Shrooms

All that talk about Vietnam and thinking about left handed cigarettes must have put me in the mood for something else!  Thought we could talk Shrooms instead.

NOT!  How about mushrooms then?  The edible kind!

Every Fall, our neighbor walks the woods that line our properties and hunts these down:

Pint jar for scale.

I have never seen anything like it!  It's a Sheepshead.  In some parts- Hen of the Woods.  Isn't it amazing?

Never having seen one and knowing nothing about it, I hit the web and found that this is one exception to the rule...you have to soak it for one hour. 

So I knocked the dirt off, broke it up and soaked it.  In both sides of my sink!  Then I rinsed it real good and layed it out on a bath towel on my kitchen counter to dry enough for packaging.

From everything I read, Sheepshead is best preserved frozen or dehydrated as a secondary method.  So I did both.  I had 12 pounds of mushroom afterall!  That is way more than I would buy in a year, so I was very thankful for our neighbor thinking of us!

I bagged about 3/4 of it up and froze.  When you cook these, apparently you do NOT thaw first.  You just throw the frozen mushrooms into your hot saute pan (yes, preheated). 

After dehydrating, I filled 1 Qt and 1 Pint with dried shroom.  They smell great!

We did have steak with sauteed Sheepshead and onion too...YUM!

And for those of you who speculate on wild mushrooms (as you should!), if you don't hear from me for a while...well now ya know!

;)