Venison - Did you get your Buck?!?

So Amanda's dad is an avid fisherman and hunter.  I have always thought about hunting, but I never had the opportunity until I met Amanda and her dad.  Sam was an excellent teacher and let me borrow Amanda's grandfather's rifle on the first day of deer season.  

I have to say that I was more than a bit spoiled by this experience.  It was the first day of the season, about 50 degrees, and this amazing animal presented himself to me as though he was sacrificing himself for us.  I sat in a tree stand for just four hours and he came out from behind a stand of pine trees, walked calmly in front of me at about 60 yards and then stopped broadside.  He died quickly (not taking a single step after the shot) and I am so thankful to him for feeding my family this year.  Sam asked me to smile in the pictures and eventually I did, but I felt it was also a solemn occasion.  He died so that we could live.  

Sam and Linda (Amanda's parents), Amanda, and I sat around a table in the kitchen and butchered him together.  All the meat is very lean and there are a great deal of tendons.  We packaged the best as steaks and loins and cut much of the rest for stew meat or for grinding.  It was a long process but supplied red meat for the entire year.  It is now March and we still have plenty of meat left.  

For the steaks, I have used the following marinade that I got from The Great Morel website (http://thegreatmorel.com/recipes.html):

4 TBS A-l or any bottled steak sauce

4 TBS Worcestershire
4 TBS Soy
1 large garlic clove crushed or diced
A few shakes of McCormick Montreal Steak seasoning (in the spice department)
a few dashes of Tabasco if desired

Mix all ingredients in ziplock bag, add steaks and marinate in refrigerator for at least an hour. Cook over hot grill to desired doneness. Remove and cover with foil for a few minutes, this insures a juicy steak! Plate up and serve with morel mushroom and cream sauce. Heaven!

We also modified a pork loin recipe to make a decadent bacon wrapped loin:

Ingredients:

• 1 venison loin
• 3 slices of bacon
• 1 tablespoon of garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon of Lawry's Seasoned Salt
• 1 teaspoon dried crumbled leaf basil
• 1/2 teaspoon dried crumbled leaf oregano
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• olive oil

Preparation:

Combine garlic powder, seasoned salt, basil, oregano, and black pepper; rub seasoning all over the pork tenderloin. Wrap pork with bacon and secure with toothpicks.Take your olive oil and coat well. Place in a 9x13 pan and bake uncovered in a 375 to 400 oven for 45 to 60 minutes, or until venison reaches about 155°. Make sure the bacon is really done. I then put it on the grill to get a bit of charred flavor.   Let stand for 10 minutes before slicing. This recipe serves 2 to 4.

We also made burgers by grinding the meat and mixing it with cooked bacon and red peppers that was put in a food processor.  The bacon adds fat that the venison burger needs to stay together and not get too dry.  After making a big batch, I spread it on a cookie sheet, cut lines like a brownie tray, and froze it.  Afterward, I could break the burgers apart and put them in baggies.  

September - Comb tooth

Found this comb tooth hanging on a tree in Bald Eagle State Forest.  Fried it in olive oil and dipped it in garlic butter.  It's very similar to the Bear head's tooth, but less of its own juices.  My feeling at this point is that these varieties are best when lightly breaded and baked.  They have a great deal of juice and baking dries them to perfection.  

September - Lederer park walk

Walked along the lower trail at Lederer park, but I didn't find anything besides these jack o'lantern mushrooms through the branches. I think there may be wild leeks there though...I'll have to return in the spring. There are definitely berries.

September - Bear's head tooth mushroom

Amanda gets credit for finding this mushroom too.

Hericium americanum is a strange looking fungi. It resembles white coral growth or something out of Jim Henson's Dark Crystal movie. This one was hanging under a fallen log.


We baked this up (I set the oven for 350 and baked them for about 10 minutes, but next time I think I will lower the temp and bake them longer) and dipped it in garlic butter.


Now, to be fair, I can eat almost anything dipped in garlic butter. However, both Amanda and I were very pleased with the taste of these strange mushrooms. They have a seafood-like texture and a similar taste as well. If breaded and fried, I believe they would taste something like calamari.


Fun to find and fun to eat. Definitely something worth bringing in if you find it.

