Morel season!

Spring has arrived in Washington (this means it is still freezing but Washingtonians put on shorts) and that means it is morel season! Now, Jay and I are not very seasoned mushroomers. In fact, we are super beginners. But, I knew that morels grew in areas that had recently been clearcut or dealt with a forest fire. So, I'm a dork. I found some GIS layers of recent burns and I was able to map out where recent burns had been in WA so we could drive to one of those burns. It turned out that this particular burn was too high in elevation - there was still too much snow! But lucky us - just by driving along the road we found another burn and off into the woods we went. I'm not sure either one of us expected to find a single mushroom. Everything we have read about morels tell you that they are impossible to find and that many mushroomers become "demorelized". Well, we were in the burnt forest for about 1/2 hour when Jay announced his sighting of our first morel! I was so excited I think I took a million photos of one little mushroom. Yipee!

Here is Jay with a bunch of morels! All those tiny dots are morels. They are small, but bigger than they look here.

After a not-so-hard tramp through the woods, we found this awesome lake to camp on. The view sucked.

Dinner was grand for campers. Morels with potatoes, shallots, and sheep cheese. Not bad for not planning on a dinner involving morels.

We went back to the same spot the next day and found more! Here I am with what I think is a white morel (everything else we found was "black")

The drive back to Seattle (and then north) was awesome. We were blown away by the cool geological formations along the road between Rainier and Yakima. Gorgeous!

Our last morel dinner was tonight. We stuffed the big morels with shallots, garlic, pecans, and goat cheese. The garlic and shallots were tossed in a sherry while we cooked them to make things even more tasty. All of that was served on top of really good pasta that was also tossed with smaller morels and good olive oil. Happy Julie and Jay.