2014 Pacific Northwest Book Award

I'm excited to share the news that The Mushroom Hunters has won a 2014 Pacific Northwest Book Award! Some of my favorite writers are past winners; my head is spinning...

A sincere and heartfelt thank you to all those readers and bookstores across the region for their support. I've been overwhelmed by enthusiasm for the book, and it goes without saying that this has been a dream of mine—to journey deep into nature's secret garden and come back with a story that resonates with a wide audience—so I'm incredibly grateful.

I'd also like to acknowledge two arts foundations that provided financial support at critical junctures, enabling my "boots-on-the-ground" research in far-flung places: Artist Trust and 4Culture. The work they do to promote the creative process cannot be overstated.

On Saturday, February 8, at 7 p.m., I'll be at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle for the award ceremony. Elliott Bay is my local. It's where my first book event was held, and I look forward to coming full circle for this occasion. Hope to see some of you there!

Grouper Sandwich

One of my most favorite sammies in the world is a flaky yet succulent grouper sandwich, preferably served with fries, cole slaw, pickle spear, and cold beer. To get such a treat you should go to southwestern Florida, where you might be temped by other similar delights...a soft-shelled crab sandwich, say, or even an oyster po'boy. But the crab sandwich can be readily procured in a Maryland clam shack in season, and the oyster po'boy, as the name implies, reaches sacrament status where the term po'boy was invented, New Orleans.

For grouper, you go to Florida.

The thing is, while in Florida you might make the acquaintance of some other flaky, white-fleshed fishies, some of which might even rival the grouper in taste if not name. The place is lousy with good-eating gilled critters.

On vacation recently I met a couple of these other fish that you won't find on the Mucky Duck's chalkboard, or any other bar menu for that matter, and I have to say they were every bit as personable as the grouper. Luckily I had my boy with me, because he's the one who made the introductions. I could only dredge up one hapless catfish after another, while the kid hooked a whole aquarium of warm-water swimmers in the mangrove-shaded back bays of Naples. We ended up keeping a couple of black drums and a nice sheepshead.

Back at the shack I was disappointed to find a general lack of flour in the cupboards. This was vacation after all. No problem. We put a stack of stale Triscuits into a blender usually reserved for that other Florida specialty, the Planter's Punch, along with handfuls of Cape Cod potato chips and mixed cocktail nuts, plus a dash of Old Bay seasoning and some salt. Voila. A perfectly acceptable dry batter. Next I cut up the fillets into sandwich-sized portions, egged them, and rolled in the batter before frying in ample butter and finishing with a generous squeeze of lemon. The rest of the sandwich is academic: a fairly soft French roll or poppy-seed bun, shredded lettuce, and thinly sliced tomato. We also whipped up a batch of homemade tartar sauce with mayo and chopped pickle.

I wonder how many Florida natives would have discerned the truth about my homemade "grouper" sandwich. And how many reputable establishments are serving "grouper" with the fry cook's catch on his day off? If I lived in southwest Florida I'd definitely be one of those guys you curse at while driving the obstacle course that is the Tamiami Trail, one of those guys fishing from a bridge abutment on an already narrow two-lane blacktop lined with traffic hazards like birdwatchers, panther crossing signs, and orchid thieves.

Florida may be overloaded with white shoes and blue hair, but it's paradise for grouper groupies.

New Classes Announced

Happy new year everyone, and may it be a year filled with wild foods and outdoor adventure. As I write in my January column for Seattle Magazine, this is the year to get outside and turn over rocks like a kid again.

To help with such resolutions, I've got new classes lined up for spring 2014.

• Spring TBD: Razor Clamming Overnight – Washington Coast. Two days of razor clamming and cooking instruction plus lodging. Call to be added to waiting list. This class is offered through Bainbridge Island Parks & Rec, and dates will be determined by Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife official razor clam openings. See page 35 of brochure for more information. To register, call 206-842-2306 x-118.


• March 23: Stinging Nettles Foraging/Cooking – Bainbridge Island, WA. This class is offered through Bainbridge Island Parks & Rec. See page 35 of brochure for more information. To register, call 206-842-2306 x-118.


