Truffling with Jack

As I lay me down here at home, cold-turkey off the meds, there's not much to report in the way of foraging. Luckily I have my wild food stash and a few things to mention that didn't get mentioned in the fall.

A few months ago while in Portland for some book events I made a side-trip an hour southwest to the Willamette Valley in search of a coveted wild edible to bring back home. It's the sort of edible that inspires otherwise circumspect men to spend stupid sums of money and otherwise intelligent women to sleep with stupid men. At least in Europe that's the case, where the truffle has enjoyed a long, colorful history as a pricey luxury item and sought-after aphrodisiac.

Truffles are subterranean fungi, many of which emit pungent scents to attract the animals that will dig them up, eat them, and subsequently spread their reproductive spores. Whether or not these aromas are ever scientifically proven to heighten arousal we can be sure that truffles will continue to fetch top dollar for their culinary uses. The white "Alba" truffles of Italy and black "Perigord" truffles of France have been the choice of royalty for centuries. Here in North America, specifically in the low-elevation Douglas-fir forests of the Pacific Northwest, we have our own edible truffles that don't require a fancy coat-of-arms or family escutcheon to possess. While not as renowned as their European counterparts, American truffles can stir the same primal passions when used correctly.

And there's the rub. The fact is, most American diners—most American chefs, one could argue—don't know what a good truffle tastes like, or worse (in the case of the chefs), they aren't scrupulous enough to know when to not serve the expensive fungus mocking them in the walk-in. In this country unripe truffles are routinely bought and sold and then passed up the food-chain until they reach restaurant patrons who scratch their heads wondering what all the fuss is about. I've been served a very unspectacular Perigord black truffle by one of Seattle's finest restaurants, with the flourish of a waiter brandishing his mandoline at table. The theatric gesture didn't change the fact that the truffle wasn't ripe.

American truffles seem to suffer even more from ill-use, perhaps because they're cheaper and easier to obtain. A small group of local truffle boosters has been trying to change this, but until the public is more educated—from commercial forager to diner—our home-grown truffles will continue to be viewed as vastly inferior to their European cousins. Which is too bad, because good, ripe truffles from both continents can elevate a meal from excellent to sublime.

As I drove southwest from Portland, I thought about my last meal of truffles. It had been just a few days earlier in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, where a friend took me to his favorite trattoria. We ordered plates of linguini with cream sauce. The waiter appeared with a scale and a large white Alba truffle, which he weighed first, then shaved onto our pasta, then weighed again. Like cocaine, truffles are priced by the gram. Fortunately this truffle that had traveled thousands of miles was in top form and our meal, so simple in appearance, was superb. The smell of the truffles rose up in the steam of the dish. Each bite seemed to offer the possibility of a secret revealed. We took in these ineffable pleasures and washed them down with woodsy Piedmontese Barbera...



Autumn colors in neat geometric patterns across the Dundee Hills snapped me out of my reverie. I wasn't in Italy, nor San Francisco. Here in the Willamette Valley the crush of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay had finished and the leaves were turning pretty shades of yellow and orange. In the town of Dayton I pulled into the historic Joel Palmer House to meet my guide.

Jack Czarnecki, former owner of the Joel Palmer House (his son is now the chef-owner), is about the closest thing this country has to a truffle expert, and he's using his expertise to produce truffle oil. Like the proverbial lightning in a bottle, truffle oil is a way to capture the fleeting flavors of truffles and use them year-round; unlike lightning in a bottle, it can really be done. But it should be noted that Jack's all-natural truffle oils are a far cry from the chemical concoctions devised in scientific labs by most of the other so-called truffle oil manufacturers.


A few words about truffle oil. As wild foods, in particular fungi, continue to land on plates served by high-end restaurants across the land, there's been a commensurate increase in the use of truffle oil. Truffle oil is the sort of fancy ingredient that can spruce up a menu and lend extra gravitas to an establishment looking for culinary plaudits. Which would you pay more for? Wild Mushroom Ravioli or Ravioli of Porcini and Chevre drizzled with Truffle Oil... But what is truffle oil? According to Daniel Patterson in his now-infamous New York Times rant, most truffle oils are a fraud—molecular creations that don't actually have a shred of truffle in their recipes.

