Okay, so there were a few Agaricus bernardii that I managed to find on the lawn of an office building in Livermore, but, for the most part, there were no mushrooms coming up because, after all, there had been no rain. But this week changed all that. Decent rains on Monday and some on Tuesday, and then the lashing of the storm on Wednesday and Thursday promises to get the mushroom season really going.
On Friday, (ahem) my wife (still getting used to that phrase) and I went hunting at two locations in the East Bay hills. At the first, we found a lot of white russulas, which are technically edible, but supposedly insipid: "better kicked than picked, better punted than hunted". There were also the scattered death caps and uninteresting Suillis (also edible but insipid), but the only thing we came away with were a small amount of decent oyster mushrooms.
At the second location, we found a few chanterelles, which seem to have come up after the rains earlier in the week, as they were surprisingly non-waterlogged. In fact, they were nearly brittle, splitting apart easily - as opposed to the somewhat rubbery texture I find more often. When we cooked them up last night, they were probably the most flavorful I've ever collected. We quite lazily didn't make anything nice with them, but had them over some short-grain brown rice with pan-roasted pine nuts. However, that combination was actually great. The mild nuttiness of the brown rice nicely complimented the honeyed earthy nuttiness of the chanterelles, and the richness of the pine nuts blended and smoothed out the slight edge to the mushrooms.
The oyster mushrooms we ate for breakfast yesterday. Fresh wild oyster mushrooms are so much better than the farmed ones, with so much flavor that they resemble seafood. I cooked them with eggs into which I had mixed some cooking rice wine, a little soy sauce, and a dribble of sesame oil. This worked quite well.
