snowbank morels, and other relatives of the true morels are known to contain a compound called monomethylhydrazine, a component of rocket fuel.

Apparently this compound has been implicated in a few deaths. There's a story of a French chef keeling over dead in his kitchen simply because he was overtaken by the fumes of false morels sautéing in a pan. Some have suggested the harmful toxins are more prevalent in certain regions, that our western North American varieties don't have the same levels as elsewhere. Others have said phooey altogether, that there will always be a few people who are allergic to wild foods and there's nothing to be done for it so eat up. If you're worried, they say, cook your false morels outside where ventilation isn't a problem. My question: rocket fuel notwithstanding, can they be worse than a box of Fruity Pebbles?

By the way, you can tell a verpa from a true morel in two main ways: the cap margin of the verpa doesn't connect to the stem, instead hanging unattached like a skirt; and if you slice it open lengthwise, you'll see a bunch of cottony stuff inside, while true morels are completely hollow.

Meanwhile, my stash of verpas continues to taunt me. They've been sitting in a bowl on the kitchen counter for two days laughing at me. It's like a bowlful of frightening clowns.

So here's what I want to know: Do you eat false morels? Do you know someone who does—or won't? Answer the poll at the top right of the page and pass it along to your friends.

Predators and Prey

During my scouting mission I saw two small herds of elk. They were feeding in hidden meadows along the flood plain and quickly retreated to heavier timber as I got closer. On my way out of the woods I came upon a probable cougar kill: just a couple of gnawed hooves left over and thatches of hair. I looked around, over my shoulder. A scene like this never fails to register with me. Creepy-crawlies down the spine, lodging in the pit of my stomach. The modern mind can rationalize its continued existence with statistics and probabilities all it wants; the reptilian brainstem still knows there are eyes beyond the ring of firelight, eyes and sharp teeth and claws.

Reminds me of Doug Peacock's great aphorism of the wild: "It ain't wilderness unless there's a critter out there that can kill you and eat you."

That's cold comfort in your sleeping bag at night—but I wouldn't have it any other way.