{"id":3821,"date":"2012-04-18T21:32:02","date_gmt":"2012-04-19T03:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/?p=3821"},"modified":"2015-10-26T09:05:26","modified_gmt":"2015-10-26T15:05:26","slug":"into-the-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/?p=3821","title":{"rendered":"Into the Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a>

Last Sunday, I was invited by my friend\u00a0J (owner and manager of the Silverstar Inn<\/a>)\u00a0to forage for morel mushrooms on their land.\u00a0 I was very excited since it was my first time to forage for anything.\u00a0 Many people in the Driftless Area look forward to this time of the year to enjoy this seasonal treat.\u00a0 In the years past, Keith and I have usually received morels from friends or have randomly bought them on roadsides or gas stations.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Morel Hunting<\/em><\/p>\n

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P, A, (J’s children)\u00a0and I drove off in an old\u00a0red Jeep and headed for the woods.\u00a0 P, the expert forager, explained to us how to find morels.\u00a0 Do you know how?\u00a0 Well, they like to grow around dying elm trees.\u00a0 How do you find an elm tree, you ask?\u00a0 Pictured above in the middle is the trunk of an elm tree.\u00a0 Can you recognize\u00a0the distinctive pattern on the bark?\u00a0 Neither can I, it looks just like any other tree.\u00a0 About twenty feet into the woods, P found his first morel.\u00a0 Thirty feet in, a cluster.\u00a0 A little bit after that, I found my first morel!\u00a0 It was small, about the size of a thumb and a half.\u00a0 I was pretty happy,\u00a0it was going to be a piece of cake I thought.\u00a0 The three of us split up to cover more ground.\u00a0 After about an hour and half, a mixture of fear and boredom sets in.\u00a0 My bag\u00a0contained only 4 morels and I had bloody scratches on my hands from\u00a0some thorny bushes, and I had no idea how I was going to find A and P or where the car was.\u00a0 I remembered them saying that their property\u00a0was about 340 acres.\u00a0 What made it worst was seeing a tree trunk with deep scratches on it.\u00a0 I wondered if there\u00a0was a bear nearby then I went on my way.\u00a0 (Later I learned that the marks were made by a deer.)\u00a0 Since I was having a hard time finding morels, I\u00a0decided\u00a0to pick\u00a0any mushroom I could\u00a0spot and maybe look\u00a0them up later for fun.\u00a0 Pictured below on the right is a false morel.<\/p>\n

Morel Cluster & False Morel<\/em><\/p>\n

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After that, I thought\u00a0I better\u00a0search for something I could actually consume, some ramps (wild leeks\/onions). They were easier to find than morels.\u00a0 I found a good stick to help me dig into the soft, black earth.\u00a0 Two hours and\u00a0a half hours\u00a0in the woods, I was finally enjoying myself and I had a bag full of ramps.\u00a0 I found P nearby and was excited to show him the ramps I had gathered.\u00a0 It turns out that A had been back in the car for a\u00a0long while.\u00a0 She said she’d\u00a0rather eat morels than gather them.\u00a0\u00a0Can’t blame her.\u00a0 We drove back to the inn happy, sweaty, and with our hands ashy from the earth and soil in our fingernails.\u00a0 J cooked up some pasta for us with the morels and ramps we found.\u00a0 Pictured below is my second dinner with Keith.\u00a0 It was fun to tell him that I went into the wild to gather our dinner that night \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Pasta + Ramps +\u00a0Morels + Butter +\u00a0Salt & Pepper = Amazing\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Sunday, I was invited by my friend\u00a0J (owner and manager of the Silverstar Inn)\u00a0to forage for morel mushrooms on their land.\u00a0 I was very excited since it was my first time to forage for anything.\u00a0 Many people in the Driftless Area look forward to this time of the year to enjoy this seasonal treat.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3822,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[381,101,380,160,383,382],"class_list":["post-3821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-driftless-area-towns","tag-foraging","tag-morels","tag-mushroom","tag-pasta","tag-ramps","tag-silverstar-inn","has-featured-image"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3821"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5874,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3821\/revisions\/5874"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}