I adore summer entertaining. For a dinner party at the farm, I might prepare homemade fettuccine with porcini mushrooms, soft-shell crabs, spinach from the garden, and lemon tarts with fraises des bois for dessert.
Over the years I've tweaked my stuffing recipe many times, adding a variety of ingredients like sauteed wild mushrooms, dried cherries, fresh chevre, toasted hazelnuts, chopped ham hock meat, and other taste treats.
I do like going out and finding free food. I've done it since I was a child. Fishing prawns and shrimps from the sea is wonderful, as is picking blackberries, sloes and mushrooms. Having a guide while out looking for mushrooms is really important, though, as picking the wrong type can be quite dangerous.
Through trial-and-error and observable outcomes, our ancestors narrowed the field of edible mushroom candidates to just a few with remarkable, health-supporting properties.
I'm a mushroom freak. I make a mushroom soup where I use maybe six or seven varieties, not just portobello and shiitake, but dried porcini and morels.
If I'm in Italy at a certain time of year, I'll make sure to try fresh porcini mushrooms in risotto, or puntarelle, a sort of curled chicory leaf that's only available for a few weeks in May.
It's interesting to try to imagine how early humans discovered what was edible and what wasn't. Who figured out that when you cooked stinging nettles, the sting would go away completely? How many people had to die before the relative toxicity of wild mushrooms became widely known?
Nowadays I actually cook Italian-style food more than French heavy sauces. I make a good salad, some great roasted vegetables, grilled fish. I'm crazy about L.A. because at the farmers' market you find all kinds of wild mushrooms.
I love black truffles. I love white truffles.
You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.
If you do not know where the mushroom products you are consuming are grown, think twice before eating them.
Lion's mane mushrooms are not your classic-looking cap-and-stem variety. These globular-shaped mushrooms sport cascading teeth-like spines rather than the more common gills.
On the subject of wild mushrooms, it is easy to tell who is an expert and who is not: The expert is the one who is still alive.
