ForageCast: Week of September 6, 2011

My first maitake since 2009!

It was 8:35pm last night when the news rolled in. It came in the form of an email from a reader named Tom, who had attached a photo of a beautiful local fruiting of maitake (hen of the woods) and told me it was time to update the ForageCast.

With the abundant rainfall and cool early September nights, I knew maitake would be here soon. But it was Tom’s sighting that sent me into a frenzy, and after a restless sleep I jumped out of bed early this morning to check on a favorite spot before work. By 8:35am today, exactly twelve hours after receiving Tom’s email, I was walking out of the woods triumphantly with a hefty hen in my backpack.

After waxing poetic about maitake’s gustatory, nutritional, and medicinal properties last August in a post entitled, “Awaiting the Maitake Dance,” I was sorely disappointed when I did not find a single hen all fall. Perhaps the hen of the woods was punishing me for my bravado; after all, in the post I boasted of maitake’s reliability and spoke of my plans for the “surplus” harvest I expected.

So, it had been two full years since maitake had met my lips when I lifted a forkful of it to my mouth today, atop ham with toasted sage leaves. Let’s just say that my tongue was handsomely rewarded for its years of waiting.

ForageCast for the next two weeks!