Dinner diary - First proper wild mushroom dish of the season

One of the great joys of Spring is going out and finding my first decent haul of wild mushrooms. That's a movable feast here in Cambridge, its such a dry city that we can end up missing the whole Spring season for mushrooms sometimes which is a real shame because there are some unsurpassed flavours and textures to be found among them.

Yesterday, despite it being surprisingly dry here already, I was fortunate enough to find this little haul. Top left there are two little thimble mushrooms (Verpa conica) which I left out in the end because they're really not great eating, top right we have a small stand of oyster murhrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus), the white ones in the middle are St. Georges mushrooms (Calocybe gambosa) and the ones that look like brains on sticks are morels, the highly prized yellow morel Morchella esculenta to be precise. Not by any means a huge haul, but more than sufficient for a slap up meal for the two of us. 

Oyster mushrooms you already know, they're very like the cultivated ones but a little firmer, meatier and more flavourful.

Now I'm going to say something heretical. I don't really rate morels. They're one of the big, chefs choice species and command an absurd price to buy (this link shows the rather less prized Morchella elata and they're flogging them for £80 per kg) but for me they're more fun to find than to eat, looking like alien sponges on the forest floor. Typically you get them on ground that was disturbed or burned at some point years ago, and while they're not that common here I know from another picker that there's at least one other patch in the city somewhere that I haven't found. The flavour is okayish, and the texture is at least firm. They are quite charming in their habitats.

For me the real prize of the day was the St. Georges mushrooms. Its a little early for them still, you get the odd one before St. Georges day (April 23rd) but they fruit more prolifically afterwards, as long as we get some rain. They're a marvellous mushroom, as I've gone into before. I'll leave this video describing them here...

This made dinner last night remarkably simple. The mushrooms were sliced, sweated down with a drop of oil and a splash of water (I'll go into why and how it is best to cook mushrooms simply to keep their texture and get an intense flavour another time), salt and pepper, and folded into the middle of omelettes (we've plenty of eggs from the hens in the garden at this time of year), and finished with wild garlic and a knob of butter, served alongside a nutty brown lentil and toasted seed salad and fresh wild salad from the allotment with a few wild leaves thrown in for good luck.

And that, for me, is Spring cooking at its best. Simple, easy, seasonal ingredients with fresh and intense flavours, and healthy.