This is one of those bucket list items: never cooked them before, have never even eaten them before. So lucky me: a dinner guest who did not even know this brought me a bag of them yesterday. Did a little research just now and learned some interesting things. The French call them Trumpets des Morts. They are a mycorrhizal fungus that grow around the roots of chestnut trees, and they need to obtain enough tree sugars below the soil in order to produce the mushrooms above the soil. They have an apricot aroma that comes directly from those tree sugars. These were scavenged somewhere on Vancouver Island. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania-based website I got the initial information from, Wild Purveyors, says that there these mushrooms appear there at the beginning of summer and before chanterelles. That these are available fresh here in January suggests that nature is following a completely different biological regime in the Pacific Northwest--for us, chanterelles are an October thing.
That website provided a few recipe ideas gleaned from the New York Times: a sauce for monkfish, a toss with linguine and chives, and perhaps the most intriguing to me, served with grits and taleggio cheese. Well, wouldn't say no to the monkfish but I can't GET monkfish up here in the long, cold fresh-fishless winters.
What to do, what to do....