• March 30: Shellfish Foraging/Cooking – Dosewallips State Park, Brinnon, WA. This class is offered through Bainbridge Island Parks & Rec. See page 35 of brochure for more information. To register, call 206-842-2306 x-118.


• May 3: Shellfish Foraging/Cooking – Dosewallips State Park, Brinnon, WA. This class is offered through Bainbridge Island Parks & Rec. See page 35 of brochure for more information. To register, call 206-842-2306 x-118.


• Ongoing: Side Tour – Seward Park, Seattle. Classes for January 8, February 26, and March 1 are all sold out, but stay tuned for more classes in the future.

Signed Gift Books

Give a signed copy of The Mushroom Hunters to the readers on your holiday gift list! I'm happy to inscribe, sign, and mail books. The cost is $25 for the book, including tax (a discount on cover price), plus $5.60 to ship each copy priority mail with 2-3 day delivery, for a total of $30.60.

Contact me at finspotcook AT gmail DOT com with mailing address and recipient name, and I'll send you PayPal instructions. No gift wrap. Hurry while supplies last and there's still time to send priority mail.

Everyone knows Santa loves mushrooms... Happy holidays!

Seattle Book Events

Two pieces of good news: The Mushroom Hunters was just short-listed for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards (thank you local indies!), and my first TV interview will be broadcast on the PBS show Well Read. Admittedly, I didn't sleep much before the interview (and I had a frog in my throat, the first cold of the season), but the 30-minute conversation flew by in a blink, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking with host Terry Tazioli, who is smart, curious, and an all-around good guy.

I'll be staying close to home through the remainder of 2013, with plenty of readings and slide talks planned for the Seattle area. If you're curious about edible fungi or the hidden subculture of mushroom pickers and buyers, stop by one of these events:

• December 3: Tom Douglas Cookbook Social, Seattle, WA, 4 p.m.


• December 5: Book Larder, Seattle, WA, 6:30 p.m.


• December 8: Urban Craft Uprising, Seattle, WA, 1 p.m.


• December 10: Puget Sound Mycological Society, Seattle, WA, 7 p.m.


• December 18: University Bookstore, Seattle, WA, 7 p.m.


• December 19: Kitsap Mycological Society, Bremerton, WA, 6 p.m.

Next Stop, the Big Apple

The West is now home, but I never pass up a chance to revisit my childhood roots and plug into the electrical current that is New York City. On November 21, at 7 p.m., Slow Food NYC is hosting me for a slide presentation in Brooklyn, at Fitzcarraldo restaurant, and I guarantee a good time for all.

The picture above was snapped a few years ago from the inside of a wild mushroom delivery van at dawn as it hustled several hundred pounds of Oregon chanterelles from Newark International Airport to the finest restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn. You can't research North America's fast-and-loose wild mushroom trade and not visit the most fabled eateries on the continent, where fungi have been elevated to a place among the top ingredients in a chef's pantry. I write about my time in New York in a chapter titled "Ingredients as Art," a phrase borrowed from Sam Sifton's 4-star review of Del Posto in The New York Times. President Obama happened to be in town to light the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, and Occupy Wall Street protesters had just been evicted from Zuccotti Park. As always, electricity was in the air.

If you're in the New York area and you're curious about the wild mushroom trail—and the colorful characters who make their living on this itinerant, informal circuit—then come on by, have a beer, and stay for the presentation. I'll be showing slides and talking about the book.

Pickled Chanterelles

As reported in earlier posts, the Pacific Northwest's fall mushroom season has been a boon to recreational pickers this year. Kings, matsutake, chanterelles, sparassis, and others are fruiting in big numbers, and such abundance encourages us to get creative with how we stock the larder.

Most years I'll sauté and freeze more than enough chanterelles, to name but one variety, to get me through the rest of the year. This season I'm taking it a bit further. I'm dehydrating and powdering the mushrooms to make a Chanterelle Spice Rub, and I'm also pickling them.

Here's a very simple way to pickle chanties. The key is to get as much moisture out of the mushrooms before pickling so that they can then be bathed in liquid later. This makes for flavorful mushrooms with good texture. You can use any sort of vinegar, but cider vinegar complements the hints of stone fruit in chanterelles, while the addition of water insures that the mushroom's delicate flavor isn't overpowered.

