Steak is the dish I do best, aside from maybe chilli con carne. The two probably take joint first place.
Although you need an asbestos-lined mouth and solid tungsten tongue to eat the steak though, and I've been known to gas the kitchen out with what may as well be pepper spray, sufficiently to drive people out of the room coughing before
I forgot one of the key ingredients actually in my other post, and thats peppery boletus (Chalciporus piperatus, a small [3-3.5'' or so is about as big as I've ever seen them get], mushroom of the bolete type, with tubular pores rather than gills) grows in association, like the fly agarics, with silver birch, and packs quite a fiery punch, although its unique, slower to develop than chilli or black/white pepper but once it gets its teeth bared, has quite a bite to show for it.
Many mushroom hunting guides dismiss it as either worthless, or actually inedible. It certainly isn't actually toxic, but one wouldn't really eat it as a main item, like button mushrooms, not the sort of mushroom that really seems right to cook a big plateful of on their own, but dried and shredded or powdered (best to slice off the pores, as thats where most of the water content seems to be,, for easier drying) or stored whole for greater shelf life, and ground up as needed.
Usually I'm stuck with having to make do with dried morels though, they aren't nearly common enough for my liking. Although I did get lucky at the last house I lived in, when my mom ordered some woodchip mulch for the garden, only for the entire place to end up absolutely COVERED in black morels (Morchella elata, mostly). Worked them into more or less every meal I cooked for weeks afterwards, or just thought 'fuck it' and simply cleaned them, de-slugged them (they are hollow inside) and fried them by the plateful in butter. Absolutely divine, my idea of culinary heaven, morels have to be one of the very best wild ones in britain, at least, that I've tasted, and I've been hunting mushrooms since I old enough to read the books and teach myself, had quite a selection of weird and wonderful fungi in my time, psychedelic ones excluded, I mean, in the sense of food.
That said, I've had a few not-so-wonderful ones too. Stinkhorn for instance...good god, never again. They aren't poisonous, but they were awful enough to upset my stomach and have me throwing up all that night the time I brought a bagful of stinkhorn eggs back from a hike in the yorkshire hills when I was staying at my grandma's house (now dead). And Lycoperdon pyriforme, a speciesof small woodloving puffball, I love many puffball species, fried in slices after being dipped in egg and breadcrumbs with a bit of saltbut those were horrid, not so much for taste, but the texture was foul, and blewits (Lepista spp. mainly L.nuda), they are ok I guess, but taste strongly perfumed, and aren't really something I'm fond of. I'd eat them if I'm hungry and forced to forage, but won't bother taking any home otherwise.
I use the fly agaric and peppery boletus in my chilli too, weather I'm using mince or better, chunks of steak, along with chickpeas, shiitake and ordinary button mushrooms (which otherwise, in most dishes I am actually not very fond of at all, but they bulk up the chilli and get saturated with spices and sauce which makes them acceptable, removes the blandness), with a combination of chilli beans, chickpeas and kidney beans.
I'm so hoping I find something good on my hiking trip on tuesday to bring home for supper, and to cook another batch of chilli with whatever is left (if anything...I have been known for a large appetite when it comes to things fungus).
Some fried sulfur polypore would go down well right now, haven't had that in a while. I see them a lot more often than i get to eat any, kinda frustrating when the mainstay for a good dinner stares you in the face, but is growing too high up a tree that cannot be climbed to reach for.
I haven't had much luck so far this year though, did think I'd found some field mushrooms or one of their relatives..well I did, relatives that is, but it turned out they were yellow-stainers, which are poisonous.
steak