You see, the truffle's complex aroma has been sequenced out by chemists so that it's now just a series of numbers and letters, an equation. Even the French and Italian oils are guilty of the deception, and though some will include shavings or pieces of truffle in the bottom of the bottle for an implied authenticity, the actual flavor has been created in a test tube.

Jack hasn't taken the short cut. His truffle oils are the real deal. And for this reason, he needs to forage an enormous quantity of truffles each season. I was only too glad to help. With his friend Tony joining us, we set out for the truffle ballpark—in this case, a managed stand of young Douglas firs on private property where Jack has worked out a barter arrangement that is typical between truffle hunters and landowners. To the untrained eye the forest looked like a rather uninviting monocrop. To the experienced truffler, it looked like the strike zone: young, single-aged conifers grew in rows for easy walking and a thick carpet of duff covered the ground underfoot. Using garden rakes, we gently raked back the layer of duff to expose little white tubers up to the size of golf-balls: Oregon winter white truffles, Tuber oregonense.



It was still a couple weeks early and most of the truffles didn't yet have their typically pungent smell. We collected them just the same. Jack explained that it was possible to ripen the truffles if done with patience and an understanding of the truffle's life-cycle.

I came home with a couple pounds of white truffles. Following Jack's instructions, I washed the dirt off each truffle with a quick blast of tap water and then used a toothbrush to clean the exterior. This took some time. Then I swaddled the truffles in paper towels, layering them in Tupperware and sealing the lid before popping into the fridge. The idea is to keep them cool and dry so they can ripen just as they would in the ground. The truffles sweat so you need to change the damp towels every couple days.

Most of a truffle's flavor and aroma comes in the form of gases emitted by the truffle which can then be absorbed in fats. This is why you never cook truffles at high temperature; the fragile gases get cooked out. The best way to serve truffles is to shave them thinly over hot food on the plate, not in the pan, and allow the flavors to soak in. Scrambled eggs, melted butter, and cream sauces are the perfect vehicles.

Unfortunately most of my individual truffles never ripened as much as they would have in the ground. My ripest specimens got thinly sliced into dishes such as homemade Tagliatelle with Alfredo Sauce to which they added a noticeable hint of truffle, though not as much as I would have preferred. But I had another card up my sleeve: I made a couple pounds of truffled butter, a better choice for my slow-ripening truffles. I sealed sticks of organic sweet cream butter into Tupperware with a few ounces of truffles per stick and left them in the fridge for a few weeks. By the end the truffles were decomposing, but over the course of those weeks they emitted enough of their fabled gases to flavor the butter. (Oh, and by the way, if you ever see truffled butter that's shot through with pieces of ground-up truffle, know that this is either a misconception on the maker's part or a gimmick. It's all about the gases.) The truffled butter is wonderful melted over pasta or simply spread on toast.

This was my first experience digging white truffles. In general I'd say they're stronger than black truffles. Black truffles have a distinctly different flavor (fruitier, less garlicky) and are supposedly harder to find, though I've had some luck foraging them in recent years. Both whites and blacks can make a special accompaniment to a meal when properly ripe, and whether or not our local truffles deserve comparison with European varieties is besides the point. Truffles are a treat wherever they are handled with skill.

Speed Bump

Dear readers, after watching my last post develop a life of its own thanks to your thoughtful feedback and generous contributions, I feel it's only right to explain my absence from that extended conversation and let you in on some personal details that will impact the next chapter in my foraging career.

I took the above photo from my 4th floor hospital room the other night after awaking from a dense, dreamless swim through Dilaudid, Valium, Oxycontin, and Oxycodone. My mood was as somber as the skyline. Frankie calls these the wee hours, that lonely time in the pit of night when we feel our smallest and most insignificant. But I prefer Dylan's counsel on the matter—that it's darkest right before the dawn.

Remember the Amanita cocktail I mixed for my ailing lower back? It didn't do squat. So, after five years of chasing remedies to the degenerating disc at vertebra L5-S1—from acupuncture to Feledenkrais, from chiropractic to Pilates—I finally gave the thumb's up to the scariest and most invasive option of all: a spinal fusion.

