THOSE TEMPTING WILD MUSHROOMS

I have been collecting wild mushrooms for a very long time: first in the mountains east of Salt Lake City where a friend who knew what he was doing introduced me to wild mushrooms. Then in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and foothills in Northern California.

I always enjoyed finding something edible in the wilds: asparagus, berries of all sorts, walnuts and of course, mushrooms. I never gotten sick from eating the wrong mushroom but I only eat them if I have virtually 100% positive identification.

Over the decades I learned to recognize the edible ones without consulting one of my mushroom books. If you are new to wild mushroom collecting, the only advice any expert collector can give you: don’t unless you have a death wish. Many mushrooms are mildly poisonous but some are extremely so. And to make it worse, some of the deadly ones take close to a day to show symptoms by which time the toxins (amatoxin) absorb and they work on destroying your liver—you have a little time left to organize you funeral arrangements. But don’t yet despair: fatality is in only in 50% of people.

Start collecting with a truly knowledgeable person and at least one very good guidebook. You need to collect them while they are fairly young to pick them ahead of the almost inevitable maggots. There are mushrooms maggots leave alone but not many kinds. Collect them in paper bags, never mixing different species and with a pocket knife scrape off as much dirt as possible. Don’t ever use plastic bags, mushrooms with their high moisture contents suffocate and spoil in no time.

Identify them until you are absolutely positive what you have. It’s always a good idea to leave a small piece preserved before cooking, just in case of tummy problems crop up later; that way an expert can check your identification.

Here is a very pretty mushroom called Leucopaxillus, species is probably albissimus. It is not edible because it is tough and bitter but not poisonous. But so pretty, so tempting!

TAHINI MADE IN YOUR KITCHEN

I love to have some baba ganouj in the refrigerator occasionally.

The eggplant part is easy. After piercing it in a few places to avoid exploding it in the oven, I roast it at 400 degrees until very soft inside—this take close to an hour. Then I cut the eggplant in half lengthwise, and scrape the soft flesh off the skin, dump it into the food processor with the rest of the ingredients.

The tahini part is more of a problem if you prefer making your own. Looking at recipes for home-made tahini, many suggest grinding the toasted sesame seeds with some sesame oil in the food processor—it didn’t work. From previous experience I’d learned that fine seeds like sesame and poppy seeds just whirl around by the blade but not ground. For my first attempt I used the tahini as is without fully grinding the seeds. The resulting baba ganouj didn’t quite have the correct texture but it was perfectly good.

The only way I know of grinding fine seeds at home is using a seed grinder. I do have a poppy seed grinder that also works for sesame seeds but it is a slow, slow process.

Can anyone offer another solution?

TOMATO JUICE MADE IN YOUR KITCHEN

In my kitchen I like to prepare as much from scratch as possible, including juices. Orange and grapefruit are easy, just squeeze, and if the grapefruit is not very sweet, stir in a little sugar.

Tomato juice takes a little more effort. I like V8 juice a lot, and that’s what I aimed for in my effort to make tomato juice at home but I like it a little more spice, little more jazzy than the commercial version.

I scanned cookbooks checking tomato juice ingredient suggestions, and finally decided what seems like a good blend—at least to my taste. The base is tomato paste that I use a lot in my cooking. Anything left in a six-ounce can I scrape out, wrap in a plastic cling wrap, then place it in the freezer—when I need a little tomato paste, the frozen paste is easy to cut from. The kitchen tool is the blender.

I combine all ingredients in a blender and I have tomato juice in seconds.

Here is what I combine:

6 oz tomato paste

24 oz water

¾ tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

1 tsp lemon juice or vinegar

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

½ tsp horseradish

⅛ tsp crushed chili

light sprinkling of smoke flavor (optional)