I guess I shouldn't be that surprised.
Brian has always been an outdoors-y kind of guy, and I love that he still holds a childlike fascination with the world around him. If he stumbles upon a cool rock, you bet he's going to put it in his pocket. Our bookcases and shelves are filled with geodes, crystals, petrified wood, old coins, flies for fishing, and now recently, quite the foraging and mushroom identification literature.
His newfound hobby for "gathering" crazy stuff from the woods came from a desire to be self sustaining in the wild, which morphed into a enthrallment with actually good tasting wild edibles of "culinary significance" (his fancy words). And, although I was nervous at first, I've learned to trust his knowledge whole-heartedly after I witnessed him memorizing the entire encyclopedia of North American mushrooms, Latin names and all... in just 3 weeks.
It's pretty wonderful when he comes skipping through the door after work with a gleeful smile spread across his rosy face. I can tell immediately if he went out in the woods during his lunch hour and found a pretty big bounty. With a skip in his step, he'll plop his findings right on our kitchen island, almost with an audible "ta-da!"
And, as with most things he cooks ( he worked in a French restaurant for a year before starting his career) he simply throws his foraged goods in a hot pan with a good amount of butter (read pound) and a sprinkle of kosher salt. I thank my lucky stars that he can 1. cook, and 2. I get to try amazing new tastes from the land around us.
I wanted to document this spring and summer's hauls for our own memory, and partly because they are just so pretty to look at.
We've had the pleasure of eating morels, ramps, dryad saddles, fiddle heads, wood ear, chanterelles, and most recently milkweed - which, funny enough tastes exactly like mozerella cheese.