I had the surgery last week. My lower spine where the lumbar meets the sacrum is now locked together with a couple titanium bars. A mulch of bone harvested from my iliac crest (pelvis) is housed in a cage where the disc used to be, hopefully fusing the spine as I type this. I'm back home and walking around some, though mostly I'm resting in a narcotic haze. Each day the pain recedes a little more. Yesterday I was able to stroll through my neighborhood for nearly an hour without any sciatica.

My timing was deliberate. January is the quietest month for both foragers and authors. I plan to lay low for most of the month and then gradually ramp up to my usual activities. This March you might catch me harvesting stinging nettles in a brace. If all goes according to plan, by the time the spring porcini start to push their rusty caps through North Cascades duff I'll be out of the brace and hoisting a heavy backpack once again—or maybe chasing a Squirrel Gumbo up a tree.

Fingers crossed.

Hunting?

Now I've gone and done it. So, where to begin?

First will be hunter safety class. Then I suppose a visit to a shooting range to fire an actual gun. (Bow-and-arrow can wait, don't you agree?) Maybe I'll even purchase my own firearm at some point.

But before you get all excited and twitchy about my misadventures in this new land of weapons, killing, and bloodshed—oh, and mouth-watering recipes for wild game—keep in mind that my leap from forager to hunter will not be an overnight transformation. The learning curve is steep enough that this first year, I suspect, will yield mostly preliminaries, plus I've got a bunch more traditional foraging to attend to, and, well, I just don't want to make any predictions, okay? In short, I don't see an elk hunt in my near future.

One of the commenters on my Resolution post mentioned hunting with firepower isn't really the same as foraging. While not one to slice the semantical salami too thin, I'll admit that this feels like a pretty major shift to me, which is why I'll be starting small. I was pleased to see a recipe recently in the New York Times of all places for Squirrel Gumbo. Regular readers know that I'm a fan of Nawlins-style cookery, and though I haven't had the distinct pleasure of tasting our bushy-tailed tree rats yet, I'm pretty sure I can make one palatable in a spicy gumbo.

But this is a ways off. My first shot at a squirrel will probably be in the spring when I visit relatives in Arkansas. My plan is to bone up on all the safety issues first and read some history and lore on the ancient bloodsport. Then, maybe, I'll do my Elmer Fudd routine. I'm both looking forward to and dreading this chapter. Somehow, though, it feels necessary.

(Photo by RunnerJenny)

Resolution

I'm not much for New Year's resolutions. Most of them don't take, and resolving to do better can be decided any day of the year.

But I'll go ahead and make one anyway. See that scrumptious meal above? That's Seared Duck over Squash and Sage Risotto. Easily one of my more memorable meals of 2009. Normally you wouldn't find it on this blog. You see, it doesn't contain a shred of foraged foods. Nada. The duck was farm-raised and I didn't resort to any trickery—for instance, ladling porcini-infused broth into the risotto—to post it here.

Instead, I reference this meal as a challenge to myself. I'm an omnivore and don't intend to change that. In other words, I eat meat, if only occasionally and mostly in small portions. Over the years I've made incursions into the Animal Kingdom with my foraging: free-diving for Dungeness crabs, digging razor clams, fly-fishing for salmon, spear-fishing lingcod. Always the animals have been of the fish or shellfish sort.

Mark 2010 as the year I get other kinds of meat, the furred and feathered kinds. It's time to up the irons on this foraging thing!

***

Big thank-yous to everyone who participated in Menu for Hope. The winners will be announced in January. Until then, Happy New Year to all!

Win a Day of Foraging with Yours Truly

Season's greetings everyone! Have you heard about Menu for Hope?

Menu for Hope, the brainchild of Pim over at Chez Pim, raises money to help feed people in disadvantaged parts of the world. For the past few years the money raised has gone to the UN World Food Programme, the largest food aid agency in the world, working in over 75 countries. This year funds raised will go to support a new initiative called Purchase for Progress, which enables smallholder and low-income farmers to supply food to the UN global food operations. Rather than just distributing food, this program empowers participants to become self-reliant.

Here's how Menu for Hope works: Food bloggers around the world are offering goods and services which you can bid on. Each $10 donation earns you a raffle ticket for the item of your choice. The more you donate, the greater your chances of winning. If you donate $50, you can select five different items, or you can put all five raffle tickets toward the same item, increasing your chances. Winners are selected at random, and notified in January.