September - Black Trumpet Mushrooms

We were out in Bald Eagle State Park and Amanda found these black trumpet mushrooms, Craterellus fallax. They were difficult to see, but once she spotted one, we were able to find more and filled a bag.


These mushrooms look like old, rotting leaves or rotting mushrooms until you get close enough to inspect them. They were growing up through moss on the trail about 40 yards uphill from a stream. We brought them home, cleaned them, and followed this recipe that I found here.


Black Trumpet Linguine - recipe from the New York Times, adapted from "A passion for Mushrooms" by Antonio Carluccio
Serves 4, 15 minutes

Salt
1/2 pound fresh black trumpets
6 Tbsp. butter
12 ounces linguine
freshly grated nutmeg
freshly ground white pepper
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
3-4 Tbsp. chopped fresh chives

Bring a large pot of salted water to a rolling boil. Plunge mushrooms into cold water several times to remove grit. Drain well and squeeze dry. Chop and set aside.
Heat 2 Tbsp. butter in a large saute pan over medium-high heat. Add mushrooms and sprinkle with salt. Cook, stirring until well wilted and tender, about 10 minutes.
When mushrooms are dearly done, cook pasta until al dente. Remove about 1/4 cup cooking water and set aside. Drain pasta and transfer to a warm serving bowl. Add remaining butter, mushrooms, grated nutmeg and white pepper. Toss to mix, adding reserved water as needed. Add cheese, and toss until pasta is coated and ingredients are integrated. Sprinkle with chives and serve with additional cheese if desired.




It was absolutely delicious!


The mushrooms have a wonderful taste that infused the pasta.


We will definitely seek these beauties out again. They may look ominous and may even have the inaccurate nickname "mushroom of death", but they easily made it to top of my fall weather finds this year.

September - Central PA Wild Mushroom Club

This past weekend I went out to Whipple Dam State Park to hunt for wild mushrooms with the Central PA Wild Mushroom Club.  There were several highly experienced mushroomers there who led different groups into the woods to search for a wide variety of mushrooms.  It was extremely informative and a fun walk in the woods.

As soon as we arrived, a few members found a couple hens of the woods mushrooms.  The above picture is not one of the ones that we found, but it gives an idea of what they look like and the general size.  This was the main objective of the outing as there are many hens out at this time and they are apparently very tasty. 

I didn't find any myself, but I did find three interesting varieties. 

The first was the Jack o' Lantern Mushroom (Omphalotus olearius). 

Again this isn't my picture, but this is what they looked like.  These are a poisonous mushroom, but they do have a beautiful color and they have a rather unique feature.  They apparently glow in the dark!  I didn't get a chance to see this in action, but they are slightly phosphorescent and if you place them in complete darkness, they glow.


I also found Granulated Boletes.  We found them under a white pine in clumps.  In order to eat them, it is sometimes recommended to peel the cap.  Some people have reported that the slimy coating has a laxative effect.  Bill Russell, a leader of the club, said that he has never had this problem, but I went ahead and peeled them anyway. 

I haven't eaten these yet because I didn't want to eat more than one kind of new mushroom at a time.

The mushroom that I did try was the "Small Chanterelles" (Craterellus ignicolor).  They look like a bright orange true chanterelle; however they have a trumpet like center as they age and are hollow near the top.  They do have the false gills. 

I fried these up in a little butter and they were very tasty.  They also had an almost citrus smell to them. 

July - Oyster Mushrooms

I've been looking for these for a while now as I mountain biked and hiked through the woods.  I found a few once before in June, just a few young ones, and they were really tasty.  I found these ones in August 2011 on a tree on the way back home from Fisherman's Paradise outside Bellefonte.  They were growing up the back of an oak.  

Amanda and I fried a few.  We dipped them in egg whites and then covered them in Panko bread crumbs and fried them in oil.  They were really delicious, though perhaps frying isn't the healthiest method.

With a majority of them, I tried a recipe for oyster mushroom chowder.  The recipes I found were very basic and I explored other chowder recipes (oyster/clam) for ideas, having heard that these mushrooms could be used in seafood recipes.  I settled on a recipe with red peppers and bacon added to the chowder along with liquid smoke and Tabasco sauce.  I won't give the details here because I wasn't overly pleased with the results.  It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't wonderful.  The mushrooms are great, but next time I'll go a different direction than chowder.