2 lbs chanterelles
1 1/2 cups cider vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 tbsp kosher salt, plus a pinch
2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp pickling spices *

* I used a commercial pickling blend that included black peppercorns, allspice, coriander seeds, mustard seeds, bay leaf, red chili pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, mace, and cardamon. An equivalent amount of black peppercorns, allspice, and coriander seeds is fine, plus a bay leaf.

1. Use button chanterelles if possible. Clean carefully. Keep small mushrooms whole; cut larger ones in half or quarters.

2. Heat a deep sauté pan over medium without oil or butter. Add chanterelles and stir immediately, continuing to stir at an easy pace until the mushrooms begin to release their water. Increase the heat to high and continue to stir until most of the water has evaporated. Sprinkle a healthy pinch of salt over the chanterelles and reduce heat again to medium.

3. Add vinegar, water, salt, sugar, and pickling spices. Simmer 5 minutes.

4. Use a slotted spoon to pack mushrooms into sterilized jars. Pour liquid and spices over to cover, with a quarter-inch of head room. Top off with more vinegar if necessary.

5. Seal jars and process in a hot water bath for 15 minutes.

The Wild Table

One of the perks of being a writer (besides the endless hours of self-doubt and boatloads of cash) is the chance to hit the road and meet up with likeminded folks—and call it work. Likeminded in my case means those who enjoy spending time both outdoors in nature and indoors in the kitchen.

This past weekend I traveled down to Eugene, Oregon, for the Mt. Pisgah Mushroom Festival. Along the way I stopped near the funky coastal hamlet of Yachats to visit with a friend who I knew only from Facebook. David is an ace cook, mushroom forager, and photographer. His food photography graces the web site Earthy Delights. His wife Anna is of Russian descent, which makes her genetically predisposed to sleuthing out fungi.

Together the three of us hunted some of their favorite spots and came away with a cooler filled with beautiful #1 matsutake buttons, plump porcini, and a variety of other edible boletes. Back at their home, we celebrated our bounty in Russian fashion—Za vashe zdorovie!—with a shot of yellowfoot-infused vodka (and then another) and got down to the business of snapping a few pics of that evening's wild table.

Unlike me, David is an organized and well prepared food photographer. He had a light box and tripod in his office along with various deflectors and gizmos. We set up some of that evening's goodies, starting in the upper right corner and moving clockwise: yellowfoot-infused vodka, salt-cured saffron milkcaps, matsutake, golden chanterelles, king boletes, shots of yellowfoot vodka, wild scaber-stalk bread, dried chanterelle spice rub, and smoked salmon spread.

After a first course of homemade ravioli with a pork and chestnut filling and a salad course of romaine hearts with fresh-shaved porcini and a Meyer lemon dressing, we proceeded out front into the cool evening air to grill: matsutake caps with a ponzu marinade and dipping sauce of soy and key lime; traditional olive oil and garlic marinated porcini; a fillet of wild Chinook salmon with chanterelle spice rub and rock crab butter; and a dessert of pears with spruce bud syrup. As the decanter's waterline of yellowfoot vodka ebbed, multiple bottles of Willamette Valley Pinot Noir appeared. It was a feast to savor, capping off a fruitful day of foraging with new friends on a miraculously sunny fall day on the Oregon Coast.

The next morning, after a rise-n-shine bowl of Matsutake Wonton Soup, I drove the pretty little Alsea River through the Coast Range, spying salmon fishermen along the way, to Eugene for the mushroom festival. It was a huge success, with a big crowd of fungal fanciers, more than 400 species identified, and a bluegrass band playing outside. Volunteers whooped it up at the After Party and I made the wise decision to spend one more night. I also had the opportunity to put a few faces to names, including the elusive Chicken-of-the-woods (aka Laetiporus Sulphureus) and Dimitar Bojantchev, moderator of the Mushroom Talk listserv. As a nightcap, my hosts in Eugene, Bruce and Peg, plied me with their delicious (and powerful) homemade blackberry brandy.

The next day I bid adieu to Madame Muscaria and the rest of the characters that make Eugene and the Oregon Coast such a pleasure to visit, with plans to make it back down there again as soon as possible.

Upcoming Events

This fungi train keeps a-rolling...