At Fat of the Land we're offering a morning or afternoon of foraging in the Seattle area. We could bushwhack through woods in search of edible fungi...or dig clams at the coast...or pick huckleberries in the mountains... The choice is yours. To bid on this item, select UW40.

Directions for bidding:

1. Choose a bid item or bid items of your choice from our Menu for Hope main bid item list.

2. Go to the donation site at Firstgiving and make a donation.

3. Please specify which bid item you'd like in the 'Personal Message' section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per bid item, and please use the bid item code.

Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a bid item of your choice. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for UW01 and 3 tickets for UW33.

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we can claim the corporate match.

5. Please check the box to allow us to see your e-mail address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your e-mail address will not be shared with anyone.

Thank you and happy holidays!

Food Photography

Yesterday I was talking to an experienced photographer and asked him to rank the most important factors in taking a good shot. At the top of his list was light; composition came second. This was very interesting to me. My own ranking had those two reversed, with composition as number one. I suspect there are many of us amateurs out there who would like to believe that composition can trump all else, that those of us with a capable eye can frame a photo just so to make a good shot no matter what the light conditions.

Is this just my romantic notion of the artist? Certainly it's true that poor light conditions can flummox professionals, while really good light can make even amateurs such as myself seem competent. Somehow I'd like to think that an inspired shooter can get it done even in the basest of conditions. But my friend's point remains: Light is king.

Last week I took a half-day food photography workshop organized by Seattle Bon Vivant and taught by Penny de los Santos, who takes pictures for Saveur, National Geographic, and other magazines with exceptionally demanding photo editors. The workshop was held at Spring Hill restaurant in West Seattle, and over the course of four hours we looked at slides, talked shop, and photographed dishes prepared by the staff (including the four photos in this post, my best of the day). Penny went over basics such as light source, angle, styling, and so on, but it was her off-the-cuff remarks that really made an impression on me. For instance, Penny doesn't use a tripod. And because she's often on the road with limited kit and time to fuss around, her go-to lens is a zoom.

Well, both these facts fly in the face of what I've read in the past about how to take good photographs of food. With all the talk of tripods, you'd think you were committing a serious photographic sin without one, yet in Penny's words: "I just hold my breath and shoot." After all, how else are you going to get several different angles in a short time-span before the food dies on the plate? Also, because she uses only natural light (with the added aid of reflectors and diffusers), she must be ready to move quickly with a sudden shift in the clouds—or, if you're shooting in Seattle in the dead of winter, those few hours of workable daylight.

As for the debate over fixed lens vs. zoom—just look at Penny's photos and you'll be persuaded that it's possible to take a good shot with the latter, albeit a very nice and very expensive zoom lens. In short, don't be afraid to break the so-called rules.

The last nugget of wisdom I want to pass along is this. When I told Penny a little bit about what I do, she immediately got excited about the possibilities of taking pictures of landscapes, people working in the outdoors, the tools and implements of the forager. She was thinking about wild food foraging from a more journalistic viewpoint. Here at FOTL I see a lot more of those sorts of photos when I scroll back to the earliest days of this blog. More recently I've concentrated almost entirely on the plated food. This is in part because I was finally able to get some half-decent food photographs after bumping up to a DSLR a year ago. It's also due to the fact that much of my readership—much of the food blog readership at large—seems to be drawn to beautiful pictures of food.

I want to keep working on my food photos, but I think I'll try to capture more of the visual narrative in the future. The people, places, and stories. Oh, and no more cheating with automatic settings. It's all manual from here on out.

Magic Mushrooms?

Here at FOTL Headquarters we're mostly into outdoor fun, good eats, and wild foods that have more than merely survival appeal. True, we've been known to expound on the nutritional benefits of weeds and concoct the occasional tonic, but we leave the wild medicinal trade to those herbalists, shamans, witchdoctors, and other alternative health practitioners who supposedly know what they're doing.

However, like the law, there is a time to take one's own personal health and well-being into one's own hands. And so it is with my ornery lower spine, specifically the troublesome connector at L5-S1. That's the vertebra where your lumbar and sacrum meet, an intersection of misery for many a modern human that has come down from the trees only to sit at a desk or drive a car. Mine's been hassling me for about five years now and I'm looking at drastic measures, though before such measures can be implemented I'm going to try one last crazy off-the-wall treatment...

