just jan: Chanterelle Mushrooms

Hey everybody! My mister found these mushrooms in our front yard a while back. When I say yard I mean our wooded front yard. We had several of the small trees cut down this past winter. After having the small trees cut down and hauled off we had the front yard raked like it hasn’t been in years. This summer, June I think, my mister noticed all these mushrooms growing in the yard. These are chanterelle mushrooms.

He decided he was going to eat them. I told him he was crazy and I sure wasn’t going to. I figured I would be driving him to the emergency room. He did do research on them online however. When it comes to mushrooms you have to know what you are doing or you can get very sick. The Jack O’ Lantern mushrooms look like the chanterelles. Here is a video about them here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPyKzwqF9nw#aid=P9h-Xkgfo6I

Also known as Golden Chanterelle it is loved by most food experts. They seem to be worth their weight in gold. So if you were to go to a restaurant and order them they would be very expensive.

You don’t have to worry about insects bothering them and forest animals are not interested in eating them. They will reappear in the same places year after year if carefully harvested so as not to disturb the ground in which they grow. They enjoy deep old leaf litter. Yep, that was our wooded yard ~ full of old deep leaf litter.

A bucket full. They are high in potassium and vitamin D. Also relatively high in vitamin C. There are several ways to cook them.

The mister cleaned them and put up six bags of mushrooms into the freezer. This is a batch that has thawed and is ready to be cooked.

The mister sprinkling some of his ‘magic dust’ on the mushrooms for seasoning. He is a much better cook than me on almost everything. He enjoys it, thank goodness.

He covers them in flour.

And fries them in our cast iron skillet.

Yum! I love them! If you haven’t had them or even heard of them I would say they taste like a cross between fried chicken livers and fried oysters. But they have more flavor.

Jan