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[unetetebrulee]

Today's lunch: soup with oyster mushrooms and pork dumplings, and a bit of leftover pork bulgogi from yesterday.

My mom had made a pot of stock using chicken bones, common wood pigeon and some vegetables (leek, celery, carrot), and we used the last of it today. I decided to cook some store-bought dumplings in a bit of the stock, and combine them with some wild oyster mushrooms. The weather's been pretty good, and so far there's a lot of them growing in the fields! I picked some of the smallest ones and cooked them in a skillet on low heat with just a pinch of salt. Once they were cooked, I put them in my bowl and seasoned them with a few drops of sesame oil and a bit of chopped garlic.

As for the dumplings, I just took them out of the freezer a bit in advance, and then simmered them in two ladlefuls of broth for ten minutes.

To finish the dish: put the dumplings in the bowl over the mushrooms, with the broth they simmered in. Add as much extra hot chicken broth as wanted. Garnish with chopped green onion, and shichimi to taste.

(Recipe for the pork bulgogi here, btw!)

Comments

[coinin]

that sounds ssoooo good. :) I am envious of your wild mushrooms - mushroom picking is not something my family has ever done.

[unetetebrulee]

Augh, now I definitely wish I could take you to pick mushrooms around the fields/forests north of my town -- even though I'm not particularly good at it XD

This is one of the really good things about the island, because a wide variety of (edible) wild mushrooms grows here (IDK, around 10~12 different kinds? I only know their names in Catalan and it's tricky to find the exact English equivalents, but you get the idea ;))

[coinin]

I would love to go mushroom picking with you! :D stupid distance between California and Spain....

This whole mushroom picking thing got me thinking about cultural differences and stuff, because mushroom picking is not something done by most of the people around where my parents live. You see people out on the roadsides picking blackberries and stuff, but the only people I can think of who go mushroom picking are from families of Italian descent, or recent Asian immigrants. And I know we have edible mushrooms around here, and some of them are even supposed to be really tasty, but we don't go mushroom picking.

I'd like to go mushroom hunting, but I don't know anyone who could show me the edible species, and field guides only get you so far. There's this cultural perception here of mushrooms as super dangerous, so I'm paranoid about mushrooms in a way I'm not about berries or whatever. (Berries are easier to identify. Also, I can't think of any lethally toxic berries that grow around here.) Maybe some of that paranoia is well founded - one of the local edible mushrooms looks a lot like another mushroom whose common name is "death cap" and every so often someone eats some and dies, or gets a bunch of people sick - and maybe some of it is just American food-based weirdness, but either way, I don't know enough to be confident picking mushrooms. For some reason I don't feel like fooling around when there are mushrooms called destroying angels...

Anyway, it's just interesting to me, because the Finns I know go out picking chanterelles, and our Czech friend sent us dried wild mushrooms she'd picked, and an Estonian food blog I read posts these mouthwatering photos of wild mushrooms, and you go mushroom hunting, and here I am with no cultural context for mushroom picking. :)

[unetetebrulee]

It's great that you've pointed this because not only it's really interesting to consider, but I've also been thinking about cultural differences applied to food and now I'll probably write something on that ;)

[smokebalm]

this looks super tasty!! wish my food pics turned out as nice as yours haha

[unetetebrulee]

Hahaha, thank you! I'm lucky there's a spot in our kitchen that has plenty of light :)