...a drop of fly agaric for what ails me. Also known by it's scientific name, Amanita muscaria, this totemic toadstool from temperate woodlands around the globe was called "fly agaric" by the Romans for its use to ward off winged pests. It hails from the dreaded Amanita genus, home to the most deadly mushrooms in the world, such as the death cap (Amanita phalloides) and destroying angel (Amanita bisporigera et al).

The fly agaric isn't deadly poisonous except in the largest doses, but it packs a wallop just the same, a hallucinogenic brain warp that is said to have inspired Lewis Carroll to send Alice down the rabbit hole. Accounts vary. Some have reported transcendent spiritual experiences, others talk of nightmarish fits and vomiting. A forager friend of mine believes the North American variety doesn't contain enough pyschoactive ingredients to do much at all.

I write about this beautiful mushroom's sketchy history in my book. Quickly: Its psychoactive compounds have been known for millennia and nomadic Siberian tradesman reputedly ate the mushroom for the buzz when their beloved vodka was in short supply. Their reindeer ate it too, and both parties apparently ate the yellow snow around them that contained traces of the excreted drug. More than a few ethnobotanists have suggested that certain forms of Christmas iconography might derive from this behavior: jolly man dressed in red, flying reindeer, and so on.

As for me, my interest was piqued after reading this page on Henriette's Herbal pages. According to Henriette: just rub "2-3 drops of tincture on the spine, when sciatica hits. Relief is pretty much instant." She posits that the tincture "relaxes the muscles around the spine, where the hurt comes from, and when those muscles are finally allowed to relax they stop clamping bone all over the pinched nerve, which means the nerve can finally relax."

I've made my tincture according to the instructions, first chopping up a bunch of nice Amanita muscaria buttons, then packing them into a half-pint canning jar and covering with vodka.

So, dear readers, should I go ahead and try a topical application the next time I feel stabbing pain down my left leg? What do you think?

Farro with Porcini, Chanterelles & Mascarpone

What the heck is farro, you ask? It's an ancient form of hulled wheat that's low-yielding and similar to barley or wheat-berries in texture, and despite being in vogue of late, farro is actually among the oldest of agricultural products. It was first domesticated nearly 10,000 years ago in the Near East, most likely in present-day Turkey. Today it is eaten more in Itlay than anywhere else, and in the mountainous regions of The Boot there are no fewer than three closely related relict grains commonly referred to as farro: emmer, spelt, and einkorn. Apparently these hard-scrabble grains make a good crop for highlands and poor soils.

My first taste of farro was at Lark restaurant in Seattle several years ago. Lark uses a local variety grown and packaged by Bluebird Grain Farms in the Methow Valley of Eastern Washington, a Shangri-La on the dry side of the Cascade Mountains known for its excellent backpacking, mountain biking, and cross-country skiing. Bluebird's farro of choice is emmer (Triticum dicoccum).

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, which means the kitchen is a place of nearly constant praise. Most home cooks I know, myself included, spend the majority of their time either trying to perfect recipes out of a book or web site, or trying to recreate memorable meals they've enjoyed at restaurants. We leave the truly creative work to the pros and hope to capture a little of their light from time to time—such as the other night, when I finally got around to imitating John Sundstrom's creamy farro dish that I've ordered countless times at Lark. It's a simple dish. Farro is combined with sauteed wild mushrooms and a healthy dollop of mascarpone to give it the creamy unctuousness that has you coming back for more. Yet within that simplicity there is a wide range of skill required to properly cook both the grain and the fungi.

I often hear would-be mycophagists complaining about their chanterelles turning slimy with cooking. This is a rookie mistake and can be solved with one easy reminder (provided the chanties aren't water-logged): never crowd chanterelles in the pan. For most recipes you want to cook the water out of the mushrooms. A good saute pan heated with a little butter or oil is up to the task—just don't try to cook too many at once. When they've expelled their water, the mushrooms can continue to brown in the pan provided there's enough surface area for the water to evaporate. This also helps concentrate their flavor.

These particular chanterelles, both white and golden, came from a recent trip to the Rogue River Canyon in southwestern Oregon. Other wild mushrooms work just as well. At Lark I've had the dish with hedgehogs, yellowfoots, and black trumpets. Sometimes John adds a vegetable to it such as green beans for a dash of color and added texture. Word on the commercial street is that it was a poor chanterelle harvest this year. Maybe so, but it's also been a long harvest. Normally by Thanksgiving week Seattle would have had several hard frosts and the chanterelles—except for those in the most favorable of microclimates—would be returning to the earth. Instead they keep fruiting across much of their usual low-elevation habitat. I'm not opposed.

