The stun gun is an antique, but I assure you it delivers a reliable 40,000 volts. Ouch.
Too many to eat, so I cooked a bunch down and froze them for future consumption.
I also put some up in Everclear. After a week or so I’ll strain the liquid into a pretty aperitif bottle and have a fabulous chanterelle-flavored aquavit—good for judicious sipping, or to deglaze a steak pan.
Chanterelles are a member of what I call the Four Fabulous Feral Fungi. (The other three are morels, porcini, and truffles.) The flavor of fresh chanterelles is intense, wonderful, and entirely unlike any other mushroom. Some people say they taste like apricots. I think those people are overly influenced by the color. Although they do have a fruity quality, the flavor is not apricot, IMHO. It’s…chanterelly.
But then, just yesterday, I bought some “white-fleshed peaches” at Cub Foods because they were on sale. I tasted one last night and it tasted exactly like a chanterelle. To quote my friend Dougie Hanson, “I find that very strange indeed.” I've had white-fleshed peaches before, but not the chanterelle-flavored variety.
Here is my favorite chanterelle recipe. It’s always fantastic. The basic idea came from Bill Buford’s book Heat. This recipe is remarkably protean—every single ingredient (even the chanterelles) is amenable to substitution or elimination. I've made variations that include smoked hog jowl, salmon, ramps, chipotles, and various cheeses. You might even want to try adding a little sweet sherry or port. But first try this basic, no-frills version.
Chanterelles with Pasta
Ingredients:
1 pound fresh chanterelles*
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves**
¼ cup finely minced shallots
2 tablespoons butter
¼ cup heavy cream (optional)***
¾ pound farfalle (bowtie) or a similar quantity of other pasta****
¼ cup finely chopped parsley leaves (or you could use peas. You want something green.)
Cooking directions:
If chanterelles are large, slice them lengthwise into halves, or quarters if they are ginormous. Keep in mind that they will cook down to less than half their size.
Heat salted water in a large pot for cooking pasta.
Heat a large (12 inch+) saute pan. Let it get smoking hot.
Add olive oil, wait a few seconds, then add chanterelles to the pan. Cook on high heat (stirring no more than once or twice) for six or seven minutes, or until the mushrooms release their water and start to brown.
Add thyme and shallots. Cook for 2 minutes.
Stir in butter. Turn off heat and set aside.
Add pasta to boiling water and cook for two minutes less than you think it needs.
Drain pasta and add to the mushrooms in saute pan. Turn heat up to high. Stir in cream and cook over high heat two or three minutes, or until the sauce thickens and coats the pasta.
Garnish with minced parsley.
For those who insist on putting cheese on absolutely everything, serve with grated parmesan reggiano or hard cheese of your choice.
* DO NOT substitute dried chanterelles. Just don't. Trust me.
** It pains me to pay three or four bucks for those little packages of fresh herbs at the grocery store, so I don’t. Except for thyme. A package of fresh thyme goes a long way, it lasts for weeks in the crisper, and it is SO good.
*** If you want to skip the cream (I usually do), save a bit of the pasta water and use that to thin the sauce
**** The quirkily formal shape of farfalle, or bow-tie pasta, visually complements the chanterelles, but I find fresh fettucini to be more texturally appealing. Your call.
iPulp Fiction is a cool web publisher that offers short genre fiction suitable for reading on your iPad, Kindle, smartphone, computer, or other e-reader. They just released a collection of three of my early short stories: "The Death Angels," "Cardboard Coffins," and "The Guy." The theme, in this case, is women who are driven to homicide by the misbehaving men in their lives....you may assume that I am writing. Most recently, I have been deeply immersed in a SF/time travel trilogy with a back story so freaking complicated that I sometimes fear I’m about to pop a vessel. I should have known better—the last time travel book I wrote (Mr. Was) just about did me in. I swore I would never mess with time travel again. But then I got this idea, and I found myself thinking, Okay, just a leetle beet, just a taste, just a peek…
Next thing I know I’m at 100,000 words and counting, and the strangeness of the book is spilling into my “real” life, like, for example, I find myself at Costco hanging onto a shopping cart full of pineapples, and I can’t remember why I am there, and where did all the pineapples come from?. So I say, channeling Dr. McCoy, “What planet is this?”
I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but this woman turns her head and looked at me.
“You have my cart,” she says.
I take my hands off her cart.
“Oh, good,” I say. “I was afraid it was mine. I don’t even really like pineapples.” I look around confusedly. “I wonder where my cart went.”
“Probably where you left it,” she says, quoting my mother.
She starts pushing her cart full of pineapples away, then turns back to me and says, “By the way, this is Earth.”
“Thank you,” I say, thinking that if she had one eye sewn shut, a metal leg, and futuristic marital arts skills, I could use her on the Cydonian Pyramid of the Lah Sept. And that if this were Costco in the year 2162, I could maybe buy a flying car. And how odd it seems that until recently cigarette smoking was permitted in nearly every compartment of a nuclear submarine, and how you can get a really good deal on athletic socks at Costco if you want to own twenty-four pair, and what did I come here for, anyway?
I never did find my cart, or remember why I had gone to Costco, but I bought a giant package of toilet paper because I knew it was something we would use eventually, then I drove home and traveled to the year 2560, when the Boggsians will develop a non-digital technology that permits post-corporeal consciousness, and the Lah Sept dynasty will finally collapse under the insupportable weight of its own tenets.
The working title of the trilogy is The Klathu Diskos. The first volume will be published by Candlewick in 2012. If you had a time machine you could read it right now.
Here's a photo of me and Teen Services maven Anna Hartman standing in front of a golden mummy. Ever see that movie "Bucket of Blood?" It's about a sculptor who finds success by murdering people and covering their bodies with a thin layer of plaster. It made a big impression on me when I was ten years old. Anyway, as I was delivering my talk in Council Bluffs a few weeks ago, the golden mummy stood silently at my back the entire time, and I kept thinking about that movie, and how the thing at my back might be a deceased librarian preserved by a shell of gold leaf. If you ever visit the teen area at the Council Bluffs Public Library, check it out!
This falls under the category to “posts I am likely to later regret.”
(Yep, I regretted it and I deleted it!)
The sketch below is from the point of view of a character looking down into a river gorge. It’s a terrible drawing, but when I look at it, it helps me capture that woozy feeling of looking down from a great height.
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