News From Native California - Spring 2016 Volume 29 Issue 3 | Page 21

Fall in L ve with Fungus
Recipe by Meagan Baldy

2 tablespoons olive oil, divided

Chop the mushrooms and onions. Sauté them in a sauce pan with a tablespoon
of olive oil over medium heat until nice and tender. In a small sauce pan, add 1
tablespoon of olive oil; beat the eggs and pour them into the pan over medium
heat. Gently stir around the eggs until they firm up, then turn them over and
add cheese in the middle. Cover melted cheese with the sautéed mushrooms
and onions. Serve and fall in love with fungi!

As spring fills the air with love
and beauty, it also creates a great
indigenous food that has sustained
our Native people for thousands and
thousands of years. I want you to fall
in love with one of my favorite ingredients, FUNGUS. Yes, I am talking
about mushrooms. Spring has a great
assortment of fungi, but the ones I
will be talking about today are the
black trumpet and the hedgehog.
Black trumpets are visually
unappealing at first, just a dark,
trumpet-shaped mushroom. They
are camouflaged and are challenging
to find. Once you get them and
bring them home to the kitchen,
clean them up, and inspect them, you
can begin to see their true beauty.
Their unique shape and deep color is

very intriguing to me. I hadn’t fallen
in love with them until after I ate them
for the first time. Black trumpets are
aromatic and full of flavor, but that
flavor is not explainable until you
taste them. One thing I can say is
that if you are cooking them, they
dye whatever they are added to, so be
aware that they may turn your food
dark brown. I enjoy searching the
mountains with the family for this
spring fungi. They are a challenge to
find but when I do I fall in love.
The hedgehog is a great hearty
fungus to fall for as well, a goldencolored, thick-on-top, slender-built
fungi. Hedgehogs are a meaty and
sweet fungi; they add great flavor to
many dishes. I enjoy finding hedgehogs for many reasons: one, they are

plentiful in our mountains; and two,
they grow to a nice size, so you get
more bang for your hunt. You know
what they say: in love, the bigger
the better.
Mushrooms are a good source of
vitamin D and they contain selenium,
which studies have shown is a great
antioxidant. Mushrooms possess
unique minerals that have shown to
help aid in fighting cancer. Fall in love
with your local indigenous fungi—
but I really want to stress to you not
to fall for fungi in the woods without
knowledge of what Mr. or Mrs. Right
look like. Just like in life, if you chose
the wrong fungi, it can have dire
consequences for your life.

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