As for the farro, I only have this one episode under my belt so I'm hardly qualified to instruct, but it would seem that one has a wide range of mouth feel to work with when cooking this whole grain, not to mention ample time. Add more water and cooking time if you prefer a softer, more yielding bite. You can also soak the grain overnight.

1 cup farro
3 cups warm water
1-2 oz dried porcini, pulverized (optional)
4 oz mascarpone
1/2 lb chanterelles, chopped
2 tbsp butter
1 clove garlic, minced
salt & pepper

I don't know whether John uses porcini dust in his version but my feeling is that the essence of edulis improves just about any hearty dish in the dark months.

1. Reconstitute the porcini in 3 cups of warm water. Set aside for 10 minutes.
2. Pour porcini water in pot, salt the water, and bring to boil. Add farro, lower heat to simmer and cook until water is gone, about 40 minutes. Farro should be al dente yet tender. You can add more or less water and cook until desired softness. There's a lot of leeway and personal preference with farro.
3. Saute chanterelles for several minutes in butter in a large skillet, or in batches. Avoid slimy chanterelles by not crowding. You want the mushrooms to be lightly browned and firm.
4. Stir mascarpone into farro, then stir in most of chanterelles, reserving some as garnish. Season and garnish with chopped chives or parsley.

We served the farro with sauteed kale from the garden and sliced Steak au Poivre. The steak was organic and grass-fed, with a single 8-ounce New York strip plenty enough to feed two of us along with the other sides. A bottle of cabernet completed the meal.

Going Rogue

Every year in mid-November I help my friend Bradley close up his cabin near the Rogue River in southwestern Oregon. The Rogue is one of only a handful of coastal rivers that can boast a significant roadless section, in this case a 30-plus mile stretch of river that flows through the Congressionally designated Wild & Scenic lower canyon and the adjacent Rogue River Wilderness. It's rugged country filled with bears, cougars, hermits, and goldpanners. After the chores are attended to, we hike the trails, fish for steelhead, hunt mushrooms, and whump up big meals on the wood stove.

This annual trip is pretty much the capper on my year of wild food foraging.

Long Live the Queen

I don't get many opportunities to pick queen boletes (Boletus regineus). They're most often found in mixed woodlands of the coastal mountains to the south of me, in Northern California and Southern Oregon, particularly the lower elevations where tanoak thrives and puts the hurt on anyone hoping to bushwhack around those river valleys below snowline. I've never found them in Washington, probably because I rarely encounter tanoak here.

Besides habitat, the best way to distinguish the king and queen in the field is cap color (see photo at right). Queen boletes will have darker caps at maturation, sometimes a rich mahogany brown, and the younger specimens, while often lacking dark caps at this stage, will frequently have a whitish bloom across the cap that can be rubbed off with your finger. They're generally smaller than kings too.

One of the cool things about the queen is that it fruits later than the king, at least where I pick it, and often in troops, so you can still get fresh porcini even after the kings have gone to dirt. Our queen is not the same species as the one found in the Old World. That's Boletus aereus, which by all accounts rivals Boletus edulis, the king, for its porcini flavor and aroma. Boletus regineus is similar with its dark brown cap but tastes milder. On the plus side, the flesh is white and firm like the king yet often lacks the insect infestations of its more heralded partner in royalty.

We ate the queen with steak one night and sauteed it up with black trumpets another night to serve over crackers.

Blow Your Horn

Speaking of black trumpets (Craterellus cornucopioides), this is another species I only see in the Rogue. We never find large quantities, just enough to savor that wonderful woodsy, almost smoky flavor. Northern California is the strike zone for the trumpet. I've heard professional foragers reminisce about enormous patches in the hills just inland from the Pacific.

Supposedly there are a few patches of well-guarded trumpets in Washington but I've never found them. Instead I look to the Rogue each year to satisfy my craving. Sometimes we get just a taste that must last us through the year.

"They're not big, but they don't know it."