Thursday night, October 24, I'll be part of an all-star lineup for Seattle Lit Crawl. Other readers will include Ivan Doig, Will Self, Claire Dederer, Neal Thompson, Ellen Forney, and many more. Join me at Capitol Cider at 8pm for the "Farm to Fable" crowd, with readings by Kathleen Flinn, Joe Ray, Kurt Timmermeister, and myself. After Party at Richard Hugo House at 9pm.

This weekend, October 25-27, I'll be in Eugene, Oregon, to speak at Lane Community College on Friday at 7pm, as part of the Cascade Mycological Society's fall lecture series, and on Sunday I'll be signing books at the Mt. Pisgah Mushroom Fest.

For fungi fanciers around Puget Sound, I'll be reading and showing slides at Village Books in Bellingham on November 13 as part of the North Cascades Institute's "Nature of Writing" series. And on November 14 I'll be at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park.

After that, I take a bite out of the Big Apple. More on my East Coast swing later...

Porcini Lasagna per Marcella

My first cookbook was Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, which collects into a single volume two of her earlier books, The Classic Italian Cook Book and More Classic Italian Cooking. (Actually, it was owned by my girlfriend Martha, who would later become my wife, and even back then it was dog-eared and flecked with red sauce.) We refer to the book simply as Marcella, and it remains our go-to reference for Italian cuisine.

For many of us, making Italian at home means a night of romance: wine, maybe too much of it; endless antipasti of olives, roasted peppers, prosciutto; some candlelight. It’s an occasion. Having a signature Italian ingredient on hand such as fresh porcini mushrooms (translated as the evocative “little pigs”) seals the deal.  

When we heard that Marcella Hazan had passed away at the end of September, we took a nanosecond to decide on dinner. It would be a night to celebrate the whiskey-drinking, chain-smoking woman who introduced so many Americans to Italian culinary traditions. We cracked open a bottle of Chianti and started slicing up the last of our hard-won little piggies, which we had gathered in the North Cascades Mountains of Washington State for just such a meal. Next we flipped open Marcella to remember her very particular rules about making a béchamel sauce. A Porcini Lasagna would mark the occasion.

This recipe is adapted from both Marcella and a recent edition of Health magazine (a publication she would surely object to). While conventional, store-bought mushrooms such as cremini and portobello will suffice, it’s the sweet, nutty flavor of fresh wild porcini that truly makes this dish.

12 lasagna noodles, boiled and drained

4 cups milk

8 tbsp butter (1 stick)

6 tbsp flour

1 tsp salt

1/4 tsp white pepper

1/8 tsp nutmeg

3 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup parsley, chopped

1 tbsp thyme, chopped

1 tbsp sage, chopped

3 tbsp olive oil

1 medium yellow onion, diced

2 lbs mushrooms, sliced

1 cup Parmesan

1 cup Asiago cheese

salt and pepper, to taste

1. Make the béchamel white sauce by simmering milk in a saucepan and setting aside. In a separate pan, melt butter over medium heat. Add flour to melted butter while stirring until a paste forms; the paste should darken ever so slightly without becoming too colored. Slowly whisk hot milk into flour. Continue to whisk until the sauce is smooth. It should be thick enough to coat a spoon. Stir in minced garlic, most of chopped parsley (reserving 1 tablespoon for garnish), salt, white pepper, and nutmeg. Set aside and cover.

2. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a pan over medium heat. Sauté diced onions until soft and translucent. Remove to a bowl.

3. In same pan, heat 2 tablespoons oil over medium heat and sauté sliced mushrooms until tender (porcini mushrooms should be lightly golden on outside). Season with salt and pepper. Return onions to pan and add chopped thyme and sage. Cook together, stirring, another minute. Remove from heat.

4. Mix cheeses together in a bowl.

5. In a greased 13 X 9 inch baking dish, assemble the lasagna. Spread a few spoonfuls of béchamel over bottom. Place three noodles lengthwise in dish, then spread about a 1/2 cup of sauce over, followed by a third of the mushroom-onion mixture, and 1/3 cup of cheese. Repeat layers twice more. Top with final layer of noodles, remaining sauce, and cheese.

6. Bake uncovered, about 45 minutes. It should be lightly browned on top and edges. Garnish with remaining parsley and allow to sit for 15 minutes before serving.