Kelly Rossiter
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My best friend moved to France seventeen years ago and I've only seen her once in all that time. She's in Toronto for a visit and I invited her for dinner, coincidentally on market day, so that meant no planning the menu. I was hoping to get some fresh wild mushrooms from Seth at the Forbes Wild Food booth with the idea that I might make a risotto. He didn't have the fabulous blue chanterelles that he had last week, but he still had hedgehog mushrooms which I had also tried last week. They are a very odd looking mushroom with a kind of fringe on the underside with quite a delicate flavour.
My friend and I were catching up on our lives over a glass of wine when she reached into her purse and pulled out a bag of magnificently named Trompet de la mort mushrooms (trumpets of death) that she had picked and dried herself in France. When I showed her the mushrooms I had bought for dinner she got very excited and said that in France they were called pied de mouton which translates as sheep's foot. Apparently the two mushrooms are quite often paired in dishes because they grow at the same time and in the same conditions so are frequently picked together.
So I had to ask which side of the debate she came down on when re-constituting the mushrooms. Did she use hot water or room temperature. Neither, it turns out. She uses milk, which I had never heard of before. I have always saved the water I soak the mushrooms in to add to whatever dish I'm making and I asked her if she used the milk. The look on her face said "Quelle horreur!" Apparently the point of using the milk is to draw the bitterness out of the mushroom which is then discarded. Clearly, living in France, her palate has become more refined because I'd had never noticed that the mushrooms were bitter. My puppy Jasper loves a bowl of milk so I thought I'd see if he wanted it when we were done soaking the mushrooms. Clearly his palate is also more refined than mine, because he sided with Sandra and declined the milk.
Last week when I bought the hedgehog mushrooms I just cleaned them and tossed them in a pan. Mais non, I was supposed to scrape off all the weird fringe stuff underneath. While I stirred the risotto, Sandra carefully removed the offending stuff. It pulled away from the meat of the mushroom rather like the choke coming away from an artichoke. We then just sauteed them in butter until they were cooked a just getting crispy, put it on top of a classic risotto recipe, and fleur de sel and Parmesan cheese and it was incredibly delicious. I added an arugula salad with the last heirloom tomatoes of the year and we had a perfect meal.
All in all it was a wonderful evening. A chance to reconnect and a lesson in picking, drying and cooking mushrooms.
Difficulty Level: Easy
Related Recipes:
Stir Up a Risotto: Memories of an Italian Idyll
Recipe of the Week: Heirloom Tomatoes and Arugula Salad
Find Your Dinner at the Farmers' Market: Yellow Boletus
Farmers' Market Dinner: Chanterelles
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