The owner of the Silver Sedge Fly Shop told me that years ago when I stopped in to buy some fly-tying materials. He was talking about immature steelhead that probe the lower Rogue River before dropping back into the salt to finish their growth. Known as "half-pounders" to locals, these torpedo-shaped flashes of silver average 12 to 15 inches yet attack flies with the hellbent abandon of much larger fish and they're a hoot on light fly gear.

As in previous years, I took a single hatchery half-pounder home to share with the family so they could get a taste of the Rogue. The other fish, most of them wild, were released back into the drink.

You betcha.

Spiced Up Take-Out

Chinese take-out. It's one of the great pleasures in life, especially if the take-out is good and cheap. I've got a favorite Szechuan joint not too far from home. It sits nearly anonymously on the edge of the International District in an uninspiring little strip mall called "Asian Plaza." The restaurant's name is equally original: Szechuan Cuisine. Before it was remodeled it didn't even have a recognizable name, just a bunch of faded Chinese characters strewn haphazardly above the door.

Those faded characters seemed like a good omen to a bunch of us wandering around looking for lunch one day more than a decade ago. By our third or fourth trip we were calling it The House, as in: "Should we pay a visit to The House today?" There was no denying it was the go-to lunch spot for a bunch of us who worked together, our house lunch establishment. You could order 25 pot-stickers for $3.50. Prices have gone up since then. Now you get 20 pot-stickers for $4.95.

The House is known for its Hot Pot but usually we order more obvious stuff like Ants on a Tree or Twice Cooked Pork. I'm a sucker for the salty-sweet nothings of the General Tso-ish Manadarin Spicy Chicken, and the Garlic Beef makes other versions seem pedestrian at best.

Rather than get bogged down in the kitchen this Halloween Eve, Marty and I wanted to watch some scary movies with the kids and eat popcorn and candy. The House to the rescue! But this time I had a little home-made treat to spruce up our plates of take-out: Szechuan Pickled Fungi & Vegetables.

The fungi were cauliflower mushrooms (Sparassis radicata) picked near the Columbia River Gorge a few weeks ago. While driving from a book reading in Hood River to the Wordstock Lit Fest in Portland I stopped off in the hills above the Gorge to go for a hike. The trail contoured across a steep pitch shaded by old-growth fir and hemlock. Horses had been on it recently. I didn't expect to see much in the way of mushrooms along this rather dry section of trail, but a mile or so in I came across my first cauliflower mushrooms of the year, a pair of recently emerged specimens of average size, each one weighing a few pounds.

Cauliflowers are delicious mushrooms and they can be huge. A few years ago someone brought a 50-pound cauliflower to the Puget Sound Mycological Society's annual exhibit. The mushroom boasts a nutty flavor and firm texture that doesn't soften with cooking like so many other species. Even after braising in a stew for an hour they remain al dente, which is a good way to describe the texture since this mushroom resembles nothing so much as a bowl full of cooked egg noodles. Its wavy protrusions and deep clefts are expert at trapping duff and forest debris, making the cauliflower one of the more difficult mushrooms to clean. Worms like them too. The trick, as with so many tasty mushrooms, is to find them before the worms do—or else cut away the infestations as best as possible.

Szechuan Pickled Fungi & Vegetables

Szechuan peppercorns are the key ingredient. Not really pepper, the spice is actually the husk of a type of berry widespread through Asia. When consumed, it gives the mouth and lips a numb tingling feeling that works well with other hot spices commonly found in Szechuan foods.

1 lb cauliflower mushroom, boiled for a few minutes and cut into pieces
1 lb Napa cabbage, pulled apart and cut into 2-inch squares
1/2 lb diakon radish, sliced into 1/4-inch thick half-moons or matchsticks
2 carrots, sliced on an angle into 1/4-inch thick ovals
6-8 hot peppers cut in half and de-seeded
1/4 cup sliced ginger
2 tbsp Szechuan peppercorns
2 tbsp vodka
6-8 cups water, boiled and cooled
3 tbsp salt

Mix the brine and Szechuan peppercorns in a large tupperware or other non-reactive container. Stir in vodka; this is strictly for sanitary reasons. Add vegetables, fungi, and spices, making sure they are immersed completely in the brine. Cover and store at room temperature for 3-5 days. After the initial pickling, the contents can be refrigerated for 2 weeks.