After an abundant beginning to the chanterelle and black trumpet season, the recent bout of spectacular weather has sent the mushrooms back into hiding. I am still finding chanterelles and black trumpets, but, as local master forager Carl Whittaker recently remarked, there is nothing more “depressing” than sorting through vast swaths of dried up chanterelles, hoping to find a few decent specimens.

While Ithaca’s gorges mean relief from the summer heat is never far away, sometimes I miss the crashing waves and salty smell of the ocean.  I may be hundreds of miles inland, but my thoughts drifted off to sea today when I found two mushrooms that blur the line between fungus and crustacean.

Remember how much fun you had as a child stomping on puffballs and watching them erupt into a cloud of dusty spores? You may not have realized it at the time, but you were helping a tasty edible mushroom distribute its trillion-strong legion of spores.  

My tongue has been reunited with an old friend – the black trumpet. Last summer’s drought took its toll on the trumpet crop, and this already hard to spot mushroom disappeared from Ithaca’s forests altogether. Despite many hours spent on hands and knees combing through moss patches, I did not find a single black, fragrant morsel.

Something subversive is brewing in the dimly lit depths of my pantry. Two mason jars sit atop a nondescript white shelf, stuffed with thinly sliced reishi mushrooms steeping in cheap vodka.

The summer solstice may not happen until tomorrow, but my summer has already begun. Sure, it’s felt like summer in Ithaca for a few weeks now, with 90-degree days and daily swims in the gorges. But for me, nothing heralds the arrival of summer like the first chanterelle, in all its fragrant, golden glory.

This week we have two new additions to the ForageCast – the scaber stalk boletes and artist’s conk. As a perennial polypore, the artist's conk can be found year-round in Northeastern hardwood forests. However, it arrives on the ForageCast this week since most of the local conks have now developed their new annual layer of milky white, fragrant pores. During the winter months the conk is dormant, its underside hard and brown and lacking its distinctive woodsy odor. There is not much sense harvesting it at this stage, since it is weaker medicinally and artists cannot etch on its creamy pores.

I want to love Leccinums, the scaber stalk boletes. They are hefty and often abundant from June through October in Ithaca, and their solid, pockmarked stalks make them profoundly satisfying to pick. In the right patch, I can fill up a basket in minutes, and Leccinums are some of the only mushrooms that actually provide a good bicep workout as I carry my haul out of the woods.

One of the most common mistakes beginning foragers make is to search for mushrooms without any specific target species in mind, assuming they will take home whatever they find for identification. Though this approach may occasionally be fruitful, it does not result in many grand mushroom feasts.

After nearly getting lost last week tromping through brambles and poison ivy in search of the spring’s last morels, I was reminded that sometimes the best mushroom patches are right under our noses. On Thursday, I went for a lunch break saunter behind my workplace on Cornell’s Ag Quad. I wasn’t explicitly looking for mushrooms, but I still found my greedy gaze continually returning to the ground in search of sylvan booty.

Since my blissful encounter with a black morel on May 2, I have had many a fruitless morel foray.  Now that I have seen morels this spring with my own eyes, I am even more frantic than ever in my single-minded pursuit of these elusive edibles. To make myself feel just a smidgen better about my empty basket, I have been gathering tender young specimens of Dryad’s saddle (Polyporus squamosus).

I am wandering through the spring woods, the soggy ground squishing beneath my feet.  Out of the corner of my eye, I spot the unmistakable honeycombed cap of a morel.  Bending down to take a closer look, I realize this morel is not alone. A second morel pops into my vision, followed by a third. My morel eyes are on now, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, begin to spring up as if to announce, “We are here!”

Maybe it is just because I have been in ramp heaven throughout the past three weeks, finding vast caches of wild leeks (Allium tricoccum) on our forays and loving ever minute of it. Or perhaps it is because I grew up in a household where every meal began with a head of garlic, and the unmistakably garlicky scent and flavor of the ramp satisfies my life-long love affair with this pungent allium. The bottom line is that I just can't get enough of ramps, and these days they seem to be showing up on the table for breakfast, lunch and dinner. From lightly sautéing ramps in a tad of olive oil, salt and pepper, to featuring them in omelets, soufflés, quiches, sandwiches, risottos, burritos, soups, and pasta dishes, it is beginning to seem that there isn’t anything that doesn’t go well with ramps.

Today, like yesterday and the day before, I spent two long, desperate hours stalking morels (Morchella sp.), the first gourmet mushrooms to emerge each spring in most of North America. I have not yet heard any reports of morel sightings in Ithaca this spring, but the mere fact that morels theoretically could be out keeps me on the prowl. Mushroom hunters to the south and west of Ithaca have been luckier, filling their baskets since early April according to this 2011 sightings map from Morel Hunters, whose slogan is, "Where the hunters gather." Morels have deservedly acquired a singular reputation amongst foragers and gourmands alike; there are millions of people throughout their wide American range who confidently harvest morels every spring, yet cannot identify any other local mushrooms.

As my anticipation of morels begins to grow unbearable, I have found a welcome diversion in ramps (Allium tricoccum). On March 29 I reported seeing ramps beginning to pop through the leaves and uncurl, their vivid green hue contrasting sharply with the brown forest floor. On Tuesday, three weeks later, I returned to the same spot to find a sweeping carpet of nearly mature, densely spaced ramps, as well as several smaller satellite colonies. That very night, they were the karpas, or spring greens, on the Passover Seder plate.

Let’s face it – this was one of the colder, snowier northeastern winters in recent memory. As much as I relish slapping on my cross-country skis and getting chased by my yelping dog through the winter woods, there comes a time when even the hardiest soul is ready for the dawn of spring. In one of my favorite childhood rituals, my father would take me into the woods each March as the ground began to thaw to search for signs of spring. From the sound of peepers peeping to the heady smell of maple sap boiling, today the sensory memories of early spring hit me with a heavy dose of nostalgia.